Dear AREUEA members,

It is my honor and pleasure to serve as your President in 2022. We have much to look forward to this year. But first a quick look-back on 2021, a year of REAL progress for the association. 

In 2021, we appointed a new Editorial Team for Real Estate Economics and drafted operating policies and procedures. The team is off to a strong start with about 250 submissions in 2021, great turnaround statistics, and a huge jump in the 2-year impact factor from 1.59 to 3.42. More from the managing Editor Dan McMillen and his team below. Josue Cox and Sydney Ludvigson won the Edward Mills best REE paper prize and Luis Lopez won the best REE referee award. Please continue to send your best work to REE.

On the communication front, we launched our new website as well as our twitter account. Take a moment to follow us @AREUEA_ORG. We adopted a social media policy. We launched a new membership system, saw strong member growth, and are currently discussing a data policy to protect how we use your data. 

In June, we had a successful virtual National Meeting, organized by yours truly, featuring 72 research papers, Stuart Gabriel's Quigley Medal lecture, and a keynote interview with Fannie Mae's CEO Hugh Frater. We launched a new junior scholar mentorship program with 12 mentor-mentee pairs and awarded two best paper prizes for the first time.

The virtual seminar series fired on all cylinders with 22 talks and over 850 registered participants in 2021 under the leadership of Xudong An. We will continue to build on that momentum in 2022. If you would like to present your work, please email [email protected].

AREUEA made great strides in becoming a more inclusive association in 2021 under the leadership of Karen Pence and PC&I officer Stephanie Moulton. Feel free to reach out to Stephanie with your DEI suggestions or concerns: [email protected].

We just came off a great ASSA-AREUEA conference, organized by our 1st VP Ingrid Gould Ellen. It featured a doctoral poster session and panel, 22 paper sessions, Karen Pence's excellent presidential address, a membership meeting, and mentorship and WREN social events. We awarded 13 doctoral students a small dissertation stipend in lieu of a travel grant.

At the meetings, we announced that Susan Wachter is the recipient of the 2022 Quigley Medal and Bob Conolly the recipient of the Bloom Service Award. The Homer Hoyt award for the best dissertation went to Samir Elsadek Mahmoudi, with Eunjee Kwon and Desen Lin as the runners-up. Congratulations to all winners!

The submission portal for our 50th National Meeting is already open and will remain so until February 1. Also be on the lookout for an invitation to join the second cohort of mentors or mentees. We are planning for an in-person event at the Fairmont in Washington D.C. on June 2-3, 2022 but will be flexible; please mark your calendars.

At the National Meetings, we are planning to hold the first AREUEA Policy Forum in lieu of the keynote address. The Policy Forum is part of a broader new policy initiative that aims to improve the exchange of ideas between researchers and policymakers in real estate, housing, and urban economics. We believe that this exchange will benefit the visibility and impact of your research and meaningfully inform your future work. Stay tuned for more on this in 2022.

Finally, thank you to our outgoing board members: Sheridan Titman (president in 2019), Bob Connolly (executive VP), David Downs (Treasurer), Scott Frame, Lauren Lambie-Hansen, Jenny Schuetz, and Siqi Zhang. We are excited to welcome our new board members: Xudong An (Second VP), Joseph Tracy (executive VP), Steven Bourassa (Treasurer), Jim Conklin, Yuming Fu, Kris Gerardi, and Christian Redfearn.  Last but not least, a big thank you to Karen Pence for her leadership on the executive committee these past three years; we are fortunate to have her on the board for three more years.

As you can see from this update, AREUEA is thriving despite these strange times we live in. Thank you for pushing the research frontier forward and for all your efforts to make our community an inclusive and productive one. Please do not hesitate to reach out with comments or suggestions and let me know if you’d like to get involved. 

I wish all of you a very happy 2022.

Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh
President AREUEA