DividendDiscountModel.com Wins Standard of Excellence Award; Site Enhancements and Corporate Sponsorships Also Announced.

Business & High-Tech Editors

INDIANAPOLIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 1, 2002

DividendDiscountModel.com announced today that it has been honored with the Web Marketing Association's 2002 Standard of Excellence Award. The Web Marketing Association is an organization devoted to setting high standards for Internet marketing and corporate web site development.

Approximately 1,300 web sites were entered in this year's WebAwards competition. Entries were judged by an independent panel of experts in areas such as web site design, navigation, innovation, and usefulness to the target audience.

DividendDiscountModel.com is a free online investment analysis tool that gives investors access to the popular Dividend Discount Model (DDM) to value publicly traded stocks. Fueled by daily updates of information from Zacks Investment Research for thousands of stocks, it calculates the present value of the future dividends that a company is expected to pay its shareholders. The site also allows quality dividend paying companies to promote their investment merits through banner advertising.

DividendDiscountModel.com is owned by DividendDiscountModel.com LLC, a joint venture of affiliates of Duke Realty Corporation (DRE/NYSE) and Evaluation Consultants, Inc. The website was programmed under the supervision of Jeffrey D. Fisher, Ph.D. who serves as DDM's technical advisor. Dr. Fisher is the principal shareholder of Evaluation Consultants and is professor of Finance and Real Estate and Director of the Center for Real Estate Studies at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business. Commenting on the success of DividendDiscountModel.com, Dr. Fisher stated,

"We are very pleased to be recognized by the Web Marketing

Association as a site that has exceeded the requirements for a

Standard of Excellence award. DividendDiscountModel.com was

designed to help primarily smaller investors to better analyze

the fair value of individual stocks. As the popularity of the

site continues to grow, we look forward to helping more people

benefit from using the dividend discount model, and we pledge

to maintain and even improve upon the level of quality that

resulted in today's award."

DividendDiscountModel.com also announced today that it has completed several enhancements to the site that give users more flexibility to vary key inputs such as the current dividend level and projected growth rate of a particular stock. These enhancements were made possible by recent corporate sponsorships from some of the top dividend paying companies in America including Colonial Properties, Duke Realty Corporation, Equity Office Properties, Great Lakes REIT, Highwoods Properties, Kimco Realty Corporation, and Reckson Associates Realty Corporation.

More on the Dividend Discount Model

The dividend discount model is a widely accepted stock valuation tool found in most introductory finance and investment textbooks. The model calculates the present value of the future dividends that a company is expected to pay to its shareholders. It is particularly useful because it allows investors to determine an absolute or "intrinsic" value of a particular company that is not influenced by current stock market conditions. The DDM is also useful because the measurement of future dividends (as opposed to earnings for example) facilitates an "apples-to-apples" comparison of companies across different industries by focusing on the actual cash investors can expect to receive. Although it is conceptually simple, the DDM is not widely used except by some institutional investors because it can be cumbersome to apply without the necessary data and analytical tools. DividendDiscountModel.com makes the DDM accessible to all investors to determine whether they think a particular stock is over or under valued based on its dividend potential. Although no investment model works for all stocks all of the time, the dividend discount model has proven to be a reliable way of selecting stocks that on average will perform relatively well on a long-term basis. It should be among the tools that investors use to select at least some of the stocks in their portfolio.