Guest editorial

Citation

Appel-Meulenbroek, R. (2010), "Guest editorial", Journal of Corporate Real Estate, Vol. 12 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jcre.2010.31212aaa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Corporate Real Estate, Volume 12, Issue 1

Welcome to this first special issue of the Journal of Corporate Real Estate with papers from a European Real Estate Society (ERES) Conference. Last summer in Stockholm, it was the 16th time that the ERES organised their conference (with almost 400 delegates), but the first time with three paper sessions dedicated completely to corporate real estate (CRE) issues. This indication of a rising number of CRE researchers is very good news to our community and this journal. This special issue contains a selection of four papers covering the broad field of academic CRE research in Europe.

The first paper “Responsibility for and performance of CRE functions” compares how European and North American CRE managers deal with real estate functions, like portfolio management, leasing and outsourcing. The authors also look at the trends for the near future, showing, among other things, that in Europe the property ownership rates are still dropping but are by far not as low as in North America. These times of economic crises are bound to raise the issue of sale-and-leaseback possibilities to free up capital among more Europeans CRE managers as well. The second paper in this special edition “Ten years of sale-and-leaseback transactions in The Netherlands” specifically studies the leasing behaviour of European CRE managers. The authors give an overview of transactions and find very different transactional rent – and yield levels than what was common on the market at that time.

This fact that corporate occupiers treat their real estate differently than other real estate companies is also one of the research premises for the third paper “Methods for evaluating office occupiers’ needs and preferences”. It gives an overview of the methods used by Finnish real estate sector companies such as investors, developers, consultants and service providers, to identify and evaluate their current and potential clients’ needs and preferences. A clearer view of these needs is necessary for the real estate market to choose the right direction in fulfilling them. In the talking heads sections, Dr Gibler explains the role of the International Real Estate Society and discusses the current and future role of CRE education and research. She is the previous Editor of this journal, President of the International Real Estate society and also happens to be the first person that I met at my first ERES Conference many years ago.

The final paper in this issue deals with one of the occupier preferences that is receiving more attention lately: “Corporate branding: an exploration of the influence of CRE”. Especially service providers are trying to present their company under a total corporate brand. This study shows which real estate strategies CRE managers choose to complete the picture. It is an explorative paper opening up a wide field of possible further research in this area. Suggestions for future research can also be extracted from a new annual section in this journal: the end of year round up. Howard Cooke looks back at 2009 as “The CRE year that was”.

This summer the ERES Conference will take place in Milan (Italy), followed by Eindhoven (The Netherlands) in 2011. The 2011 conference will be the responsibility of my own group at the Eindhoven University of Technology, and we strive for even more CRE research sessions. So, a very warm invitation for all of you readers to come and present your CRE research at our conference. Together we can make the conference as diverse as the real estate sector is.

Rianne Appel-MeulenbroekGuest Editor