President's Letter | Summer 2022

Dear AREUEA members, 

With the summer upon us, this is an opportune time to share some updates and reflect on the progress we have made at AREUEA recently. 

If you were one of the 200 participants of the National Meeting on June 2-3 in Washington DC, I hope you had a productive and fun conference. Our 50th jubilee edition took place in a new venue, the Fairmont Hotel, and featured several highlights. 

• We welcomed a first group of Pipeline Scholars, college students who show an interest in real estate and urban economics and can help us build an inclusive pipeline of talent. 
  
  

• We hosted our inaugural Policy Forum event, a new initiative that aims to build bridges between the academic and the policy worlds in an effort to increase the visibility and relevance of our research. Kathy O'Reagan moderated the discussion which focused on Eviction Prevention Policies and featured three researchers (Boaz Abramson, Robert Collinson, and Winnie van Dijk) and two policymakers (Vicki Been and Marisa Novara). If you missed it, our website contains the video and additional background material on Evictions research, policy, and media coverage.  Thanks to the Policy Forum Committee for their work on this successful kickoff event.
  
  
• Susan Wachter received the Quigley Medal, the highest honor of our Association, and gave a wonderful lecture. 
• We launched the second cohort of our junior scholar program with 12 mentor-mentee pairs. We had 60 applications for this program, indicating the great need and the value our younger members place on this program. Fortunately, we were able to accommodate many more JSP applicants on the regular conference programs. We thanked the first cohort of mentors and mentees at a dinner on June 1.
  
  
• We had 15 wonderful "regular" paper sessions. With record submission volumes, the National Meeting has never been more selective than this year. Thanks to the Program Committee for their hard work.
• We awarded two best conference paper prizes to Ian Herzog and Sun Kyoung Lee. Thanks to the Awards Committee for their hard work.
• We hosted a well-attended WREN breakfast with a brainstorming session on how to improve seminar culture. Thanks to the WREN committee for putting this together.

None of this would have been possible without the incredible work of our First Vice President and National Meeting Program Chair, Ingrid Gould Ellen, whom we all owe a great debt of gratitude.

We now look forward to our two International Meetings in Dublin and Tokyo in July and August, and to the ASSA meeting in New Orleans in January 2023. Submissions for the latter conference were also very strong, and our Second Vice President Xudong An is putting the finishing touches on that program.

After a busy spring semester, the Virtual Seminar series will take a summer break until August 17. You can watch past seminars on our website. There you also find instructions for submitting your work for consideration for the fall semester.

Our journal Real Estate Economics is thriving with strong submission volumes and fast turnaround times. You can now see the latest accepted papers through our Twitter feed.

At its June 1st meeting, the Board made several important decisions to strengthen the organization. It passed a data privacy policy, it passed new membership fees for 2023, and it approved new permanent budgets for the Mentorship Committee and WREN in recognition and further support of their efforts. 

We are planning for a second, virtual Policy Forum event in the fall, focused on the causes and consequences of the house price boom. 

If you are interested in contributing to AREUEA, please consider applying for the position of Secretary. Thank you very much to Andrea Heuson for serving in this capacity for two terms. We are also taking member nominations for Second Vice President and Board Member. Please email Joseph Tracy ([email protected]).

Look out for email updates in your inbox and follow us on Twitter (@AREUEA_ORG).

Happy Summer,