The valuation profession is relatively young in Poland compared to Western European countries. Its beginnings are related to the transformation period and the introduction of free market economy. Since its formal foundation, the profession has been strictly regulated by law. The regulations govern candidate preparation and access to the profession, as well the manner in which valuations are conducted. The most significant restriction is the limited access to the profession, which requires passing a state exam and obtaining a license.

For many years this profession has been considered in Poland as an attractive career path. This is influenced by both the prestige of the profession built on entry barriers and the level of professionalization, as well as the nature of the work performed. In common view, the advantages of this occupation include: the variety of tasks performed, their importance, independence of valuer, the ability to combine this work with other professional and non-professional commitments as well as the opportunity to earn a satisfactory income. These qualities result in approximately 300 candidates becoming licensed each year, bringing the number of licensed valuers in Poland to 7794 by the end of 2020.

The research presented here is one of a few we have conducted in recent years concerning the real estate valuation. The main objective was to determine the factors that attract new applicants, but also to assess the job satisfaction of those in the profession. For this purpose we have carried out two surveys.

• The first was among students enrolled in postgraduate studies in real estate valuation at three separate universities in Poland. The questions focused on the candidate's current career setting, their main motivations for going into professional certification, and their vision of how they would run their business in the first few years.
• The second survey focused on the level of job satisfaction of those who are active real estate valuers. We examined overall job satisfaction, but also selected facets of it. The data collected allowed us also to examine the influence of individual characteristics of the real estate valuer and the nature of his/her professional activity on the level of job satisfaction.

This research primarily adds to the knowledge of the evolving real estate valuation services market in terms of the inflow of new practitioners into it. They allow us to learn and understand the motives that attract new candidates to the profession, and the factors that contribute to professional satisfaction.

Land registration requires complex of sensitive data which require decentralise environment. As land registration system requires complexities and challenges in term of land tenure security at high risk scale, the security level of land registration system need to be put at the highest level. Fraud is one the major problem as well as long process problem. This is due to the centralised transaction system which resulted bottlenecks at the processing system. The blockchain technology by using Digital Security Offering (DSO) able to create public ledgers from all complex transactions that has high potential to replace the complicated systems with one simple database. Therefore, objectives of this research are (1) To identify characteristics in blockchain technology by using DSO for the land registration system in Malaysia (2) To investigate the blockchain technology by using DSO that is able to solve the problems in the Malaysian land registration system. By using systematic literature approach, this paper will assess the innovative method to enhance land registration system in Malaysia. The innovation in land registration system will bring Malaysia meet the challenge in digital economy in Industrial Revolution 4.0.

Aim of research: Real estate markets are featured with a spatial dimension that is pivotal for the economic value of housing. The inherent spatial dependence in the underlying price determination process cannot be simply overlooked in linear hedonic model specifications, as this would render spurious results (see Anselin, 1988; Can and Megbolugbe, 1997; Basu and Thibodeau, 1998). Guidance on how to account for spatial dependence in linear regression models is vast and remains subject of many contributions to the hedonic and spatial econometric literature (see LeSage and Pace, 2009; Anselin, 2010; Elhorst, 2014). Moving from the parametric paradigm of hedonic regression methods to the universe of non-parametric statistical learning methods such as decision trees, random forests, or boosting techniques, literature has brought forth an increasing body of evidence that such algorithms are capable of providing a superior predictive performance for complex non-linear and multi-dimensional regression problems, including various applications to house price estimation (e.g. Mayer et al., 2019; Pace and Hayunga, 2020; Bogin and Shui, 2020). However, in contrast to linear models, little attention has been paid to the implications of spatial dependence in house prices for the statistical validity of error estimates of machine learning algorithms although independence of the data is implicitly assumed (see Roberts et al., 2017; Schratz et al., 2019). Our study aims at investigating the role of spatial autocorrelation (SAC) on the accuracy assessment of algorithmic hedonic methods, thereby benchmarking spatially conscious machine learning approaches to linear and spatial hedonic methods.

Study design and methodology: Machine learning algorithms learn the relationship between the response and the regressors autonomously without requiring any a-priori specifications about their functional form. As their high flexibility makes such approaches prone to overfitting, resampling strategies such as k-fold cross validation are applied to approximate a models out-of-sample predictive performance. During resampling, the observations are randomly partitioned into mutually exclusive training and test subsets, whereby the predictor is fitted on the training data and evaluated on the test data. SAC can be accounted for using spatial resampling strategies which attempt to reduce SAC between training and test data through a modification in the splitting process. Instead of randomly partitioning the data which implicitly assumes their independence, spatially clustered partitions are created using the observations coordinates (see Brenning, 2012). We train and evaluate tree-based algorithms on a pooled cross-section of asking rents in Germany using both, random as well as spatial partitioning and subsequently forecast out-of-sample data to assess the bias in the in-sample error estimates associated with SAC. The results are benchmarked to well-specified ordinary least squares and spatial autoregressive frameworks to compare the models generalizability.

Originalty and implications: Applying machine learning to spatial data without accounting for SAC provides the predictor with information that is assumed to be unavailable during training, which may lead to biased accuracy assessment (see Lovelace et al., 2021). This study sheds light on the accuracy bias of random resampling induced by SAC in a hedonic context. The results prove useful for increasing the robustness and generalizability of algorithmic approaches to hedonic regression problems, thereby containing valuable implications for appraisal practices. To the best of our knowledge, no research in the existing literature has thus far accounted for SAC in an algorithm-driven hedonic context by applying spatial cross-validation. We conclude that random resampling yields over-optimistic prediction accuracies whereas spatial resampling increases generalizability, and thus robustness to unseen data. We also find the bias to be lower for algorithms which apply column-subsampling to counteract overfitting.

Based on the analysis of the Ger district’s housing market in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia, a study was conducted to determine whether it meets the purchasing power of the population and is based on market demand. The following factors were studied.

