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Wharton News Real Estate at Wharton is #1U.S. News and World Report has once again ranked the real estate program at Wharton the best in the country as enrollments in real estate courses continue to set records, at both the undergraduate and MBA levels.Alumni and Students Get Together in New YorkThe third annual Wharton Real Estate New York Happy Hour in early August was a great success and very well attended, drawing alumni from the Class of 1988 to 2006. The event was a great opportunity to meet alumni from all areas of real estate. If you would like to be added to the Zell/Lurie Real Estate Center Alumni Directory, please send your contact information to Janice Leberman (lebermaj@wharton.upenn.edu)"Bubble Trouble? Not Likely"A commentary by Professor Todd Sinai and Chris Mayer was published in the Wall Street Journal (9/17/05) " . . .this apparent evidence of a bubble is anything but … While housing prices over the last decade have gone through the roof, the annual cost of owning a house has not." Sinai was also interviewed on Bloomberg Radio on September 19 concerning housing bubbles.School Quality and Housing PricesFernando Ferreira, Assistant Professor of Real Estate, and co-authors Patrick Bayer and Robert McMillan received a research grant of $391,000 from the U.S. Department of Education Research Program on Education Finance, Leadership, and Management for 2005 to 2007. The team has written two papers about changes in local public school quality on household location decisions. They will use the grant to further investigate the relationship between housing prices (and household sorting) and the quality of local schools.Immigration and the NeighborhoodAssistant Professor of Real Estate Albert Saiz presented his research on "Immigration and the Neighborhood" to Columbia University's Economics Department, and was quoted in an Associated Press release on heraldtribune.com (8/20/05), titled "Investors Power Miami's Booming Condo Market."House PricesA research paper on housing prices by Joseph Gyourko, Raven Saks, and Edward Glaeser was cited in the National Bureau of Economics Research September newsletter, The NBER Digest. The authors say the increase in housing prices is due in large part to man-made constraints such as government regulation rather than geographic limitations.Professor Gyourko was quoted in an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer (8/28/05) on Bucks County house prices. Gyourko commented that rapidly rising land costs, caused by "increasingly restrictive land use and building regulation at the local level," appear to be the cause of the supply-demand incongruency. "Our survey results clearly show that the wealth, income, and education level of the community are important drivers of local regulation," he said. "The higher are house prices, household incomes, and the percentage of college graduates in the community, the larger are increases in single-family lot-development costs, the longer are review times even for standard projects, and the longer are permit lags between application and approval [whether or not rezoning is required]," the study showed. Rebuilding New OrleansProfessor Witold Rybczynski was quoted on the future of New Orleans by the New York Times: "The lesson of disasters, natural and manmade, is that we generally rebuild more or less what was there. The reasons for this are probably mainly pragmatic (existing property ownership, buried infrastructure) but also perhaps sentimental: the urge to recreate what had been destroyed, to rebuild the world we knew." His comments on the urban disaster also appeared in the Dallas Morning News.News From the International Housing Finance ProgramDrs. Marja Hoek-Smit, Director of the International Housing Finance Program (IHFP), was invited by HUD to speak at a panel on International Housing Policy at the International AUEREA meeting in Los Cabos, Mexico on "Housing Policy Challenges in Latin America" in August, and prepared a housing policy concept note for HUD summarizing the panel's findings. She spoke in June on "Comparing U.S. and European Housing Finance Systems" at the invitation of the Dutch Embassy in Washington, D.C., for a group of visiting mortgage sector specialists from the Netherlands.The IHFP signed an agreement with the World Bank Group, a three-year partnership in housing finance training and scholarship. The purpose of the partnership is to facilitate and expand knowledge sharing with public and private housing officials in developing and emerging economies and enhance the effectiveness of their housing finance systems. The first joint activity is the publication this fall of a reference book on housing finance subsidies by Drs. Hoek-Smit and Douglas Diamond. Susan Wachter interviewed on NPRSusan Wachter, Richard B. Worley Professor of Financial Management and Professor of Real Estate, Finance and City and Regional Planning, was interviewed about current challenges in the housing market on National Public Radio on July 1.Land Management Addressed by Wachter at White House ConferenceProfessor Susan Wachter participated in a panel discussion on "Vacant Land Management and Reclamation in Philadelphia" at a recent White House Conference on Cooperative Conservation. The discussion was part of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society's Philadelphia Green Program's presentation.Linneman—Moderator and Guest SpeakerProfessor Peter D. Linneman joined Sam Zell in the Equity Office Strategic Customer Exchange, September 12-13 at the University of Chicago's Gleacher Center for the session "Leading Minds, Forward Thinking," on leading and industry perspectives on real estate issues "ranging from inflation, labor markets and interest rates to politics, macro-economic trends, and the future of the global REIT industry."September was a busy month for Linneman. He was the featured guest speaker at The Real Estate Roundtable's State of Commercial Real Estate Markets meeting. Linneman also moderated a discussion on real estate and the global economy with Sam Zell and George Mitchell, Global Chairman of DLA Piper, at the "Boom or Bubble" DLA Piper Global Real Estate Summit in Chicago. In Philadelphia, Linneman gave a "Real Estate, Hospitality & Construction Industry Update: Overview of current and emerging economic and market trends impacting our industry" at Ernst & Young's Desk-top Learning Session. Later in the month he was the featured speaker at O'Connor North American Property Partners' meeting in Bermuda. On October 6 in San Francisco, Linneman was the keynote speaker at BT Commercial Real Estate/NAI's National Real Estate Outlook, addressing "the state of the economy, interest rates, capital flows to real estate, real estate pricing, and outlook for real estate."
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