The Graaskamp Award

PREA’s biennial James A. Graaskamp award was presented to David Geltner at the 2011 PREA Fall Conference on October 18th in Chicago. His body of work embodies the very spirit of the Graaskamp Award which is given to recognize those persons who contribute to the common body of knowledge some practical insights gained through significant research. Dr. Geltner has been at MIT since 2002 where he has held the George Macomber Chair and currently is Professor of Real Estate Finance in the Department of Urban Studies & Planning, and Director of Research in the Center for Real Estate. Geltner served as Director of the MIT/CRE during 2003-08 and is the faculty chair of MIT’s Master of Science in Real Estate Development (MSRED) program. Dr Geltner has served since 1999 as the External Academic Member of the Real Estate Investment Committee of the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio (a pension plan sponsor with over $8 billion of directly managed real estate holdings). He also serves as the Academic Advisor to the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries (NCREIF), and as Director of MIT’s Commercial Real Estate Data Laboratory, which has developed pioneering commercial property indexes based on transactions prices (including to date the Moody’s/REAL index and the NCREIF-based TBI). Prior to MIT, Geltner was the REEAC Professor of Real Estate in the Finance Department of the College of Business Administration at the University of Cincinnati, and has been teaching graduate level real estate investments and finance since 1989. Dr Geltner also served from 1998-2004 as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Land Management of the Faculty of Urban and Regional Science at the University of Reading (England), a research appointment.

About the Award

To highlight and encourage high quality research in the area of institutional investment in real estate, the Pension Real Estate Association, through its Plan Sponsor Council, established The Graaskamp Award to recognize such work.

The award is named in memory of the late Dr. James A. Graaskamp, one of the greatest researchers of our time, a distinguished professor of real estate at the University of Wisconsin, and a champion of research of immediate use to investment decision makers.

The purpose of the award is to recognize those persons who contribute to the common body of knowledge some practical insights gained through significant research. Practical research yields results that are immediately useful to real estate decision makers and are developed by researchers who are in touch with the problems facing the industry and have used their unique research skills to define the problem, properly design the research methodology, gather the data, analyze, test and interpret the results in a scientific manner, and then communicate these results in an understandable form to the decision maker.

PREA's Board of Directors has recently reviewed the formal award process and has instituted changes that will not only improve the overall process but also draw upon the expertise of past award recipients.

The process is as follows:

1. Names of potential recipients will be solicited from the full PREA membership. Nominees should be recognized for career accomplishments, not just by recent work. Prior winners are not eligible to receive the award.
2. A team of former Graaskamp recipients will select a slate of finalists by evaluating research accomplishments. This panel may also add nominees to the slate to acknowledge significant but less visible contributions.
3. The PREA voting members will vote on the slate, with a summary of all nominees' accomplishments included with the ballot.
4. The top vote getter will receive the award, which will be presented at the Annual Plan Sponsor Real Estate Conference. The award is given on a biennial basis, with a scholarship of $10,000 presented to the academic institution of the recipient's choice.

The first award was presented at the First Annual PREA Plan Sponsor Conference held in November 1990 at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, California.

Past Recipients of the James A. Graaskamp Award
1990	David Shulman Salomon Brothers, Inc. New York, NY	1998	Wylie Greig The RREEF Funds San Francisco, CA
1991	Tony Downs The Brookings Institution Washington, DC	1999	Michael E. Miles Fidelity Management & Trust, Co. Boston, MA
1992	Jeffrey Fisher Indiana University Bloomington, IN	2000	Jacques N. Gordon LaSalle Investment Management Chicago, IL
1993	Blake Eagle Frank Russell Company Tacoma, WA	2001	Glenn R. Mueller Legg Mason Wood Walker, Inc. Baltimore, MD
1994	Charles Wurtzebach Heitman Capital Management Corporation Chicago, IL	2003	Kenneth Rosen Haas Business School, University of California Berkeley, CA
1995	Susan Hudson-Wilson Property & Portfolio Research Boston, MA	2005	Doug Poutasse AEW Capital Management Boston, MA
1996	S. Michael Giliberto J.P. Morgan Investment Management, Inc. New York, NY	2007	Raymond Torto and William Wheaton Torto Wheaton Research
1997	Leanne Lachman Schroder Real Estate New York, NY	2009	Peter Linneman Linneman Associates
		2011	David Geltner Massachusetts Institute of Technology