The Global Chinese Real Estate Congress (GCREC) and the University of Macau’s (UM) Faculty of Business Administration recently held a gala dinner at Grand Hyatt Macau in celebration of the fourth annual conference of GCREC. During the dinner, three Doctoral Dissertation Awards and fourteen Best Paper Awards were presented.

The gala dinner received generous sponsorship from the Melco Crown Entertainment. In her speech on behalf of Melco Crown Entertainment’s Co-chairman and Chief Executive Mr. Lawrence Ho, Ms. Akiko Takahashi, executive vice president and chief human resources/corporate social responsibility officer, emphasized the company’s commitment to life-long learning, as demonstrated by various learning initiatives for the employees and scholarships extended also to the employees’ immediate family members.

Prof. Rose Neng Lai, chair of GCREC’s 2012 annual conference, indicated that the conference had been widely publicized via different media in the Greater China region. In addition to the six sessions, with nine concurrent paper sub-sessions in each, there were six roundtable panel discussions hosted by professional entities, during which participants discussed real estate issues from academic, policy-making and social perspectives. All the sessions were well received and enriched the outcome of the conference.

During the dinner, twelve groups of postgraduate students from universities in the Greater China region, including Tsinghua University (Beijing), Chengchi University (Taipei) and Zhejiang University (Hangzhou), were invited to perform on stage. Three Doctoral Dissertation Awards and fourteen Best Paper Awards, sponsored by E-House (China) Holdings Limited, were presented. The closing dinner came to a grand finale when Prof. Feng Changchun, chair of GCREC’s 2013 annual conference, director of the Real Estate Research Institute and associate dean of the Capital Development Research Institute of Peking University, expressed his congratulations on the success of the 2012 annual conference and conveyed his best wishes for the next year’s conference.

The conference provided a platform for experts, scholars, industry practitioners and postgraduate students to have in-depth discussions on the opportunities and challenges facing the real estate sector under macro-control.