September 23, 2009 - Call for Nominations for SIOR Distinguished Service Award
The Howell Watson Distinguished Service Award is the highest form of volunteer recognition by SIOR. This award recognizes a member’s outstanding service to SIOR through volunteer leadership, participation and involvement in SIOR programs and activities, and contributions to the industry.
This award is not an annual award, but is given only when an SIOR member's accomplishments and contributions clearly stand out as distinctive. To preserve the prestigious nature of the award, it is ordinarily not presented more than once every several years.
If you’d like to nominate a member for this award, please send a letter to Virginia Antevil at SIOR headquarters or email vantevil@sior.com) explaining why you feel this individual’s contributions to SIOR and the industry make him/her worthy of the award. SIOR staff will provide more extensive information on the individual’s contributions to the Past Presidents Advisory Council, which is responsible for administration of this award. If arecipient is named, the presentation will be made at the 2010 Spring World Conference.
August 27, 2009-SIOR welcomes first member in Alaska. Please click here for a brief Alaskan industrial and office real estate market overview.
July 23, 2009 – SIOR - Important legislative progress affecting our industry!
SIOR, along with 17 other associations, firms and networks convened by NAR’s RCA, participated in a Commercial Real Estate Industry Outreach Meeting on June 18th in Washington, D.C. Mark B. Goode, SIOR, representing SIOR, and other participants gathered to discuss the current state of the commercial real estate market, both overall and in terms of impact on particular segments of the industry while working toward the development of a conceptual agreement on short and/or long-term solutions for purpose of advocacy efforts.
Meeting participants were successful in identifying commonalities and policy priorities and agreed to work together in both educating and providing to policymakers a package of principles and priorities to guide them in their efforts to address the current crisis in the commercial real estate credit markets. The group’s final consensus statement Consensus Principle-Based Policy Statement see link below) sets out to express support for the following concepts:
1. Promote liquidity in the commercial real estate markets through federal programs that address the immediate transaction barriers i.e. TALF, PPIP, etc.) 2. Promote accounting policy that fairly reflects the risk of holding whole and securitized mortgages 3. Demonstrate the vital role that real estate plays in the creation and protection of jobs, as well as the overall economy 4. Promote federal tax policy that strengthens and supports commercial real estate investment
To view the resulting Consensus Principle-Based Policy Statement, Click Here
To view an email about the current and future efforts of this Commercial Real Estate Industry Outreach group, Click Here
Also, on July 21st, the Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, delivered his semi-annual Humphrey Hawkins Report to Congress. During the hearing, Chairman Bernanke was questioned repeatedly on the state of the commercial real estate market by numerous members of the House Financial Services Committee.
In addition, several Members of the Committee specifically addressed the issue of commercial real estate in their opening remarks see the link to Mr. Bachus's Opening Remarks below). At the end of the hearing, Mr. Bachus also read from the recently released Consensus Principle-Based Policy Statement, highlighting its importance and formally submitting it into the record.
