The recession has cast a pall over the real estate market—but perhaps not over the players in the industry who met on Tuesday at the Los Angeles Convention Center for the Benjamin S. Crocker Symposium. The day of seminars with industry leaders culminated in a cocktail reception at Lucky Strike at L.A. Live, the city's biggest-scale new real estate venture—a venue selection meant to keep with the overall theme of the conference: "Building the New Real Estate Paradigm."

Don Nanney, chair of the Real Property section of the Los Angeles County Bar Association, turned to Tracy Kwiker of Pivotal Events for the event's production, as well as some sponsorship wrangling. “We’re all facing a very challenging economy—in particular, the real estate industry has been quite decimated," Kwiker said. "We needed to find as many ways as possible to get the word out about the symposium."

This year, the program filled the exhibit hall with associations, which served as partners for the event. "We set about forging partnerships with professional societies, whereby we would promote their organizations in our materials,” Kwiker said. In the end, the team managed to fill the exhibit hall with allied partners, even in the tough economic climate.

This year organizers set in place a scholarship program to invite those who could not afford the registration fee to attend. “The theme [was] intended to imply that those people at the event are the builders of the new real estate paradigm—we’re not passive recipients, we’re active participants in what the future holds,” Kwiker said.