Welcome to this Special Section of the Journal of Corporate Real Estate with papers from the 25th annual conference of the European Real Estate Society (ERES) conference 2018 in Reading, UK. ERES 2018 was the designated conference of the International Real Estate Society as well, who also celebrated its 25th anniversary. A key theme of the conference was to look forward with a Horizon 25: 50 which seeks to stimulate debate on the future of real estate research and education.
The 25th ERES conference was successful with 350 registered participants and 253 abstract submissions on ten themes. Real Estate and Planning, Henley Business School, the University of Reading hosted the conference at the University's Whiteknights campus in Reading which gave the conference a vibrant, dynamic and warm atmosphere. At ERES we meet, and I think that I can speak for numerous researchers, our extended work-family outside of our own organisations. The conference took place in four distinct and beautiful places: besides visiting the campus, we also went to the outskirts of Reading for a lovely conference diner, and the ERES golf tournament at Wokefield Estate Golf Club the conference started at Reading Town Hall. Town Hall has a long and illustrious history and consists of four buildings built in the 18th and 19th centuries. From a real estate perspective, Reading Town Hall survived the threat of demolition in the 1970s and was comprehensively refurbished in the late 1980s and undergoing further changes to meet new demands to host conferences.
In the Corporate Real Estate theme, five dedicated sessions took place with a total of 17 contributions from 44 authors from a very diverse range of countries from inside and outside of Europe; Poland, Estonia, Norway, Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and the USA. It is worth mentioning that several new cooperation’s between researchers across Western and Eastern Europe that started in Delft the year prior, have resulted in abstract contributions at ERES 2018. Special attention this year was given to four topics:
university campus management and science parks;
well-being in several forms;
sustainability of building and during the use of buildings; and
public real estate and municipal real estate.
I take the opportunity to look back at the 2017 24th ERES conference hosted by TU Delft as well, since due to unfortunate technicalities, the guest editorial was not published. From a Corporate Real Estate perspective, the 24th ERES conference hosted by TU Delft had set a record with ten sessions and 37 papers. It was the first time we have had a dedicated workplace track with six sessions in addition to four sessions in the corporate real estate (CRE) track. Together they resulted in a record of received submissions in one week for the ERES special issue. The CRE track in 2017 was of comparable size to ERES 2018 with 16 papers from 29 authors coming from 9 different countries covering a wide range of topics: CRE strategies, CRE management; Higher education real estate and CRE from a theoretical point of view. In 2017, an additional 21 papers in the Workplace track were presented from ten different countries. All papers were user oriented but focused on different themes.
Notwithstanding the successful ERES conferences, the question that needs to be asked is whether a JCRE ERES special issue remains a viable format. Two trends are colliding these past few year. With increased pressure from some universities on publishing in ISI rated journals, some PhD students are more hesitant to publish in JCRE. Next to that, the earlyCite that JCRE is using, makes a special issue less important as papers are first published individually anyway. I plea for a continued ERES special issue and stimulate researchers to submit. From ERES 2018, three interesting papers have been selected for this special issue.
The first paper aims at gaining a clearer understanding of the current design of corporate real estate (CRE) to satisfy the demands of software technology companies, such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft, at four stages of company growth. In addition to traditional statistical approaches, data analytics and newer forms of data visualization were included in this study in preparation for the growing trend of using big data in research studies incorporating semi-structured and unstructured data. In the future larger sample sizes could be augmented with data mining and machine learning techniques to generate and test predictive and prescriptive models for performance and business efficacy in CRE decision-making.
In the second paper, the author’s aim to advance the existing knowledge in campus management by describing campus management information (CMI) in universities of technology (UTs) located in Europe’s most innovative regions. University campuses provide physical, technological and functional infrastructures supporting the activities of universities in boosting socioeconomic development. However, it is a challenge is to understand how campuses can do this best. Fourteen participating universities in nine countries provided substantial data increasing the available CMI. Three goal-related patterns driving the strategies of UTs and their campuses were identified across competitive, social, economic and environmental performance aspects.
In the third paper, the author studies the behaviour of its occupants because it determines next to the technical design the building performance does as well. Actually, occupant behaviours can more than offset technological efficiency gains so that corporate real estate (CRE) managers have to go beyond sustainable buildings. In this study, the effects of environmental attitudes and mindfulness on occupant behaviours at home and at the office are studied. Both have positive effects on occupant behaviours, but the effects tend to be weaker in the office. This means that environmental education as well as mindfulness training may be an effective way to further reduce the environmental impact of CRE portfolios.
This paper forms part of a special section “ERES 2018”, guest edited by Monique Arkesteijn.
