My background combines academic training in urban and economic geography with ten years of applied real estate research experience. Prior to joining the University of Washington, I was a faculty member in the Department of Geography at the University of Arizona. I have held positionswith The Dorchester Group, a real estate consulting firm specializing in complex property valuation assignments, and with RREEF, a leading real estate investment advisor and subsidiary of Deutsche Bank, where I led the firm’s east coast market research department. I have also lived in a dozen metropolitan areas across the U.S., and worked in many others, and I strive to bring these real-world experiences into the classroom. My research interests focus on housing and commercial real estate market dynamics, urban economics, and sustainable development. Among other projects, I am currently exploring the implications of the nation’s changing demographic profile for housing markets, and the extent to which changing demographics and housing preferences may stimulate demand for various forms of “smart” growth.
Courses:
URBDP 553 Real Estate Appraisal
URBDP 558 Real Estate Market Analysis
URBDP 598 Urban Land Economics
Selected Publications:
Bitter, Christopher, and David A. Plane. Housing markets, the life course, and migration up and down the urban hierarchy. In Handbook of Housing Studies, ed. D. Clapman, W.A.V. Clark, and K. Gibb. Sage Publications (Forthcoming).
Bitter, Christopher, Gordon F. Mulligan, and Sandy Dall’erba. 2007. Incorporating spatial variation in housing attribute prices: a comparison of geographically weighted regression and the spatial expansion method. Journal of Geographic Systems 9: 7–27.
Plane, David A., and Christopher Bitter. 1997. The role of migration research in regional science. Papers in Regional Science 76: 133–153.
Christopher Bitter, Ph.D.