At the SMU Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics' annual conference on financial economics last week, Distinguished Fellow at the SMU Centre for Asset Securitisation and Management in Asia Professor Susan Wachter presented her research paper entitled Real Estate Prices in Beijing, 1644 to 1840, and was asked if real estate would continue to show no significant price increase in real terms in the near future. To this, she replied, "No, there has been a regime change." Real estate prices will trend up over the long term because of the constraint of resources, be it of land or materials, she said. But the biggest restrictions will be those imposed by regulations. The conference also dealt with the usefulness of indexes, the different ways an index can be constructed, the pros and cons of different methods of index construction, the reliability of indexes, and development in the big data environment, among other things.