Meanwhile, in 1993 a group of young Russians, with common thoughts about the need for real estate valuation in the newly evolving economy of their country, formed the Russian Society of Appraisers and, led by Igor Artemenkov, traveled to Houston, Texas to attend one of the regular classes in valuation that Gere Gaige taught as part of his real estate valuation business. A few months later, they invited Gere to teach the first course on real estate appraisal in Moscow in January 1994, where almost 100 Russians learned the basic concepts of value creation and how to measure it to estimate property value. The success of the course led to a series of trips to teach it in St. Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Saratov, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod and Novosibirsk.

Gere's work not only made him an honored member of the Russian Society of Appraisers, but also one of the very few foreign experts on the changes taking place in the real estate sector of Russia's developing economy. So in 1994, when the U.S. Agency for International Development set up a program to privatize urban lands (Enterprise Land Sale program (ELS)), Gere was called upon to be one of its program managers. ELS was to encourage business enterprises to privatize the land associated with their businesses and start a commercial real estate market. Presidential Ukaz 1535 was the first legal basis for private land ownership and gave enterprises the right to own the land used by their business.
To counter the still Communist controlled national legislature, Gere and his colleagues first went to local governments to create the mechanism to implement commercial land ownership. This involved, creating a cadastral system and defining rights and documentation for the process of ownership. They started in St. Petersburg and Nizhni Novgorod where the progressive leaders Anatoly Sobchak and Boris Nemtsov had teams interested in passing regional land laws to accommodate a real estate market in their regions.
Once the laws were in place, they went to the large enterprises to explain to them the benefits of owning the land - gaining an asset fully under one's control that could be used to finance development of the business and upon which expansion would be more secure. The ELS team led closing of transactions transferring ownership of land from the Russian Federation to major businesses that led to the beginning of urban commercial markets in major Cities of Russia.

The two-year ELS project ended in 1996 with commercial real estate markets started in major Russian cities from Moscow to Siberia and up and down the Volga River region. In addition, real estate professionals from appraisers to brokers and managers had been trained to support and encourage ongoing market transactions. American experts that had assisted went back home, except for Gere who joined Arthur Andersen to start a real estate appraisal and consulting practice to assist the global client base of Andersen in entering the Russian market.

Companies from around the world recognized the potential of the developing Russian market and needed real estate for their businesses, or wanted to invest in real estate for its own investment benefits. The presence in the market of international quality real estate appraisal and consulting practices like Gere's and brokerage advisors like HIB and The Western Group encouraged investment activity and the development of other specialized real estate businesses. Along with international real estate developers and brokerage firms entering the market, Russian-owned entities began to compete in the real estate marketplace.

And so, only twenty-five years ago, the modern Russian real estate services industry was born.