Rismark believes that intellectual capital is the most important intangible asset and will increasingly become a company’s predominant source of competitive advantage and wealth creation.

Rismark’s Global Research Advisory Board (“the Advisory Board”) comprises of pre-eminent experts in the fields of economics, finance and business strategy and was formed to provide management with regular access to some of the world’s leading financial minds.

The Advisory Board meets formally six times a year in order to contribute to the development and execution of Rismark’s investment, research and portfolio management objectives. Particular emphasis is placed on advancing Rismark’s quantitative research activities in relation to the global residential real estate industry. Outside of these meetings, members of the Advisory Board are available to consult to the Rismark executive on a monthly basis.

Foundation members of Rismark’s Global Research Advisory Board include:

Professor Robert R. ("Bob") Officer
Arthur Apted, Executive Chairman, Australian Farms Funds Management
Professor Alex Frino, Chairman, (Sydney)
Professor Barry Nalebuff (Yale)
Professor Joshua Gans (Melbourne)

Professor Robert R. ("Bob") Officer, Professor Emeritus, The University of Melbourne, formerly Deputy Director and AMP Professor of Finance at the Melbourne Business School.

Bob was previously Chairman of the Victorian Funds Management Corporation (VFMC) and a Director of Unisuper. He is well known for being one of Australia's most distinguished finance academics and investment professionals. Bob currently serves as: Chairman of Acorn Capital Limited; Deputy Chair of Tactical Global Management Ltd; a Director of the Babcock and Brown Direct Investment Fund Limited; a Director of the Colonial Foundation Limited; and Trustee of Buckland Foundation. Until recently, Bob was the Deputy Director and AMP Professor of Finance at the Melbourne Business School and is currently Professor Emeritus of the University of Melbourne. Previously Bob held a Chair at Monash University and positions at the Universities of Queensland, Chicago, Rochester, Stanford and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2003 Bob was awarded the Centenary Medal for services to public administration.

Arthur Apted, Executive Chairman, Australian Farms Funds Management

Arthur has extensive experience in establishing and managing direct property investment funds for both wholesale and retail investors. He played a key role in establishing ISPT, which is the property investment arm of Industry Funds Management (IFM), and was its CEO for ten years until he resigned at the end of 2004. ISPT grew to $3 billion of diversified property investments, and consistently delivered top quartile investment returns. In 2005 and 2006, he was CEO of Becton Investment Management, which targeted retail investors through financial planners, dealer groups and platforms. He is now working on establishing his own funds management business, investing in the rural sector. Other directorships have included Australian Defence Industries, the Victorian Gaming Commission, Members Equity (and its predecessor, Superannuation Members Home Loans), and Industry Fund Services. He also serves on the investment committee on Pentacle Property Funds Management.

Professor Alex Frino, Professor and Chair of Finance Discipline, The University of Sydney, 2005 Fulbright Scholar Georgetown University (PhD (Finance), Sydney; MPhil (Finance), Cambridge; BCom (Hons), Wgong).

Alex ranks among Australia’s most impressive financial economists. Ordained as one of the youngest tenured Professors at the University of Sydney, he is the current Chair of the Finance Discipline within the School of Business and Director of the Futures Research Centre at the Securities Industry Research Centre of Asia-Pacific (“SIRCA”). Previously, Alex has acted as a Visiting Economist at the Sydney Futures Exchange (“SFE”) and at Credit Suisse First Boston. Alex has an impressive publishing record with articles appearing in The Journal of Finance, The Journal of Futures Markets, The Journal of Portfolio Management, The Journal of Banking and Finance, The Journal of Derivatives, The Pacific Basin Journal of Finance, The Journal of Multinational Financial Management, The Journal of International Financial Institutions and Money, ABACUS, Accounting and Finance, and The Australian Journal of Management. His potential was recognised early on by way of an extraordinary number of academic and practitioner accolades, including the 1993 Young Accountant of the Year Award, the 1992 St George Youth Endeavour Award, the 1990 KPMG Peat Marwick Hungerford's Scholarship, the 1990 The Institute of Chartered Accountants Scholarship, the 1990 Cambridge Commonwealth Trust Scholarship, the 1988 Australian Society of Accountants Prize for the best graduating student, and the 1987 Illawarra Credit Union Scholarship. In 1997, the Australian Research Council (ARC) awarded Alex with a $1m Collaborative Grant to study the SFE’s market microstructure. Alex is the recipient of the 2005 Fulbright Senior Scholar Award at Georgetown University. While serving as a Fulbright Senior Scholar, Alex has spent much of his time in the United States as a visiting economist at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Professor Barry Nalebuff, Milton Steinbach Professor of Economics and Management, Yale School of Management (DPhil (Economics), MPhil (Economics), Rhodes Scholar, Oxford University; SB (Mathematics), SB (Economics), Phi Beta Kappa, MIT).

