"In real estate, if you keep yourself in front of long-term demographic trends, you will prosper," observes Christopher Cole, founder and chief executive of the Cole Companies, who received the Distinguished Achievement Award at the W. P. Carey undergraduate convocation recently. A survivor of Phoenix's boom-and-bust real estate markets for more than 28 years, Cole maintains real estate as an investment class is in its baby years. The biggest inflows of capital, he says, have yet to happen.

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Since the turn of the millennium, real estate has become one of the fastest growing investment sectors, not just in the United States but globally as well. But as much as we would like to think otherwise, there's considerable risk involved in real estate investing. One way to ameliorate that risk is through hedging practices, according to Robert Edelstein, a real estate professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and Anthony Sanders, the Bob Herberger Arizona Heritage Chair in Real Estate and Finance at the W. P. Carey School of Business.

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