You may have noticed our new design, introduced last month. What you may not have realized is the personal significance of this transition from a newsletter to a magazine format.

Twenty-seven years ago, I had left my job at Equitec Institutional Realty Advisors and was armed only with a dream and a business plan. My objective: to launch a new publication to be called Institutional Real Estate magazine, patterned after Institutional Investor magazine, a publication that had been launched 20 years earlier.

My thesis at the time was very similar to the one that prompted the launch of Institutional Investor in the late 1960s. At that time, Gil Kaplan, a 26-year-old former trader on the American Stock Exchange, observed that the ownership of financial assets was rapidly moving from individual investors to institutional investors.

In 1987, the idea for Institutional Real Estate mag