Barry is the Milton Steinbach Professor of Economics and Management at the Yale School of Management, and widely believed to be one of the world’s leading business strategists. He has written on a variety of subjects ranging from strategy to pricing, bidding to bargaining, and innovation to incentives. He is an expert on game theory and has published extensively on its application for managers. Barry’s work on strategy focuses on the fundamental duality in business—the conflict between cooperating to create a pie and competing to divide it up. The result is his book on business strategy, “Co-opetition”. His most recent book, “Why Not?”, focuses on providing a framework for problem solving and ingenuity. Barry frequently writes op-ed articles for North America’s major newspapers on subjects as diverse as credit cards, the term structure of debt, political strategy, innovation, and “complementors”. His work on product bundling was featured in the European Union’s investigation of the proposed GE-Honeywell merger. A consultant, as well as a scholar, Barry often collaborates with Fortune 500 clients and has served as an expert witness in antitrust litigation. He has advised American Express, Bell Atlantic, Citibank, Corning, General Re, Merck, and Procter & Gamble, among others. Barry has also worked with McKinsey & Co. to help bring game theory into their consulting practice and with the Federal Communications Commission in the design of the Personal Communication Spectrum Auction. Subsequently, he acted as the Bell Atlantic-Nynex-Airtouch-US West consortium’s bidding consultant. A Rhodes Scholar and Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, Barry earned his doctorate at Oxford. He sits on the boards of Bear Stearns Financial Products, Plats du Chef, Trader Classified Media, and Strategic Advisory Boards. He is also the chairman and co-founder of Honest Tea, and writes a regular column on new ideas with Forbes. Current consultancies include Columbia Forest Products, Eli Lilly, General Electric, Johnson and Johnson, and US Borax. Barry was a member of the 2003 Prime Minister's Home Ownership Task Force's Academic Advisory Board.

Professor Joshua Gans, Professor of Management (Information Economics), University of Melbourne (PhD, Stanford (Fulbright Scholar), BEcon (1st Class Hons, University Medal), QLD)

Joshua is popularly perceived to be one of Australia's leading economists. At the age of 32 he was appointed the Foundation Professor of Management (Information Economics) at Melbourne Business School (“MBS”), University of Melbourne. Joshua is also a Professorial Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Melbourne, and Associate Director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia and the Economic Theory Centre. He has been at MBS since 1996. Prior to that Joshua was at the School of Economics, University of New South Wales. He completed a PhD at Stanford as a Fulbright Scholar and Stanford Fellow under the supervision of the Nobel Laureate, Kenneth Arrow, and an Honors degree in Economics with 1st Class Honours and the University Medal at the University of Queensland. Joshua teaches MBA students in introductory microeconomics, technology strategy, economics of organisations, incentives and contracts, and market design using game theory. He has also co-authored (with Stephen King and Robin Stonecash) the Australasian edition of Greg Mankiw's Principles of Economics and a new text, Core Economics for Managers. While Joshua's research interests are varied, he has developed specialties in the nature of technological competition and innovation, economic growth, publishing economics, industrial organisation and regulatory economics. This has culminated in publications in journals such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Economics and Management Strategy and Rand Journal of Economics. He has also recently released a book, Finishing the Job: Real World Policy Solutions in Housing, Health, Education and Transport (co-authored with Stephen King). Finally, Joshua is co-editor of the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy and the International Journal of Industrial Organization. Details of his research activities can be found at www.economics.com.au. On the consulting side, Joshua is Managing Director of CoRE Research; a well-respected economics consultancy on competition and regulatory issues. He has been retained by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission where he worked on several abuse of market power cases (against Boral and Safeway) as well as on issues in telecommunications network competition. Overall his consulting experience covers energy (gas and electricity markets), telecommunications, financial services and banking, pharmaceuticals and rail transport. Joshua was a member of the 2003 Prime Minister's Home Ownership Task Force's Academic Advisory Board.