The first, current housing needs for households in the Ger area, where more than 60 percent of the city's population lives, have been identified. Secondly, their affordability was assessed based on their current living conditions and opportunities.

According to the survey, half of the households in the Ger area of Songinokhaikhan district have an average income of MNT 450,000, so there is an urgent need for an Affordable Housing Program to pay the rent and deduct the price from the newly built apartment. 20 percent of all the surveyed households can be connected to the infrastructure, and the remaining thirty percent are willing to take out low-interest loans to live in apartments.

However, 20 percent of the surveyed households are interested in connecting to the infrastructure in their yard, and the remaining 30 percent want to live in a low-interest loan.

In order to provide housing in Ger areas, there is a lack of low-cost technology to solve infrastructure problems (drinking water and restroom with water supply) and a “Complex Housing Policy” with 3-5 percent loans for low- and middle-income people.

In order to plan and manage low-carbon investments in wide real estate assets, thereby meeting the European energy efficiency requirements recently presented in EU Directive 2018/844, a methodological change in both research and practice is now necessary.

Since a sharp increase in retrofit rates of large building stocks is going to be promoted, new strategic approaches should take into consideration building portfolios as a whole, overcoming the single-building perspective, so that to identify the level of energy retrofit leading to the overall maximum benefit.

In this contribution, a decision support system is developed for the automatic assessment of both the monetary and non-monetary benefits produced by a retrofit investment, and determine the optimal efficiency program over a large building stock. The core idea is to consider the energy enhancement as an optimization issue and identify the configuration of retrofit design that brings to the greatest possible benefit, by balancing conflicting objectives, and within several constraints.

As far as the monetary benefit is concerned, we estimate the savings produced by the investment over a life-cycle perspective. Among the non-monetary values, we first consider the environmental benefit in terms of avoided CO2 emissions. We also assess the value of the improved indoor comfort and the value of the safeguard of the building, when the energy efficiency is also intended as a measure to protect the heritage.
To this end, a set of different and interdisciplinary techniques has been employed, such as parametric energy modelling, neural network analysis, economic and financial feasibility assessment, calculation of thermal comfort indexes (Fanger), multi-criteria approaches (Analytic Hierarchy Process), and multi-objective constrained optimization analysis.

Among the results of this research, the extreme flexibility in comparing countless design scenarios and the simplicity of application of the model developed are the most important contributions obtained. The effectiveness of the decision-making tool was then verified through the implementation on a case study of an interesting and heterogeneous portfolio of buildings located in Northern Italy.

Social value is gaining unexpected attention in the property industry, triggered by Sustainable Development Goals, social awareness, ethical consumption, and the demand for business transparency and accountability. As such, businesses have transformed their corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies from philanthropic to creating shared value- i.e., coupling financial performance to social benefit. Interest in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) has accelerated since 2019 due to the global pandemic. Investors have been keen on integrating ESG standards to measure the sustainability and impact of their investments; however, majority of the focus has been on environmental aspects. Only recently have property market actors paid attention to the social aspect, as the current global health crises exasperated social issues in urban areas thus, instigating awareness on the implications of social conditions on investments’ value.

Using empirical data, this study looks into the various formal and informal institutions that aid the production of social value in property development in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. More specifically, it studies the structures and mechanisms (i.e. values, norms, rules) that guide property market actors and their practices, which in turn influence development outcomes, and shape urban areas and its wider communities. I argue that harnessing social value requires a better understanding of the complex institutions that guide social outcomes in property developments and urban areas at large. Data will be collected from policy documents, municipal websites, property market publications, and  semi-structured in-depth interviews with actors, thus providing a thorough interpretation of social value and assessment of strategies and interests that shape development outcomes.

Urban development, growth, sprawl, expansion and fringe issues have gained special importance both in spatial planning and infrastructure investments and in the analysis of real estate markets. Approaches based on Geographic Information Systems and fractal analysis are often used in the analysis of urban growth and spatial change, and the states of compact (concentrated) or fringed (spread) are measured as an indicator of urban space use efficiency. Fractal analysis, based on fractal geometry, contributes to the quantitative study of the morphology of objects. In this sense, by determining fractal dimension and lacunarity index the change in space over time and especially by analysing the change in land use and land cover, the structure of spatial organization, urban growth and development of the built environment can be analysed.

Although many research has been conducted on the analysis of urban development processes and analysis of urban morphology, it has been found that there are no studies on spatial pattern in Ankara by using fractal analysis. This paper will contribute to the questioning of urban spatial dynamics and to the assessment of its possible effects on real estate market and location choice of landowners. In addition, in the process of historical development in the city, it is necessary to determine the orientation of urban sprawl, real estate investments and, in particular, the land ownership change or the evaluation of speculative trends depending on the mobility of zoning in the immediate vicinity of the city. The determination of the time between the acquisition of land in the city and the date of sale and the determination of the main factors that affect the relocation of people in the city between places were evaluated according to the results of the survey applied to owners, real estate market intermediaries and other stakeholders.

When the observations and research results conducted in the studied settlements are put together, it was determined that there were similarities between the fractal dimension values and the physical structure specificities of the space. The values obtained as a result of computation through software show that urban spaces containing elements that contribute to urban life have fractal dimensions at different scales. In addition to the distribution analysis depending on the spatial planning process in the districts and neighbourhoods selected from the city of Ankara, the transfer of hands of land and the time of possession were also examined during the planning process. By analysing Land Registry records, zoning plans and survey data together, the existence of speculation in land markets in selected settlements was examined on the basis of mobility in land markets during planning periods. In the study, urban sprawl, change in land use and mobility analysis of landowners (mobility) were discussed according to the results of the general situation analysis and fieldwork conducted in selected neighbourhoods. It has been observed that there is a strong relationships between spatial planning studies and infrastructure investments and urban sprawl in the selected neighbourhoods of the city, and the characteristics of areas that landowners prefer to the results of planning studies. Based on the outcomes related to the development of spaces in cities it has been shown that planning carried out with future predictions can significantly contribute to the sustainability.

