Moderators: Lisa Speltz, Nestlé Waters North America; Jim Winter, Alcoa

Research Roundtables are special programs at Professional Forums exclusively for Active members and other corporate end-users to discuss, evaluate and explore important corporate real estate issues. The atmosphere is low key, collegial and interactive. Attendees may discuss, raise questions and speak their minds, or they may sit back and listen. Each program’s topic is selected from among proposals submitted by Active members.

Amelia Island Research Roundtable attendees listen to a fellow Active member’s remarks.

Who should attend: All Active members and other end-users are invited and urged to participate. Pre-registration is not required. If you decide at the last minute that you’d like to attend, just show up. You’ll meet new Active members as well as long-time participants. Here are some of the topics covered in past Research Roundtable programs:

• St. Louis — "Strategies for Distribution/ Warehouse Facility Development — Best Practices for Managing the Internal Team, Landowner, Developer and Build-to-Suit Company"
• Amelia Island — "Engaging Service Providers for International Corporate Real Estate Operations — Selection, Management, Compensation and Evaluation" The Research Roundtable was the second highest rated program at the St. Louis and Amelia Island Professional Forums.

Note that there will be no tape recording of the Research Roundtable so that participants can speak frankly and discuss issues openly. When you register for the Phoenix Professional Forum, please mark the "Research Roundtable" box on the registration form.

John Caslione

Speaker: John Caslione, GCS Business Capital John Caslione is Founder, President & CEO of GCS Business Capital, an M&A advisor to U.S., European and Chinese middle market companies seeking to globalize their businesses through mergers, acquisitions and strategic joint ventures (Chicago, Frankfurt, Milan, Shanghai and Hong Kong). He will draw from a wealth of experience and actual studies as he shares his insights and perspective about today’s compelling business issues and the shifting economy in the context of approaches to global mergers and acquisitions:

• M&A 2008: The world targets the USA
• Today’s M&A is all global: Impact on asset management
• M&A key to all companies’ strategic planning
• The global portfolio managers M&A tool box
• Asset management vs. asset protection: mitigating M&A risks
• M&A strategies and tactics in a resource constrained environment
• Going forward: successful M&A and strategic asset management

He has authored a number of articles on globalization, developing global business. Two of his books — Growing Your Business in Emerging Markets: Promise and Perils and Global Manifest Destiny: Growing Your Business in a Borderless Economy — have been among the top business book selections for six consecutive years. Mr. Caslione is an alumnus of the University of New York/Buffalo and Illinois Institute of Technology/Kent College of Law.

Many industrial consumers favor U.S. utility deregulation because they subscribe to the theory that it will stimulate free-market competition and greatly reduce utility costs. Is deregulation working well for industrial and manufacturing sectors? Drawing from actual case studies and cost analysis, the M1 Workshop offers:

• A broad overview of U.S. utility deregulation, pricing, services and crisis.
• Examples of how end-users are coping with deregulation; e.g., strategies for effi cient warehouse lighting, bundled utility purchases, and wholesale purchases.
• An update on the availability, effectiveness, efficiency and cost of alternative energy sources.
• A perspective

Real estate leases are accounted for according to a Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) rule, FAS 13, written in 1976. Until recently, this allowed companies to keep millions of dollars of facility lease obligations off their balance sheets and place them instead in small-print footnotes to their fi nancial statements. Financial regulators and some Wall Street analysts claim this is a recipe for abuse, if not fraud.

A CFO magazine article by Sarah Johnson entitled "FASB, IASB Begin Rethinking Leases" says, "the Securities and Exchange Commission decided the lease accounting rules should be rewritten after estimating that they allowed publicly traded companies to keep $1.25 trillion of future cash obligations off their balance sheets." The implications of the change are not yet fully understood, but Johnson believes, "Since companies would also carry more assets on their balance sheets, profi tability measures, such as return on assets, would fall. At the same time ... corporate income statements would likely reflect an increase in interest expense, decreasing net income. By contrast, EBITDA (earnings before interest, depreciation, taxes, and amortization), which does not refl ect interest, would be higher." FASB is scheduled to release a discussion paper on the new lease accounting standard this year and to publish the fi nal standard in 2009.

