The Center for Real Estate hosted this year’s MIT-Cambridge-Maastricht Real Estate Finance & Investment Symposium on October 12-14. Sponsored by the Journal of Real Estate Finance & Economics, the annual international conference has been hosted alternately by Cambridge University and Maastrict University since 2000. This is the first year that the MIT/CRE has hosted the conference, a reflection of the Center’s increasing eminence in international real estate education.

The conference was attended by representatives of sixteen universities from China, England, France, Korea, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, and the United States as well as representatives of seven leading and diverse real estate companies, partners of the MIT/CRE.

The Friday, October 12 segment of the program focused on institutional investment and real estate development decision-making and featured presentations by Professors Olivier de Weck and Richard de Neufville, of the MIT School of Engineering. The two professors discussed recent research, conducted collaboratively with the Center for Real Estate, on tools that can be useful for decision-making in real estate development, including an engineering perspective on “real options,” computer simulation decision tools aimed at valuing flexibility in design and construction, and addressing uncertainty in project development.

To learn more about the Symposium and read some of the papers presented, visit the web site.