In this work, we compare the results of multiple linear regression analysis (MLR) with spatial analysis method (geographically weighted regressions (GWR)) and an artificial neural network (ANN) approach deriving a state-wide model for property yields. The database consists of approx. 3000 purchase prices in the market of multi-family houses collected in the purchase price database of Lower Saxony (Germany). The purchases occurred between 2014 and 2018. The locational quality as well as the theoretical age (deprecation) of the real estates are the influencing variables in the analysis. In the GWR, different fixed and variable kernels are used.

The approaches are evaluated using cross-validation procedure with quality parameters like the root mean square error (RMSE), the mean absolute error (MAE) and the error below 5% (eb5). The first analysis shows that GWR leads to better results in comparison to classical approaches (MLR) because local phenomena can be modelled. Also, the approach of ANN is superior in comparison to the classical regression analysis because of its ability of nonlinear modelling. In this dataset, the ANN cannot reach the accuracy of GWR which leads to the conclusion, that the spatial inhomogeneity has a bigger influence than a data non-linearity. Further investigation shows that the complexity of the data and the amount of available data plays a key role in the performance of ANN.

Introduction: In the South-East of Nigeria, investors/ managers in real estate investing face diverse challenges which ought to be considered at the feasibility studies of the development project through to its completion, letting and management phases. The core target of these development and maintenance management activities is to minimize the development/maintenance costs to sustain the real estate in a manner as to generate reasonable returns. Labour costs variations is an inevitable item in real estate investing that defines the possible trend in rental value decisions, as well as determination of returns therefrom. Its supply and options therefore needs more insight to guide the direction of decision making/giving depending on the nature of labour involvement.

Aim: This paper aims to demonstrate the application of labour constant model in weighing and selecting most satisfactory labour cost options during development stage and investment management stage in typical real estate investments within the South-East region of Nigeria.

Methodology: This study takes experimentally exploratory approach to demonstrate the applicability of the Labour Constant model for purposes of labour cost minimization in real estate investments at development and operational stages. The operational conditions considered in the study are constrained to experiences obtainable within the study area (i.e. South-East States of Nigeria). Some raw data were sourced through interviews granted by sampled contractors within the study area.

Findings: Sustainable real estate investment demands prompt but wise decisions especially in selecting between options on labour costs which can is better handled using labour costs model experimented in this study for better decision-making.

Implications: This study has economic implications pertaining to cost minimization during development or operational stages on a real estate investment. The outcome of this study has strong implications to cost handling in relation to investment returns from commercial real estates. However the need for further exploration and expansion of this study is essential.

Originality: The study is a nascent development which tends to explain how analysts and property/facility managers could more confidently guide real estate investors in making decisions regarding labour costs in managing real estate development projects or management.

Previous studies suggest that there are many psychological, social and cultural motives for owning private cars in addition to using it as a means of transportation. In Hong Kong, the cost of car parking space is a very significant cost of car ownership. When a car owner buys a housing unit, he would also need a car parking space. If the motive to own a car is independent of the choice of location of the housing unit, car parking spaces and housing units are complementary goods.

However, if car ownership is simply for the purpose of transportation, the decision to own a car and the choice of the location of the housing unit are joint decisions. A home purchaser will consider the cost of car ownership (including the cost of car parking spaces) an integral part of housing expenditure. An increase in the expenditure on the housing unit will mean less is available for car parking spaces and vice versa. Therefore car parking spaces and housing units are substitute goods.

In Hong Kong car parking spaces inside in a residential development can be purchased in the secondary market. These car parking spaces are actively transacted so that we can construct car parking price indices for the urban and sub-urban areas. The complementary (substitute) goods argument implies that price trend of residential properties in the urban areas relative to those in the sub-urban areas is positively (negatively) correlated with the price trend of car parking spaces in the urban areas relative to those in the sub-urban areas relative. The empirical results suggest that car parking spaces and housing units are substitute goods.

Financial leasing, which is widely used in medium-term financing of investments in many countries, provides great advantages in meeting the increasing demands of the working capital of organizations. Financial leasing, which is a unique transaction that consists of the combination of three different transactions such as medium-term investment loan, lease, instalment sales, and which have a different quality, is a financing method that is very close to medium-term loan adopted in Turkey. Financial leasing, whose legal infrastructure was first established and backed by the Financial Leasing Law No. 3226 of 1985, was put into its application within the scope of the financial leasing, factoring, and financing companies under Law No. 6361 in 2012. To meet the housing demands, within the scope of Law No. 5582 on the Housing Finance System, consumers are provided with the opportunity to provide long-term funds through financial leasing. In addition, apart from being a means of financing in real estate projects by participation banks and financial leasing companies, it is also used as a sales method in housing finance as a real estate acquisition method. The real estate sector in Turkey greatly contributes to the economy as a hub of employment and stimulates the growth of several sectors, so the consideration of financing of real estate is essential.

In the period of 2010-2020 in Turkey, the share of financial leasing transactions in total building investments were decreased by 1% at the end of 2020. The share of financial leasing transaction volume in total fixed investments was around 2% at the end of 2020. In the period examined, the share of construction, real estate brokerage, leasing and operating activities and consumer housing finance in the gross transaction volume of financial leasing was around 20-30% in the period before 2018 but fell below 20% in 2019 and 2020. In the field of financial leasing, especially the sell and lease method, it attracts attention as an Islamic financing model in the financing of commercial real estate investments and housing acquisition.

