Greenfield Advisors was busy in 2015. From mortgage-backed securities, to environmentally contaminated properties, to product liability cases, to drug royalty valuation, we worked on a wide variety of matters.

This year also included the addition of several new staff members across both of Greenfield’s offices. Those new staff members include Jessica Flood and Holly Selby in the Cartersville, Georgia office and Nawaf Alfaouri, Minkyu Kim, Elizabeth Luff, Roget Luo, Victoria Rodgers, Colleen Shanahan, and Matthew Shaw in our Seattle, Washington office.

Seattle Fireworks

Fireworks at the Space Needle in Seattle, courtesy of Rajiv Vishwa, CC BY 2.0.

This year Greenfield introduced two new lines of business. We worked with our first client in our business line focused on EB‑5 consulting services. Recently we also introduced a new EB‑5 due diligence service, which I will coordinate out of our Cartersville office utilizing staff in both offices. The Greenfield Advisors EB‑5 team provides an expert level of financial and business analysis with a high degree of objectivity that will give clients the information they need to make an informed decision about whether to invest in a particular project.

This year, Greenfield principals Dr. Kilpatrick and I spoke at many conferences. Here are just a few of the places where we spoke:

  • Keynote Speech at the 3rd World Congress on Petrochemistry and Chemical Engineering, Atlanta, GA
  • RICS/IPTI 4th Caribbean Valuation & Construction Conference: Challenges and Recent Developments in Valuation and Construction, Montego Bay, Jamaica
  • U.S. Association for Energy Economics North American Conference, Pittsburgh, PA
  • Georgia Association of Assessing Officials Summer Conference, Jekyll Island, GA
  • International Property Tax Institute Mass Appraisal Valuation Symposium, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  • International Association of Consultants, Valuators, and Analysts (IACVA) Annual Meeting, Atlanta, GA
  • American Real Estate Society Annual Meeting, Fort Myers, FL
  • 4th Plant DDD – Managing the Power Plant Decommissioning, Decontamination & Demolition Process, Charlotte, NC

One of the highlights this year was the award that Dr. Andy Krause (formerly of Greenfield Advisors, now at the University of Melbourne in Australia) and I won at the 2015 American Real Estate Society meetings in Fort Myers, Florida. We won the Best Manuscript Prize for Real Estate Education, sponsored by Dearborn Real Estate Education, for our paper entitled “A Primer on Real Estate Data Cleaning Techniques: Lessons from the Trenches.” A version of this paper is currently under review for publication consideration at a peer-reviewed journal.

In addition, Dr. Kilpatrick and I had a book chapter published this year on the valuation of brownfields:

  • Kilpatrick, J.A., and C.A. Lipscomb. 2015. “Chapter 29 Valuation of Brownfields Properties” in Brownfields Law and Practice: The Cleanup and Redevelopment of Contaminated Land (LexisNexis Matthew Bender Publications), 1–39.

I also had a second book chapter published this year related to unconventional shale gas development in the United States:

  • Lipscomb, C.A., S.J. Kilpatrick, Y. Wang, and W.E. Hefley. 2015. “Achieving Balance Between Economic, Socio-Demographic, Environmental, and Regulatory Concerns: A Shale Gas Perspective.” Economics of Unconventional Shale Gas Development – Case Studies and Impacts. William E. Hefley and Yongsheng Wang, Editors. Springer, pp. 233–246.

On our website, we published approximately three new blog posts a week, including our popular weekly news roundup that aggregates the top news stories of each week. Here are our top 10 most viewed posts of 2015:

New Year’s toast

Looking ahead to 2016, we will continue to work on various cases stemming from the mortgage crisis of almost ten years ago. We have a few cases involving environmentally contaminated property hitting our plate next year as well. And, if I’ve learned anything over the last five-and-a-half years at Greenfield, there will be new cases not on our radar now that will come to fruition relatively quickly.

In closing, thank you to our clients for trusting us with your litigation and non-litigation matters. We sincerely appreciate the trust you have in us and look forward to continued interaction in the year to come.

Happy New Year!