IIJournals JPM-Special Real Estate Article Collection | Page 11

drawn back to the rocky, stormy coast and its multitude
of islands. At Unum, Susan established a pattern that
she would follow throughout her career: Find forward
thinkers who were willing to take a chance on a new
idea, develop a strong platform to create a new level of
quantitative analysis, and sell the value of that analysis
both internally and externally. In order to ensure that
the research was applied to decision making, marketing
was always part of Susan’s DNA. In five years, she built
a top research platform, strongly leveraging third-party
providers for data and forecasts on market fundamentals, while beginning her seminal work on investment
performance, which moved well beyond the existing
state-of-the-art tools of forecasting construction and
absorption. Unum also introduced Susan to the broader
world of financial analysis.
In 1988, she became one of the first real estate
professionals to earn the CFA designation, beginning a
lifelong commitment to bringing the principles of stock
and bond analysis to real estate. With the publication of
Real Estate: Valuation and Techniques and Portfolio Management, Susan began her long-term campaign to bring
quantitative rigor to real estate portfolio management,
proposing to use the tools of asset allocation to objectively and qua