In this study, analysis of the applications of the financial leasing in the real estate sector in Turkey was analysed in aspects of legal, economic, and technical, and the identification of problems, the solution was put forward. Through various data published by financial leasing companies and participation banks and application examples, the conditions of success in the real estate sector were examined by taking into account the development process according to the periods, although it provides various advantages, the main reasons for the lack of widespread and weak development of financial leasing transactions in Turkey were determined. Literature review and regulatory analysis were conducted in the study and the current implementation of the financial leasing method in the real estate sector and its impact on the development of the real estate sector were examined. Based upon the results of the interviews and surveys conducted with the managers and experts of financial leasing companies and the beneficiaries of this vehicle, economic analysis of the use of financial leasing in real estate development and real estate investments, basic application problems and opportunities for the development of financing of financial leasing and real estate investments were evaluated. It is noteworthy that financial leasing companies and participation banks have an important role in the current practice and the employment of real estate development and real estate investments and financing experts in both enterprises is mandatory to increase the success of the implementation of the model.

The real estate investment markets have opportunities to tackle climate change. Of the various approaches to reducing greenhouse gases, increasing energy efficiency is one of the most promising options. The real estate sector is responsible for 40% of energy consumption and 36% of CO2 emissions in the EU. In 2018, the European Commission set the target of a 32.5% energy saving relative to the base year 1990 by the year 2030. In the real estate sector, a challenge is connected to the long amortization periods until savings from modernization measures cover the additional resources required. Many real estate investors shy away from high modernization costs, especially for older buildings. 75% of buildings in Europe are energy inefficient and most (75%-90%) of today's buildings will still be in use in 2050. Real Estate investments in higher energy efficiency are often seen as risky. Therefore, one strategy to achieve the EU energy savings target is to create more transparency about the risks and returns of property modernization and the risks of “stranded” assets. Various EU funded initiatives offer benchmark possibilities for efficiency aspects within the real estate sector. Two of the EU-wide available initiatives are:

1. DEEP (De-Risking Energy Efficiency Platform) is an open-source initiative to up-scale energy efficiency investments in Europe. The DEEP platform contains data about financial performance (i.e. payback time of the investment and savings) of about 7,800 building renovation projects. The main objective of the platform is to collect sufficient data in order to provide the users with statistically significant values to understand the riskiness of energy efficiency projects.
2. CREMM (Carbon Risk Real Estate Monitor) aims to assess the risks associated with poor energy efficiency and high emissions at the individual property level, making it possible to develop strategies for portfolio decarbonisation.

This contribution examines the strengths and weaknesses of the various real estate benchmark approaches focusing on the risk aspects of energy efficiency within the EU. These databases can be useful tools to collect and compare data about energy efficiency projects and thereby enable capacity building in various European countries. In theory the databases, funded by the EU research program Horizon 2020, can provide evidence of the actual performance of energy efficiency projects, thus supporting the risk evaluation of investments. However, if there is no commercial company behind these databases, there is the danger that the benchmark data is not kept up to date when the research projects have ended and that the quality of the data might be questionable.

The contribution examines the value-added of the different concepts. Since energy saving in real estate is of considerable importance in the EU's efforts, a critical assessment of the validity of the various approaches is highly relevant.

The report reflects the authors' viewpoint in discussions concerning New Housing Policy Concept in Ukraine.

The housing sector in Ukraine has the following specific features:

• residents of apartment buildings have received their flats mainly through free privatization:
• 99,2% of households owns a housing;
• 89% of households live in buildings constructed before 1990-th which are in need of expensive major repair;
• the financial sources of major financing are not identified;
• professional home management is only emerging and focused on current needs;
• joint shared ownership on building and unidentified land property rights are not effective.

Such housing management system shows a conflict of interests between residents as consumers of services as well as homeowners. 

The vast majority of Ukrainian households are insolvent in paying for utilities. Government subsidies have increased from UAH 19 billion in 2015 to UAH 74 billion in 2018 and must be reduced to UAH 39 billion in 2021. The population housing utilities debt remains still UAH 66 billion at the end of 2020 (73% of the national monthly wages fund). The provision of massive housing subsidies to almost half of the households contradicts with their real property value and leaves the problem of financing the renovation of the housing stock unresolved.

The Government of Ukraine should develop and approve a New Housing Policy Concept. We have proposed to take into account the following recommendations for improving housing management in the document.

1. The state, as well as the local government bodies must participate in the financing of the first major repair of houses constructed before 1990, in a proportion to be determined according to the age and technical condition of the house. To retain ownership of the home, another share must be funded by the home co-owners. This provides for the right to determine the ownership or use of land and to include in the management of the homes of a reasonable component for further repairs. Alternatively, the possibility of denying homeowners the rights to own a house that will pass to the community or other efficient private owners is offered.
2. In order to carry out the functions of building management and facilities management, it is proposed to consolidate the co-owners' organizations in the associations, to create a fund for capital repairs and to use it for the gradual financing of buildings renovation. To manage the real estate assets of co-owners, it is proposed to introduce and support by the managers the services of insurance, loans and other asset operations. In addition, it is necessary to establish requirements for the capitalization of housing companies as assets managers, enhancing their role in providing payment for housing and communal services using financial instruments of asset management.
3. As a large number of apartment buildings do not have the necessary documentation, it is suggested that inventory and periodic inspection of the buildings to be carried out digitally by managers. At the same time, it is planned to develop information models of typical houses, reuse projects of their repair. For developers and house managers the implementation of life cycle costing and revenue accounting are planned and their reporting to data bases.
4. In order to withdraw the rental housing market from the shadows, it is suggested to introduce accounting and reporting of owners for renting apartments (premises) and monitoring by the managers of the use of the premises of the house. In addition, to keep the control of uninhabited housing and determine the rules for its maintenance.

In the implementation of these proposals, management companies, in the case of investing their own funds in major repairs, modernization and reconstruction of buildings can acquire, in the long term, into the ownership of the houses under their management.

