NEWS

December 2008
Hines Funds New Post at the University of Reading

Gerald D. Hines, the legendary founder and chairman of the international real estate company, Hines, recently funded the establishment of the Gerald D. Hines Visiting Fellowship in Development at the School of Real Estate and Planning, Henley Business School at the University of Reading in London.

Stephen Musgrave, managing director of Hines UK, said, “Gerald D. Hines is considered to be a visionary leader in real estate, and the funding of this fellowship demonstrates the firm’s commitment to the future of UK property professionals and to global property development.”

With offices in more than 100 cities in 16 countries, and controlled assets valued at approximately $25.6 billion, Hines is one of the world’s largest real estate organizations. Hines UK, established in 2000, now has over three million square feet of projects acquired, completed or in the pipeline.

The University of Reading has a reputation as the ‘university of the land’, famous for agriculture and property. It is one of the top 10 research intensive universities in the UK, as well as one of the top 200 universities in the world. Over an initial three-year period, the Hines fellow will help to define the global development agenda and connected skills requirements, inform the development syllabus in the university’s undergraduate and postgraduate Real Estate programmes and supplement the teaching resource to expand the more practical applications of theory and technique.

The Fellow will work with the full-time academic ALDAR professor of Development to deliver a development programme.

Professor Ginny Gibson, head of the School for Real Estate & Planning, said, “We are delighted that the name of Gerald D. Hines is now associated with one of the world’s leading schools of real estate here at Reading. I would also like to thank the Reading Real Estate Foundation for the role they played in helping us realise this generous gift.”

The Real Estate School sits alongside the schools of conomics and Management, the ICMA Centre and the corporate learning division in the newly established Henley Business School at the University of Reading. The Henley Business School was created in August 2008, following the merger of the University of Reading with Henley Management College and is one of the world’s largest full-service business schools.

Hines, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, has created some of the world’s most famous buildings – the Gallerias in Houston and Dallas, 53rd At Third in New York, and the EDF Tower in Paris – and continues to change the face of cities around the world, and has worked with leading architects such as Lord Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Philip Johnson and Cesar Pelli.

Last year, Gerald Hines was awarded the first ever Visionary Leadership in Real Estate award by the Harvard Design School, established to honour the lifetime accomplishments of extraordinary leaders in the real estate industry and their contributions to real estate education at Harvard University and the built environment.

Hines has been a strong supporter of education, as reflected most notably in its endowment of the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture at the University of Houston. Hines has also provided substantial funding to KIPP, an alternative primary and secondary school program for underserved students in Houston. Reflecting a corporate commitment to sustainability, Hines recently made a major contribution to Purdue University’s Sustainable Buildings Technology Lab. Hines has also made sizeable contributions to Harvard Business School, Rice University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Texas Health Science Center, Vanderbilt University and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.