Bernard Bizet is an associate professor at ESSEC Business School in Paris, academic director of its M.S. program in Urban, Environmental, and Services Management as well as an attorney at the Paris Court of Appeals. He has developed a professional and an academic expertise in urban management, environment, heritage policy, and real estate matters, both in Europe and in developing countries.
Francis J. Conway is a senior associate at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. He has more than 25 years of experience working with decentralization and urban sector technical assistance issues in developing countries. Since joining the Urban Institute, he has advised on decentralization legal and policy reforms in Latin America as well as in the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the NIS. Prior to joining the Urban Institute, he worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development as housing and urban development advisor and for the Government of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, where he served as vice president of the planning board.
Bernard Dafflon is the chair of public finance and public management at the University of Fribourg. From 1977 to 1990, he was chief economist at the Direction of Justice and Interior, then at the Direction of Institution, Agriculture, and Forestry, in charge of local governments, districts, and decentralized jurisdictions. He has been an expert in fiscal federalism, decentralisation, and local public finance for the Council of Europe since 1994 and for the World Bank Institute since 1999. His fields of research include fiscal federalism, local public finance, institutional economics (amalgamation of municipalities and urban public economics), and the financial relation between public finance and social policies.
Peter Dow
is well known as a pioneer and "founder" of corporate real estate in New Zealand. He has worked in all areas of the property industry since the early 1970s. In 1990, Peter established Dow Group as the first tenant advocacy and corporate real estate consulting firm in New Zealand. His passion for environmentally sustainable design and development has led him to be appointed chair of the Interim New Zealand Green Building Council. As director of the Property Institute of New Zealand, Peter has been a strong advocate for increasing the awareness of real estate as an integral part of business planning. He brings to each project his unique enthusiasm, innovation, ideas, and reputation for asking the hard questions and challenging conventional thinking.
Christian Ecke
is senior manager at eBay International AG in Berlin, Germany. In this function, he is responsible for managing eBay's project portfolio and for pan-European process optimization. Previously, he has been working as a management consultant for Roland Berger Strategy Consultants and Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting) focusing on real estate management in the public and private sector, M&A, and restructuring. He has studied civil engineering and business administration at the Technical University of Brunswick.
Iain Gillies
is a management consultant at Dow Group Ltd. His 20 years in property includes valuation, consultancy, property securities analysis, and house property management. Iain has been back in New Zealand for seven years after 13 years of commercial property valuation and management work in Europe. He focuses on enhancing the skills and capability of in-house property managers and teams, primarily those in the public sector. He is a member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and the Property Institute of New Zealand.
John J. Hentschel
is a founder and principal of Hentschel Real Estate Services. For over 30 years, he has advised government and private sector executives in the United States and abroad regarding organizational, operational, and capital investment decisions involving real estate and economic/community development matters. From 1982-92, he served as the chief real estate executive officer for the City of Baltimore, Maryland, heading a real estate department that supervised a diverse portfolio of more than 7,000 properties and 3 million square feet of office, commercial, industrial, and special purpose rental space. A former member of the University of Baltimore real estate faculty, he has authored a variety of works concerning real estate in the public sector and has served on the editorial board of the professional journal Real Estate Issues. He holds senior designations from the Appraisal Institute (MAI) and Counselors of Real Estate (CRE).
Alan Jowett is a senior policy analyst and the registrar of federal real property with the Property and Materiel Policy Directorate of the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat in Canada. He has been actively engaged in real property planning, analysis, information management, and policy with federal, provincial regional government and private sector organizations for over 25 years. He has participated in international real property initiatives in Chile and Egypt.
Gary Nichols
is the national property manager for the Inland Revenue Department in New Zealand. Restructuring this portfolio will involve significant development projects to reposition the portfolio to provide leading edge, dynamic, and flexible accommodation that will take into account the future of work, changing workplace demographics, and changes in corporate culture through real estate. His professional interest is in the link between business strategy and property strategy, where providing corporate working environments supports and enables business success. Gary is a senior member of the Property Institute of New Zealand, and a member of CoreNet Australia. His previous role was associate director of Dow Group Limited, a boutique property consultancy specializing in corporate real estate.
George E. Peterson is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, in Washington, D.C. He directed the Urban Institute's Public Finance Center for 10 years and now specializes in public finance, intergovernmental relations, and infrastructure financing in developing countries. He received the Daniel C. Stone Award for intergovernmental research from the American Society for Public Administration and has been a fellow of the Urban Land Institute. He has lectured at universities in the United States, Asia, and Europe, and has taught urban economics at American University and public finance at the U.S. Foreign Service Institute.
Sarah Polen is a research associate at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.. She provides technical and logistical support for the Urban Institute's international projects in housing, local government reform, and performance management/municipal service improvement in the Balkans and former Soviet Union.
Karl-Werner Schulte is head of the Department of Real Estate at the European Business School (ebs), International University Schloss Reichartshausen. In 1986, he was appointed the professorship of the chair of business administration, in particular investment and finance, at the ebs. Since the early 1990s, he has been academic and managing director of the ebs's Real Estate Academy and founder of the endowed chair of real estate at ebs. Among his special honors are the presidency of the European Real Estate Society and the International Real Estate Society as well as the nomination as an honorary member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. As a member of numerous advisory and editorial boards of renowned real estate companies and journals, he links practical and theoretical aspects of real estate. Many of his publications have become key literature of the discipline in Germany.
Charles Undeland is a senior associate at the Urban Institute. He is director of the Central Asian Republics' Local Government Initiative, a USAID-funded project to promote effective and accountable local government throughout the region. For the past six years, he has been directly involved with providing technical assistance to improve municipal asset management practices. He is the author of several articles on Central Asia and coauthor of The Central Asian Republics: Fragments of Empire Magnets of Wealth.
Marilee A. Utter is president of Citiventure Associates LLC. The Denver, Colorado-based real estate advisory and investment firm specializes in public-private transactions with particular expertise in Transit-Oriented Development and mixed-use villages. In addition to experience as a banker and private developer, she previously established the Office of Asset Management for the city and county of Denver, and the Department of Transit-Oriented Development for the (Denver) Regional Transit District. With this unique background, Marilee has become a nationally known speaker, writer, and advisor on innovative approaches to community redevelopment and urban issues. She holds a certificate in state and local public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School and the Counselor of Real Estate (CRE) designation.