Car commuters contribute significantly to carbon emissions and seem largely insensitive to dedicated modal shift transportation policy initiatives. Therefore, integrated policies that target multiple life domains may be more effective. In this study, we investigate commuters’ preferences for carsharing facilitating neighborhoods as well as their potential travel behaviors shift if they move to such neighborhoods. This policy, combining real estate, sustainable planning and transportation, aims to reduce neighborhoods parking needs and therefore parking facilities. In compensation, residents are provided convenient access to shared vehicles against lower costs and a better living environment, reflected in more green space or safer children playing areas or larger flats. To examine the potential interest in moving to such neighborhoods, a stated choice experiment is designed that systematically varies attributes of carsharing facilitating neighborhoods to elicit the utility of a carsharing facilitating neighborhood for commuters with a particular socio-demographic profile and commuting behavior. In total, 369 valid responses from commuters who currently live in urban areas in The Netherlands were gathered for the analysis. To derive the utility of carsharing facilitating neighborhoods of a particular profile, a mixed logit model is estimated. Results indicate that the utility of a carsharing facilitating neighborhood primarily depends on carsharing cost, housing costs and housing size. The utility varies with socio-demographic characteristics, such as living city, educational level, monthly income, work status and commuting behavior, measured in terms of private car ownership, carsharing subscription, commuting mode and commuting time. Regarding shifts in travel mode, 25.5% of the respondents stated that they would reduce private car ownership if they would live in a carsharing facilitating neighborhood. 32.8% of the respondents stated that they would use shared vehicles in such neighborhoods for travelling to the office, and 18.7% stated they would use them to access transit. These results can help real estate developers and policy makers understanding how to develop appealing carsharing facilitating neighbourhoods for targeted commuters groups.

PropTechs are external drivers of digitalisation in the real estate industry. Offering mostly innovative digital solutions, they are moving into the market with high speed, but struggeling with challenges or even market entry barriers.

There is a lack of systematic approaches to transparency in key market characteristics and figures of the growing German proptech sector, meanwhile being classified as a subsector of the real estate industry. The majority of available surveys and studies on digital transformation and digitalisation analyses or emphasises the view of the traditional real estate sector. PropTechs' perspectives and their challenges are under-represented.

This paper aims at closing this gap. Using two proptech surveys from 2020 (explorative, interview-based) and 2021 (descriptive, questionnaire-based with 185 proptech respondents), the authors classify proptechs by their degree of maturity. Applying factor analysis, they identify major challenges for these proptech clusters throughout their sales cycle, when faced with the real estate industry as customer. Further, the paper will elaborate on drivers and models of horizontal and vertical cooperations between proptechs and real estate companies.

Finally, the authors reflect on recommendations for a sustainable digital transformation of the German real estate industry, integration both proptechs and real estate companies in a common ecosystem.

Before the global pandemic a lot of the hype surrounding new offices was around flexibility, proximity (co-working) and agility. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated changes in office markets that were already established including hybridity. Post pandemic, office occupiers have been re-calibrating their office requirements and re-imagining what the 'new normal' office looks like. Proximity is less favoured in our new socially distanced world. Flexibility is still important in accommodating new or adjusted ways of working, with an emerging emphasis on creating spaces that support value-added activities that require people to meet and work together (safely) instead of the more routine, solitary or other activities that can be conducted remotely. The research explores the changing demands of occupiers through case studies of organisations that procured new office accommodation pre-covid only to have their office move delayed when the pandemic and subsequent lock downs were imposed. This permitted organisations the opportunity to re- evaluate their pre-covid office layout plans and adapt them in anticipation of returning to a 'new normal' mode of office occupation. The research will explore the extent of and rationale for adjustments made to pre and post pandemic office layouts to identify the subtle changes that are emerging in corporate office occupation.

In the course of the pandemic triggered by the corona virus SARS-CoV-2 (hereinafter referred to as the corona pandemic), new and changed behaviors are appearing in citizen groups. These behaviors are particularly evident in the areas of consumer, mobility and travel behavior. The new behavioral patterns have a significant impact on (contact-intensive) companies, especially in the areas of retail, mobility companies (e.g. airlines, train companies, bus companies, rental car companies, etc.) as well as hotels and restaurants. In the medium and long-term view, permanent and irreversible effects on currently existing offerings and infrastructures could result from low utilization and thus have a lasting impact on and weaken the regional and local economic structure and crucial pillars of adding value at regional and local level.

Relevant from a spatial and regional scientific point of view and of great research interest is the question of whether the economic and infrastructures, particularly in rural areas, may be at greater risk than in metropolitan regions and thus structural weaknesses in regions may tighten by the corona pandemic.

Real estate images contain a lot of valuable information and are broadly used for marketing purposes in property sales. However, until now, photos of the exterior of a house have not been processed systematically to use the information contained in hedonic pricing models. In this paper we examine to what extent the present information in images can be utilised to derive the influence of the building condition on the value of a house. Thereby, we analyse (i) if we can extract the condition of the building directly from the picture and shows the corresponding expected influence and (ii) to which extend we can improve a hedonic pricing model with the additional information.

We classified 949 single-family houses into four classes according to a uniform condition variable. A regression analysis shows that the created variable together with the year of construction are the key influencing variables. This is in accordance with the theory and the valuation using the cost approach where these variables are also the decisive variables. It can be shown that if the condition variable is added to a baseline model consisting of the square meter of the plot and the building, as well as the price of the land per square meter the new model improves (R-squared: from 0.649 to 0.741, n = 949). This is result is comparable to a model incorporating all variables considered in our examination excluding the condition variable (R-squared: 0.741, n = 360) and yields a better prediction than the baseline model including construction year (R-squared: 0.729, n = 686).

