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Arthur Acolin receives the Bengt Turner Best Paper Award at the ENHR conference

Congratulations to Arthur Acolin, Assistant Professor in Real Estate, who received the Bengt Turner Best Paper Award at the recent European Network for Housing Research (ENHR) conference in Uppsala, Sweden.

The paper, titled “Tenure Trajectories of Immigrants and their Children in France: Between Integration and Stratification”, found that while immigrants are significantly less likely to be homeowners the gap in home-ownership between second generation immigrants and the rest of the population is smaller and not statistically significant. This suggests a progressive integration in the housing market over time and over generations. However, children of immigrants from some countries continue to exhibit a residual home-ownership gap that require specific policies to avoid durable inequalities in access to home-ownership.

Financial and macro-economic factors in global real estate markets

The last three decades have seen increased integration across global stock markets. New research from the Runstad Center of Real Estate Studies at the University of Washington has examined what factors drive international integration across public real estate markets. The research has implications for fund managers as increased integration can have a negative impact upon the diversification opportunities available across global real estate markets. The findings observe that whilst public real estate markets have become more inter-connected, both the level and increase in integration is less than that observed in stock markets generally.

The research, authored by Simon Stevenson, John and Rosalind Jacobi Family Professor of Real Estate and Director of the Runstad Center, also considers how financial and macro-economic factors impact the extent of co-movement across markets. The results highlight that those countries with heightened financial and trade openness and display monetary independence see increased integration. The stability of respective the foreign exchange rate also has a significant impact.

Financial market factors, both specific to public real estate as well as the broader stock market, are also important. The paper finds that increased integration is observed in countries with larger stock markets, which are themselves more integrated with the global market, whilst the size of the public real estate market also plays an role. Specifically, public real estate markets that constitute a larger proportion of the overall domestic stock market, also tend to display increased integration. Factors such as volatility and trading volume in public real estate stocks are also important elements.

The paper, “Macroeconomic and Financial Determinants of Co-Movement across Global Real Estate Security Markets” is published in the latest issue of the Journal of Real Estate Research, the primary publication of the American Real Estate Society.

A City to Love

Runstad Center Affiliate Fellow, Joe David, concludes our series of blog posts documenting the 2015-16 Fellows’ experiences in Auckland, New Zealand last spring.  

The 2015-2106 Runstad Center Affiliate Fellows had the privilege to spend a week in late March exploring the city of Auckland, New Zealand – A community which is grappling with many of the same opportunities and challenges that Seattle currently faces in the midst rapid population growth.

Our group spent seven non-stop days meeting with private developers, architects, transportation planners, utility planners, real-estate associations, community activists, and city officials. The goal was to learn as much as possible about the role that the right-of-way could play in fostering community spirit, advancing sustainable planning, and promoting mass transit. It was our belief that these areas of inquiry could unlock the opportunities that the public realm presented. This scope was intended to help us focus our efforts so that we could return with well-articulated recommendations for our own community.

We succeeded in learning about those specific aspects of Auckland’s streetscape, but more importantly, we discovered  a city that had gone to great lengths to break down these very silos – instilling a holistic visionary approach to city building.  We discovered a city with a clear vision for itself, a streamlined governance structure to implement that vision, city agencies that were empowered to take calculated risk, and a culture that used mistakes as an opportunity to learn and quickly advance.  Vision, financing, love of place, economics, culture, history and vibrant city living are all nested together as one multi-pronged strategy.

The Fellows have returned to Seattle with clear examples of how a community facing similar challenges of population growth has rallied to create “the most livable city in the world”.  We present ideas for how Seattle and the region can learn from this example and harness the cultural, economic, creative potential of its own streets.

To view the Fellows recent presentation at Impact Hub Seattle, click here, we also have some lovely photos of the event here