FLAfRES believes that these cohorts of members need to be nurtured and the values of AfRES introduced at an early stage of their participation in AfRES. We hope that this would generate increased participation after the conference and when they return to the various chapters and fully participate over the subsequent year after the conferences. The FLAfRES aims to work together with senior members of the organization both in academia and industry to act as mentors to early career academics and professionals. Therefore, we aim to inaugurate a mentorship program. We hope to encourage senior member of AfRES to act as mentors, prior literature has shown that individuals who serve as mentors to other report greater promotion rates, salary and career success than individuals without any experience as a mentor to others. (Allen et al., 2006).

The first mentorship program by FLAfRES commenced in May 2020 led by the Vice-Chair of FLAfRES, Emmanuel Kofi Gavu. The pairing of mentors and mentees involves a number of steps: the Vice-Chair sends the FLAfRES mentorship application forms to the entire FLAfRES membership; potential mentees fill out the application forms – which includes information on why they want a mentor, their research method of analysis and their primary area of research interest. Once the application forms are returned, the Vice-Chai collates and sends this information to potential mentors to select their preferred mentee, and the match between mentor and mentee is completed.

The FLAfRES mentorship program is an initial one-year program, which is expected to develop into a life-long relationship; we have adopted a nonprescriptive mentorship relationship and proffered a developmental mentorship relationship between mentor and mentee. Journal of African Real Estate Research Volume 5(2) 2020 6 The pairing of mentee and mentors has been successful. The initial mentors are Patrick Katabua– Past President of AfRES and Director of Cushman & Wakefield/Broll; Samuel Azasu– Associate Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand and Past Editor of the Journal of African Real Estate Research; Jonas Hahn– Vice Chairman of the IREBS Foundation for African Real Estate Research; Olusegun Olanrele– Senior Lecturer at the University of Malaya; Abdul-Rasheed Amidu– Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland; Tunbosun Oyedokun– Lecturer at the University of Glasgow; and Olalekan Oshodi– Lecturer at the Anglia Ruskin University. FLAfRES believes that this relationship between mentor and mentee could be mutually beneficial and could generate co-authorship opportunities in leading international journals, this would also assist mentees in extending network opportunities. As highlighted by Gibler (2000) and Gibler and Ziobrowski (2002), the quality of journals was the most significant factor considered in tenure requirements and promotion and hence induces authors to publish in them. In addition, mentoring has been shown as critically important in the professional success of the mentees including influencing ethical and responsible research conduct (Bird, 2001). FLAfRES have developed a leadership structure similar to the Future Leaders of the American Real Estate Society (FLARES). This organization has been largely successful and we have borrowed some of our ideas from them. We have structured the FLAfRES leadership to encourage participation and exposure to the AfRES structure and organisational goals. The functions of FLAfRES officers can be seen in Appendix 1 which stipulates the operating principles and definitions of roles, responsibilities and procedures of elected FLAfRES officers including Chair, Vice-Chair and Program Chair.