Climate change is inevitable: storms, floods, heat islands in inner cities are consequences that the real estate industry is already facing today. However, the outlook for the future is not all gloomy. Scientists have calculated that investments in climate protection are worthwhile. In addi-tion, a change in society is emerging. New needs are emerging and customers expect climate-friendly living and working. It is therefore time to see climate change not only as a threat, but also as an opportunity to generate new products and access additional customer groups.

To analyze the opportunities and risks of climate change on the real estate industry, the Competence Center Process Management Real Estate (CC PMRE) together with HTW Berlin and cctm real estate & infrastructure AG from Basel conducted the market analysis PMRE Monitor 2021: Climate. Change. Chance. 219 experts from the real estate industry and 140 students of real es-tate business courses from Germany participated in the study. Due to the particular relevance of climate change for future generations, students from international backgrounds were also surveyed. A total of 51 students from foreign colleges or universities with different specializations participated in the market analysis. 

The results of the study confirm that climate protection pays off in the real estate industry. Residential tenants are quite prepared to pay a premium for climate-neutral living. A rent increase of around 5.1% is accepted. There are also opportunities in terms of value appreciation. On aver-age, properties with climate protection aspects can achieve value increases of 8.6%. On the other hand, climate change also harbors risks. The participants in the study expect value losses of around 20.5% due to a poor CO2 balance or a climate risk situation. The article shows in detail which characteristics of a property lead to increases or also decreases in value and therefore demonstrates which climate protection measures real estate actors must take today. 

Housing is an essential factor in determining the quality of lives, the stability of communities, and the health of national economies. Its importance to society is underscored by the fact that housing accounts for a significant portion of personal-public consumption expenditures and gross private domestic investment in most North American and European countries. The housing sector is a leading indicator of economic activity, and a lagging indicator of social welfare. The public and private housing sectors are extremely sensitive to changes in monetary and fiscal conditions, and social, political and welfare policies.

In most industrialized countries housing quality is high; however, affordability and access have become a major issue. In developing countries, longstanding problems of low quality and high relative cost have been exacerbated by high rates of population growth and country-to-city migration, and by urban infrastructures that are ill equipped to accommodate residential growth.

Direct government assistance for housing in both industrialized and developing countries generally has been more extensive than in the United States. With the adoption of housing acts (Housing Act of 1949), the United States and other North American and European countries have formally pledged itself to the goal of providing 'a decent home and a suitable living environment for every family.' Nevertheless, the definition of what is 'decent' has varied according to economic conditions, political climate, and prevailing tastes. Furthermore, in most European countries the responsibility for producing housing and delivering housing services relies on both the public and private sectors; while in the United States, the responsibility for producing housing and delivering housing services remains almost exclusively in the private sector.

This first section of this paper will discuss housing policy and institutions under various theories: functionalism and stratification, modernization, neo Marxian, and institutionalism. The second section of this paper will categorize and explore similarities and differences between housing policy and performance under various welfare regimes: social democratic (Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway), liberal (United States, Canada, and United Kingdom), conservative-corporatist (Germany and France), and Latin-conservative-corporatist (Italy and Greece) regimes.

The last section of this report analyzes economic, demographic and housing statistics for each regime. The goal is to identify structural and fundamental differences between housing policies in various welfare state regimes. Discussion of results, conclusions and recommendations, and anticipated usefulness of results also follow.

Structural and dynamic changes, intensified by the current pandemic situation, con-front companies with high levels of uncertainty. This becomes a challenge especially when deci-sions have to be made about resources that are critical to success and difficult to revise, such as ownership of corporate real estate. This article examines how uncertainty affects the holding of specific property and whether corporate real estate ownership has a positive or negative impact on firm performance under consideration of business uncertainty.

Two studies have been conducted. In the first study, multivariate cross-sectional regression analysis is used to test the link between specificity and corporate real estate (CRE) ownership under business uncertainty. Balance sheet data of non-property companies of the six biggest European economies is used. For the second study, the sample was expanded to all companies listed in Europe and their capital market data to investigate the influence of the corporate real estate ownership on firm performance under uncertainty.

The empirical results show a positive link between specificity and CRE ownership. Additionally, companies seem to adjust their investment behaviour in specific properties under uncertainty by avoiding or postponing investments or even writing-off specific real estate assets due to their transfer to a new use. Furthermore, the results show that the excess returns decrease in the medium term as CRE ownership under uncertainty increases. Our findings also indicate that regardless of the uncertainty situation, CRE ownership reduces the systematic risk. Thus, ownership seems to have a diversifying effect.

This paper expands the scientific discourse by explicitly linking real estate specificity with the choice between ownership, leasing or rental solutions and firm performance. The article clarifies that in order to avoid inefficiencies, the irreversibility of specific real estates should be considered in the CRE ownership decision especially by firms operating in a structurally chang-ing business environment.

Most studies for the economic evaluation of refurbishment measures lean on energy efficiency or energy savings. From the owner's point of view, the question arises whether and in what form improvement measures that increase the quality or the value of the property are economically profitable.

This means in this case already used units, which have a potential of rent increases due to improvements. In practice, such investigations are carried out in a detailed level. The owner incurs expenses as a result before he can make the decision to carry out in-depth investigations into possible renovations.

The aim of this paper is an investigation of possible refurbishment measurements on a general level. Based on three quality levels and four defined conditions, 24 possible maintenance scenarios can arise for an existing building or component. The developed approach needs only a few input parameters, especially the quality as well as the condition and statistical key values to calculate the economic efficiency.

The methodology of this technical-economic approach has been carried out on 30 vacant building units. They are all located in city centres. The empirical study determines the typical cost drivers for the refurbishment measurements and their economic viability.

Amid increased uncertainty investors tend to adopt cautious attitudes and revise their strategies, which results in disinvestment in emerging markets and concentration on more mature regions. Similarly, the downturn of 2008 led to the increased perception of country risk and shrinking investment volumes. This resulted in the situation when, after the years of promising growth and soaring returns, some CEE markets had to face the severe reality of being excluded from investors’ portfolios and strategic plans. 

