National Association of Realtors

In this study, we examine the sustainability of downtown parking in the likely advent of driverless vehicles (DVs). The confluence of driverless, electric, and fleet-owned cars is likely to influence personal car use choice of travel modes. We ask where driverless cars could be staged during the day. We review 21 available practitioner forecasts on DV adoption, and project that net demand for parking in downtown Cleveland would drop by 20%–66% by 2035. The servicing and staging needs for the expected “robotaxi” fleet of 1,300–4,300 vehicles could be accommodated by city-owned overflow parking by the lakefront airport or football sports stadium.

David Weild IV is a scientist by training. He started his career as an academic biologist who really didn’t like biology but who liked genetics, fulfilling most of his undergraduate requirements with graduate course work in molecular genetics. He left graduate programs, ultimately finding himself on Wall Street, and was fascinated when watching Genentech go public (1980): seeing the stock open at $35 per share and cresting within an hour at more than $88.

Doug Rand’s story at the White House began in September 2010. Despite being very much a political neophyte, he found himself in the extraordinarily fortuitous circumstance of showing up for his first day of work at the President Barack Obama’s White House. For Doug, it was a dream come true. His path to getting there had been very serendipitous. He had never had a policy job before and had come to it as a public interest fellow newly graduated from law and business school. He had been a relatively older (30) law and business student, having spent most of his 20s building up a company in New York with his brother.

Nav Athwal started his career as an engineer, so his early work experience was in technology rather than real estate. He worked as an electrical engineer for a company in Oakland right out of college and was living in the Bay Area, exploring that side of the world. He’d always had an interest in exploring the real estate market since his father was a broker and investor, so while he was still an engineer, he got his real estate broker’s license and began selling single-family homes and small commercial buildings and helping folk get refinances at a time when the market was still good but the economy was about to enter the recession.

This paper examines the wealth maximisation and preservation effects of including commercial real estate in retirement-phase portfolio management. Prior research addresses the role of real estate during the wealth-accumulation phase of the investor lifecycle; however, little is known about the contribution of real estate during the invest-and-spend, or decumulation, phase. To address this issue, we estimate short-fall risk based on the widely known 4% Rule. We use pricing data for multiple asset classes and simulation techniques, combined with a robust correlation structure, to examine: short-fall risk sensitivity to alternative spending rules; the impact of public vs. private real estate allocations; wealth preservation as an investment objective; and the effect of real estate on upside, or wealth maximisation, potential. We find short-fall risk in a decumulation portfolio decreases with substantial allocations to real estate. This result holds for a portfolio including either public or private real estate. Additionally, and under most conditions, the best performing decumulation-phase portfolios include a real estate allocation with both public and private real estate exposure. These results have significant implications for investors, whether they be retirees, plan administrators or endowments, as well as financial economists studying the lifecycle of investment decisions.