Attend this workshop to learn what’s in store for real estate lease accounting, how it could affect your company, and what you can do now to protect your company’s interests.

Dr. Edward W. (Ned) Hill

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Edward W. (Ned) Hill, Professor, Econ. Dev., Cleveland State University Dr. Hill will engage the audience as he shares his viewpoints on global economic development and:

• Fragmented firm balance sheets and local communities.
• Site selection and business management best practices.
• Manufacturing, supply chain and distribution logistics.
• Challenges and concerns specific to global industrial and manufacturing sectors.

The Peer to Peer combined session under the tent at Amelia Island.

Characterized by highquality networking, timely discussion topics and solutions — Peer-to-Peer discussions are among the highest rated Professional Forum sessions.

Note: Peer-to-Peer sessions are not tape recorded.

Following a national bidding process in 2006, JohnsonDiversey, Inc. — a leading global provider of environmentally friendly commercial cleaning products — selected Liberty Property Trust to oversee Wisconsin’s first green warehouse project. The warehouse was completed in 2007, on time and on budget. This facility received the NAIOP (National Association of Industrial and Offi ce Properties) prestigious "Green Building of the Year" award in 2006 and 2007.

In the Tuesday General Session, a team of key project leaders tell how they worked closely with JohnsonDiversey to design, build and ensure operational efficiency in what has become the classroom of high performance green warehouse construction. They will describe how they incorporated LEED new construction and existing construction into the project and the allowances made for 24/7 operation and effi ciency.

Presenters in this session talk candidly about their foreign-based companies’ acclimation to doing business in the U.S.A. Each presenter will share viewpoints regarding:

• Factors that influence their company’s U.S. investment decisions.
• Challenges and pitfalls experienced early in the investment process and later.
• U.S. business drivers — e.g., political, cultural, labor, taxation, and others — that are markedly different from the same drivers in their company-based countries.

Representatives from two different global investment institutions provide information and share their viewpoints regarding:

• The direction of global corporate real estate markets.
• Capital structures or investment capital sources.
• Whether or not money to purchase corporate buildings is easy to come by in today’s global makets.

The highly-interactive session includes three educational opportunities:

• Presentations that describe corporate real estate professonals’ roles in and the merger, acquisition, and integration practices employed, respectively, by large global organizations such as The Linde Group, BASF and 3M.
• Audience Discussions oriented toward generating a standardized merger and acquisition due diligence list, and a
• Reporting/Q&A segment to outline the due diligence list components and indicate challenges and pitfalls associated with global merger, acquisition and integration processes.

As indicated by the title, this session is designed for you to get some help from your peers and colleagues regarding corporate real estate challenges that you’re dealing with today. To ensure that topics are timely and relevant, they are gleaned directly from corporate end-users, via survey, 3-4 weeks prior to the Forum. As moderators Melissa Bauer and Jim Harbaugh present topics and concerns, all corporate end-user, economic development and service provider professionals are encouraged to briefl y offer suggestions, describe solutions that worked in similar situations or initiate discussions regarding the bigger picture. The primary benefi ts of Get Some Help sessions are peer interaction, rapid solutions to corporate real estate challenges and learning how other organizations deal with the same issues. Attend this energetic session, share your ideas and learn from others!

Joel Kurtzman

The Opacity Index is a template that helps measure key aspects of a country’s overall risks. It enables companies to balance risk exposure by utilizing CLEAR Factor rankings.

In his closing session remarks, Joel Kurtzman will explain the potentially expensive challenges companies face overseas owing to the opacity in five dimensions of every economy:

• Corruption
• Legal Systems
• Enforcement of economic rules and policies
• Accounting standards and corporate governance, and
• Regulatory regimens