At the same time, in the view of the vague concept of country risk it is unclear what exactly forced investors to radically change their plans. Due to the limited research on CEE caused in the first instance by the immaturity of some markets in the region and the resulting lack of transparency and market data, it is unclear what factors influence investment decisions in this region. 

By means of qualitative method, the presented study reflects on investors’ risk perception and attitudes towards investing in CEE and seeks to answer the question of “What are the determinants of real estate investment decision-making in CEE?” Input for the analysis comes from conducting expert interviews with the market players active in CEE and primarily based in Austria. 

This paper assesses the extent to which ‘20 years of change in 20 days’ purportedly produced by the COVID pandemic has affected and will continue to affect the occupation and use of office space. The pandemic has the potential to lead to some transformative impacts on the operating models and, perhaps to a lesser extent, the financial performance of many office occupiers. Many commentators consider that changes in business strategy and operating models in conjunction with an evolving, more challenging business environment will accelerate ongoing structural change.  

Such change is expected to have a range of varying impacts on both the level and pattern of demand for office space, the operation of office space and occupiers in office space in the short, medium and long terms. Drawing upon interviews with senior corporate real estate managers in global businesses, this paper reports on the initial findings of a research project exploring the experiences and responses of a range of major UK office occupiers to the crisis. 

To uncover and understand impacts and processes of change over time, the methodological approach consists of qualitative, longitudinal research. The research examines a range of issues including pre-pandemic workplace practices and strategies; the transition to home-working during the pandemic; perceptions of business performance during the pandemic and expectations regarding post-pandemic working patterns.  

In the first section, we investigate the outlook of the Turkish real estate market in the Pre-COVID era. The fundamentals were found to be not changing dramatically from previous studies. Cyclical credit growth patterns are detected as a matter of Government intervention to the markets. İn the second part, we focus on credit expansion that led to the residential market boom. 1-year non-payment option made the mortgage market appealing. Other non-residential markets are in trouble which has ties to foreign consumption, especially the EU. In the third part of the paper, we tried to forecast how the market will perform under covid. The fast learning curve was expected to be on the side of tackle covid, but the 3rd wave becomes more severe and hits the casualties to a new high level. Office and retail are most affected and may not recover sooner than residential. Industry and logistics look very promising, but the consumption declines, and the new normal set the expenditures even low.

The commercial property market has been hit by e-commerce and COVID-19. These have led to increasing void periods, vacancies and business closures among other market occurrences. These occurrences require market actors to make strategic decisions on the future use of these spaces. One response to understanding the future of commercial property spaces is through analysing the rental value performance and the links (streets) connecting the properties within a defined city boundary. This study analyse street network to compute accessibility index via spatial configuration technique. The computed street data (accessibility integration) and observed changes in rental values for 14,570 commercial property units of a medium-sized UK city were analysed, digitalised and visualised using GIS choropleth maps. The variables (that is, accessibility and changes in rental value) were adopted in ranking property locations into future suitability for commercial purposes. Results show that almost 40% of the investigated properties require change of use for optimum utilisation the property spaces. The study contributes to the application of spatial configuration technique in analysing real property markets for efficient planning and management of urban spaces.

In the Netherlands, many universities are opening up their campuses to companies. Universities design interactive places where different campus users can meet, such as faculty, company employees, and students. It is pre-supposed that increasing interaction between these campus users will lead to more cooperation and knowledge sharing, resulting in more innovations and knowledge valorisation.

A campus spaces and services have a significant impact on interaction. These may block or facilitate interaction between different campus users. Some studies identified critical success factors (CSFs), but no study has yet included the perceptions of facility directors (FDs). FDs are of particular interest as their objective is to integrate people, place and process within the built environment with the purpose of improving the productivity of the core business (NEN/ISO 41011). Expectedly, they are the gatekeepers of the current campus design policies, developing their own CSFs in practice, as opposed to CSFs identified in the literature.

FDs of the 13 Dutch universities were interviewed. Interviews were conducted first in an office setting (to ensure confidentiality) and continued in a walkthrough location chosen by the FDs. The interviews focused on the identification of practice-based CSFs for interactive spaces and services. After transcription and coding in Atlas.Ti, an inductive thematic analysis was conducted. This approach allowed for comparison between empirical and previous theoretical findings.

Main findings show six clusters: constraints, motivators, designing spaces, designing services, building community, and creating coherence. The campus is seen as a system containing subsystems, and is itself part of a wider system (environment), forming a layered structure. Constraints and motivators are part of the environment but cannot be separated from the other four categories, as they influence their applicability. This placement of CSFs in a systems thinking approach creates a relevant addition of empirical to theoretical findings.

This study provides a comprehensive overview and comparison of CSFs from both literature and practice, allowing more effective application of CSFs in campus design policies. A framework for future studies on CSFs for interaction on campuses is provided.

This research empirically examines cross-sectional property- and credit-risk determinants of credit spreads for commercial real estate senior loans. In contrast to previous studies, we exploit a new large data set of commercial real estate mortgages of German real estate banks concentrating on senior lending activities from 2015 to 2019. These mortgages have not been securitized into CMBS loans and thus, belong to the on-balance activities of the lenders. Our results are largely consistent with theoretical predictions. In particular, credit spreads are positively related to the cap rate, reflecting the property risk, and the loan-to-value ratio, reflecting the credit risk. In focusing on senior loans, we are able to place the results in a precise context of property- and mortgage-related impacts.

