Sparkling Toast

Sparkling toast courtesy of nImAdestiny, CC BY 2.0.

This has been an exciting year for Greenfield Advisors. First, after some attrition in the East Coast office over the past few years, we have expanded that office back to three employees and will be adding more in the New Year. Given the number of clients on the East Coast, it’s a smart business move to grow this office and maintain a strong presence here.

Along with a new office came new people this year. Our marketing director and a new analyst reside in the East Coast office. Plus, a new executive assistant and several new analysts have joined the West Coast office. In addition to the analysts introduced in the previous links, we have recently welcomed two new research assistants to our staff. Rebecca Hargraves holds a dual baccalaureate degree in finance & banking and economics and has experience working for wealth management and financial investment firms. Tyler Rogstad holds a baccalaureate degree in finance with an accounting and economics emphasis and has experience providing commercial banking services to businesses, particularly analyzing and underwriting business loans in the nonprofit, real estate, and commercial industrial industries.

With our renewed focus on marketing the firm, we have seen some nice movement in Web traffic. Since August 1, we have had 18,200 webpage views, up significantly from the year before. Also, of all of our blog posts, here are the top 10 most viewed posts from 2014 (with links to each):

  1. Greenfield News – New Office, New Faces
  2. More than 12,000 Appraisals Fail Every Week. Here’s Why—
  3. Fracking Litigation Update
  4. Bowie Bonds and Other Intellectual Property Rights Securitizations
  5. How Useful Are Economic Impact Studies?
  6. AVMS 101 – What is an AVM and how do we use them?
  7. Conflict and Legal Challenges Surround Proposed Oklahoma Wind Farm
  8. BNSF Railway’s Massive Cleanup of Released Oil in Skykomish, Washington
  9. We Won! [Greenfield Advisors wins IAAO Award for outstanding essay]
  10. Home-Buying Affected by Declining Marriage Rate and Other Social Changes

Personally, I had the opportunity to present my research at conferences in San Diego, California, and Aberdeen, Scotland, UK, this year. While attending the International Association of Assessing Officers meetings in Sacramento, I picked up the Bernard L. Barnard Outstanding Technical Essay Award for me and my Greenfield colleague co-authors.

We also had a wide variety of work and assignments, most of which are confidential and I cannot talk about. Suffice it to say that they are complex (which is what we like), challenging, and require the diverse array of talents we’ve assembled here at Greenfield… from econometricians to appraisers. Two of the more interesting cases we had this year were the AIG v. Bank of America case (which settled) and the Parr v. Aruba Petroleum case.

In 2015, we expect more of the same. We have been contacted a lot recently about easement cases, so I expect that we’ll be doing some more work on easement issues in the New Year.

In closing, while these blogs have been professional in nature, I want to get a bit personal here. This has been a great year for me personally. My wife and I welcomed our fourth child into the world this summer. While it’s a lot of work, the rewards certainly outweigh the costs (as an economist, you know I had to throw in a little cost-benefit analysis).

From the Greenfield Advisors family and our family, Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year.