President's Letter | Summer 2023

It was wonderful to see many of you at the National Meeting on June 1-2 in Washington DC.  We had record attendance of 250 participants!  The conference took place at a new venue, the Westin Hotel, and featured several highlights. 

  • We welcomed our second group of Pipeline Scholars, college students and recent graduates who show an interest in real estate and urban economics and can help us build an inclusive pipeline of talent.  This year’s group was incredibly engaged and stayed at the conference through the very last session on Friday.  They attended a special mentoring reception Wednesday night (with junior scholars) as well as a career panel on Thursday afternoon with Leah Brooks, Bradley Hardy, Judith Ricks (and moderated by Luis Lopez).  I look forward to seeing the great work these young scholars produce in the future! Thanks to the mentoring committee for their hard work in recruiting and selecting this year’s cohort and for organizing a great set of activities for them.  And thanks to Wells Fargo and Freddie Mac for supporting this new initiative.

  • On Thursday, we hosted the fourth of our Policy Forum series, which aims to bring AREUEA researchers together with policy makers and practitioners.  Xudong An moderated the discussion which focused on climate risk in real estate.  The panel featured research on asymmetric information in the flood insurance market in Florida by Amanda Ross and her co-authors (Erik Johnson, Adam Nowak, and Lars Powell), and research on California wildfires and mortgage payment by Siddhartha Biswas and his co-authors (Mallick Hossain and David Zink).  Amanda and Siddhartha joined the panel, together Dan Coates from FHFA and Anne Sheehan from FEMA. If you missed the event, our website contains the paper summaries and links to additional background research, policy, and media coverage on climate risk.  Thanks to the Policy Forum Committee for their work on this successful event.

  • David Geltner received the Quigley Medal, the highest honor of our Association.  While David was unfortunately unable to attend, Alex van de Minne delivered David’s thought-provoking remarks with grace, warmth, and humor.  We have posted a recording of the remarks on the Quigley Medal tab of the AREUEA website. Thank you to Alex and congratulations again to David!

  • We launched the second cohort of our junior scholar program with 12 mentor-mentee pairs. 
  • We hosted 15 additional "regular" paper sessions. With record submission volumes, the National Meeting has never been more selective than this year. 
  • We awarded two best conference paper prizes.  Rene Crespin and Brian Higgins jointly received the best paper written by a junior scholar award.  Darren Aiello, Jason Kotter and Gregor Schubert received the overall best paper award for: “Housing Wealth and Overpayment: When Money Moves In.” Congratulations to the winners and thanks to the Awards Committee for their hard work!
  • We gave a special award to Andrea Heuson to thank her for her ten years of service as AREUEA secretary.  Thanks to Andrea for all your help over the past decade! 
  • We hosted a well-attended WREN breakfast with a terrific panel on how to communicate to diverse audiences.  Lindsey Rolheiser moderated a panel discussion with Martha Galvez from NYU’s Housing Solutions Lab, Jeff Lin from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and Jenny Schuetz from the Brookings Institution.  They offered useful tips on how to communicate clearly and effectively for different audiences. Thanks to the WREN committee for putting this together, and look out for a set of related resources, which will be posted on the AREUEA website soon.
  • With generous support from Wells Fargo, we held an on-site reception on Thursday after the final concurrent paper session. 

None of this would have been possible without the incredible work of our First Vice President and National Meeting Program Chair, Xudong An and his hard-working program committee.  Many thanks!  

Shortly after the National Meeting, the editors of Real Estate Economics hosted a very successful conference on housing sustainability and affordability at the University of Wisconsin on June 4-5th.  The conference featured 12 papers, a panel discussion on housing affordability a keynote on household energy insecurity.  Thanks to the REE editors and the University of Wisconsin hosts!

We look forward to our International Meeting in Cambridge, UK in July, and to the ASSA meeting in San Antonio in January 2023.  Submissions for both conferences were also very strong, and our Second Vice President Albert Saiz is finishing that program.  Thanks to organizers and program committees!

In addition to our conferences, AREUEA has also been busy with other initiatives.  After a very successful year, the Virtual Seminar series is taking a summer break. You can watch past seminars on our website. You can also find instructions there for submitting your work for consideration for next year.  Please consider submitting your papers.

We also hosted a virtual panel discussion on land use regulations in March.  The video for that event and associated resources are posted on our website. I hope you will take a look at all the resource pages posted under the policy forum tab on the website.  We hope that they will be useful for your teaching and research. We are planning for two additional virtual Policy Forum event in the fall, so look out for announcements about those soon.  Please send ideas for future discussions, as well as new resources for the existing pages.

Our journal Real Estate Economics is thriving with high submission volumes and quick turnaround times. You can now see the latest accepted papers through our Twitter feed. Look out soon for emails with links to papers when new issues are available.  

At its May 31st meeting, the Board made several important decisions to strengthen the organization. Most importantly, we appointed the current Real Estate Economics editorial team (led by managing editor Dan McMillen) for another three-year term.  We decided to push back membership renewals to the fall to make sure everyone is signed up before conference submission deadlines.  So look out for renewal reminders in October.  We also decided to grant membership fee waivers to students submitting papers to the conference if they request them. We agreed to convene an ad-hoc committee to consider changes to the website; please let us know if you have suggestions for the website. 

If you have ideas about ways AREUEA can better support our community, please let me know.  Look out for other email updates in your inbox and follow us on Twitter (@AREUEA_ORG).

I hope you all have a wonderful summer,
Ingrid Gould Ellen  
President

Previous President Letters

President's Letter | January 2023
President's Letter | June 2022
President's Letter | January 2022