Connecting Investors: Real Estate Derivatives

Ralph Liu

Founder and Chairman, AeFT Technologies

Ralph is the Founder and Chairman of California-based Advanced e-Financial Technologies (AeFT). AeFT has been one of the main providers for innovations in the real estate and property derivatives since its inception in 2001. It pioneers the development of an OTC market for real estate index swaps and options through its patent pending SwapRent (SM) and its related index linked mortgage products in the US and many other foreign countries. Previously, Ralph was the Chief Investment Officer and an EVP of China Everbright Bank based in Beijing where he introduced the first long term fixed rate mortgage and corporate loans and brought the first CNY-denominated interest rate swap to the domestic Chinese banking world. Earlier in his career, he started out of the Wharton Graduate Business School first as an investment banker with Morgan Stanley in NY, an FX options trader with Chemical Bank in NY, a Vice President in Sales and Trading with UBS in Singapore, and a Managing Director of Chase Manhattan Bank in Hong Kong. He also built a successful risk management related business called Advanced Risk Management Solutions (ARMS) based in Singapore. He currently lives in Rancho de Liu in southern California with his wife, two children and Arabian horses.

Douglas Poutasse

Executive Director, NCREIF

Douglas Poutasse is Executive Director of the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries (NCREIF). Since its founding in 1982, NCREIF has served the American institutional real estate investment community as a non-partisan collector, processor, validator and disseminator of real estate performance information. Prior to joining NCREIF in 2007, Doug was the Chief Investment Strategist for AEW Capital Management, one of the world’s leading real estate investment management firms.  At AEW, he chaired the Investment Policy Group, was a standing member of the Investment Committee and oversaw AEW Research, the firm’s in-house research group. He continues to serve on the investment committee for AEW Europe.  Doug has over 25 years of experience as an economic analyst and forecaster. Prior to joining AEW in 1991, Doug was with F.W. Dodge, where he managed real estate and construction forecasting, and with DRI/McGraw-Hill as Manager of Metropolitan Forecasting. Doug is a past President and member of the Board of Directors of NCREIF and served as the chair of NCREIF’s Index Oversight Committee, which was responsible for the policies and procedures of the NCREIF Property Index. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Real Estate Research Institute, the Urban Land Institute and the Pension Real Estate Association.  In 2005, the Pension Real Estate Association awarded Doug the Graaskamp Award for his high quality research in the area of institutional investment in real estate. He is a graduate of Harvard University (B.A.).

David Geltner

Professor, MIT

David Geltner has been at MIT since 2002 where he is the George Macomber Professor and Professor of Real Estate Finance in the Department of Urban Studies & Planning, and Director of the Center for Real Estate. As Director of the MIT/CRE, Dr. Geltner heads MIT’s Master of Science in Real Estate Development (MSRED) program. 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. 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 co-Director of MIT’s Commercial Real Estate Data Laboratory, which has developed pioneering commercial property indexes based on transactions prices.

Dr Geltner received his PhD in 1989 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the Civil Engineering Department in the field of infrastructure finance & economics. He also has degrees in urban studies from Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Michigan. He served during 1994-99 as a Managing Editor of Real Estate Finance, and during 2000-2003 as a co-editor of Real Estate Economics (the leading academic real estate journal and the official journal of the American Real Estate & Urban Economics Association). Dr Geltner also serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Real Estate Finance & Economics, the Journal of Real Estate Research, and the Journal of Property Research. He served during 1994-2000 on the Advisory Board and Board of Directors of the Real Estate Research Institute, where he is now a RERI Fellow. Dr Geltner is a past Academic Fellow of the Urban Land Institute (2004), a Fellow of the Homer Hoyt Institute, a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, and a recipient of the David Ricardo Medal from the American Real Estate Society. Dr Geltner has published extensively in leading academic journals in the area of real estate economics, investment analysis, and performance measurement. A 2006 study published in Real Estate Economics found Geltner to be the most influential academic real estate writer, based on number of citations during 2000-2004 in top academic real estate journals. Dr Geltner is co-author of Commercial Real Estate Analysis & Investments, a new graduate-level real estate investments textbook published by Cengage/South-Western which has now published its second edition.