Editorial

Citation

Martens, B. (2013), "Editorial", Journal of European Real Estate Research, Vol. 6 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/JERER-08-2013-0017

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of European Real Estate Research, Volume 6, Issue 3

From July 3 to 6 2013 the 20th Annual ERES conference was hosted at Vienna University of Technology: a venue in the heart of the City of Vienna (Austria). The conference, following the tradition of previous annual conferences, embraced a broad range of topics pertaining to global real estate issues and attracted a diverse audience comprising of academics and practitioners. In total over 350 delegates from 45 different countries participated in a high quality conference that was academically rigorous, professionally relevant and socially entertaining. Most importantly delegates attended from all sister societies affiliated to the International Real Estate Society.

The opening ceremony contained a double keynote. Eduard Zehetners’ contribution “Five years after the crisis: changed requirements for business models of real estate companies” focussed on ongoing transformations. In this context, the financial crisis has dramatically changed the environment for real estate companies, also for listed ones. It was argued that leverage plays much less significant role, that there is greater focus on cash flows and that there is a reduced the number of players in the sector, especially in development area. “The concept of embodied carbon” was elaborated upon by Michael Smithing, putting forward the question: does our future hold an easy life or a hot one? This keynote paper explore how technology is allowing us to build better buildings faster and with less manual labour, but this has led to an explosion in the amount of energy from fossil fuels used to expand and maintain our built environment.

In the parallel sessions, 67 paper sessions, there was a total of 274 papers presented stimulating productive exchanges of ideas and experiences supported by six dedicated panels. To mark the 20th anniversary conference, one of the panel sessions specifically reflected on the achievements of ERES since the founding of the society with panel members challenged to identify key past milestones for the society and future directions for ERES going forward. The role of ERES in advancing real estate research throughout the European continent was widely applauded as highlighted by the significantly wider geographical base of members and delegates at the conference notably young researchers and the diversity of papers by topic area and country.

The ERES Board has had long discussions on several occasions on the merits of peer reviewing conference papers. To address this requirement ERES2013 identified three full paper tracks (corporate real estate – housing markets and economics – real estate finance and investment), where peer reviewing was applied. This has led to a Book of Proceedings, consisting of selected contributions accepted for publication.

This editorial provides a useful platform to remind colleagues and readers about the relaunch of ERES Digital Library v2.0, to be found at: http://library.eres.org. Assembled through considerable effort, there is currently over 4,000 recorded entries from previous ERES conferences. Making use of state-of-the-art sematic web technology this allows the user to trace back how topics evolved in the course of time and which authors were in the forefront of such developments. The annual conferences, in contrast to the virtual library space, are an opportunity to encounter colleagues and exchange ideas. Therefore, there is no doubt that these annual meetings will remain important at the forefront of activities going forward for the society. The ERES2013 conference strengthened existing and fostered future collaborations. The next annual conference, ERES2014, will be held in Bucharest (25-28 June 2014).

Finally as conference chair for 2013 I once again wish to thank all of our sponsors and strongly encourage colleagues and delegates to forward their manuscripts for the several prizes available for best papers and to forward their best papers to the Journal of European Real Estate Research.

Bob Martens