Doug Rubenstein
Managing Director, Investment Banking, A.G. Edwards
"The most important challenge for the industry will be to ‘keep it simple’ in its structure and cash flow. Over time, the natural tendency is to add more bells and whistles to the structure which creates unnecessary complexity, and to introduce too much noise around cash flow which will deter sophisticated investors.”

Mark Patterson
Managing Director, Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc.
"The globalization of REITs will be the most dramatic change over the next 45 years. REITs have already begun to spread around the world with great momentum building on the successes of the U.S. REIT market and the Australian listed property trust market. Japan has been extremely successful in creating a burgeoning J-REIT market with 17 IPOs in the last four years—all of which have traded up. Many other Asian countries either have REIT laws or are creating them, which will pave the way for emerging markets. Several European countries also have laws or are expected to have them in a few years.”

Mark Decker
Managing Director, Robert W. Baird & Co.
"I think that the REIT industry will grow to be four to five times its current public equity market capitalization and virtually all Americans will be owners through their 401(k) plans.

In terms of legislative changes, the cost of implementing Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) has erected a major barrier to new, smaller REIT IPOs. We need reasonable modification]s to SOX so that smaller companies can afford to enter the public markets. Smaller IPOs are critical to the health and long-term success of the REIT/public real estate markets.”