In the last decade, IT and digital systems have silently become pervasive in traditional real estate markets, creating a contemporary branch of real estate typically referred to as “PropTech” (property technology). Despite the advancement of property technology and innovations over the last few decades, there has been a disproportionate growth in related scholarly work, particularly in the area of PropTech education. Furthermore, there is no evidence-based approach to developing a Property Technology and innovation educational framework for higher institutions. This research, therefore, develops a practical and pedagogical framework to enhance and sustain the integration and delivery of technology and innovation in real estate higher education. Using a stakeholder and analytical approach, we conduct several interviews and focus group sessions with senior managers and CEOs of leading real estate and PropTech firms in the UK. In addition to these, we conduct further interviews with heads of real estate departments, senior real estate educators and professional bodies (RICS and UK PropTech Association). We thereafter design a practical and pedagogical framework for PropTech and real estate innovation in real estate higher education (referred to as PEIF). The PEIF proposes a blended approach of integration, involving the development of a module to introduce property technology and innovation in the real estate higher education curriculum, while simultaneously incorporating technology and innovation in the already existing real estate modules. This framework, to the best of our knowledge, is the first PropTech education integration framework that has been developed using extensive empirical evidence; it is thus valuable to real estate educators and higher education institutions.

Integrated strategic urban planning in many cities and countries, as well as analysis of current situation in local development, urban transformation and urban conservation together with the participation of all stakeholders in various activities, poses an impact on the success of a project. It is possible to create a useful model with the participation of local people and other stakeholders in the use of urban space, conservation of areas and monuments of natural and historical value and in this way, the success of sustainable urban revitalization at the local level can be improved. In order to develop sustainable approaches to the conservation and revitalization of archaeological, historical and urban areas, it is necessary to increase compliance with local community values, contemporary needs, public participation and stakeholder satisfaction levels. Because, in the analysis of urban development, conservation and real estate projects through a strategic planning approach with the participation of local people and the private sector is considered among the main conditions for ensuring the sustainability of projects.

In recent years, importance and priority have been given to the analysis of open and green areas, parks, conservation areas and urban transformation implementation projects in cities, and integrating strategic planning model has adding value in the process. In the city centre of Ankara province, which is the capital of Turkey, there are several large areas among which the most important is Ataturk Cultural Center (AKM) area, which is an historical centre of the city in the Zubeyde Hanım neighborhood of Altindag District. In this study, physical, economic, legal, social and environmental indicators of Atatürk Cultural Center area were determined. In addition to ensuring the preservation and development of historic urban spaces, opportunities for the development of an adequate and effective strategic model and practice-based management tools were evaluated. In the analysis of AKM case study, the relationship between the historical development and the environment of the area was revealed by using the current situation analysis and region data.

Based on historical and cultural characteristics and stakeholder views of the area, current use of status and problem analysis of region called the green belt and historical city centre of Ankara Province was conducted. With the data obtained, the difference/gap analysis related to the region was performed and the possible risks were examined in various aspects. In addition to the survey work, project alternatives were determined by taking into account the property and zoning data related to the region, the historical, cultural and symbolic characteristics of the region, and the most appropriate alternative was selected using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). According to the most appropriate alternative, market and competitiveness conditions were examined, and strategic goals were determined at the real estate level by taking into account the compatibility of the project alternative with the relevant existing corporate-macro strategic plans. According to the income-generating approaches included in the selected project, the path of cost and income estimation was taken and the outline of the strategic action plan was presented by designing the process for the strategic spatial plan. 

According to the research results, it has emphasized that in real estate development project model with the strategic planning approach, competitive real estate markets and the functioning logic of the current region for sustainable (economic, environmental and social) impacts, the potentials and benefits should be taken into account. According to the results of the field study, it has revealed that the AKM area should be a cultural centre by function; and if integrated with its surroundings, especially the historical city centre it will have a modern appearance that preserves its historical and cultural nature. In addition, according to the results of the competitor analysis and gap analysis, it was determined that the project alternative envisaged to be carried out in the region has a competitive advantage and is compatible with the strategic plans already in practice. The fact that the strategic action plan is compatible with the results of fieldwork shows that the strategic planning approach is consistent in itself. Finally, monitoring and evaluation of the strategic plan with the perspective of 10P model for providing corporate level action. In addition, considering that corporate real estate needs to be increasingly integrated into business strategy, it should be emphasized that corporate real estate strategy and corporate strategy should be harmonized in specialized areas such as AKM.

This paper aims to investigate theoretical and practical links between applications of digital twin (DT) and heritage facilities management (HFM) in order to identify future applications of DT in HFM through a systematic review of the rapidly expanding DT literature. A systematic literature review strategy was developed based on three research questions: what are (1) the current relationship between ID and HFM, (2) existing gaps between DT and HFM and (3) future trend of applying DT on BHM? The results of the literature review show that first, the studies on adopting DT in the disciplines architecture, engineering, construction and operation (AECO) have been growing in the past few years, especially from 2018 to 2020; second, among the identified papers, a major portion of the literature focuses on investigating DT’s application in maintenance, operation, facilities management and asset management from both the building level and smart city level; third, heritage conservation calls for digital solutions for problems related to performance monitoring and predictive maintenance. The implication of this study is that DT application in HFM is that DT shall be integrated with heritage building information modelling (HBIM) to facilitate efficient data management and HBIM-based mechanism for DT development is needed for future HFM.

One of the key research questions in the private commercial real estate market involves the investigation of the amount of specific risk in portfolios of various size. In other words, the number of properties a real estate portfolio needs to diversified, i.e. have no specific risk. Previous studies suggesting that the reduction in specific risk from increasing portfolio size is difficult to achieve and so investors should increase portfolio size almost indefinitely. A conclusion largely based on the linear regression model of Evans and Archer (1968), which infers the amount of specific risk indirectly.

This paper therefore re-examine the extent of diversification in private commercial real estate portfolios using two approaches not previous applied in real estate portfolio analysis. First, to overcome the issues with the linear regression approach of Evans and Archer (1968) we use the multivariate curve fitting methodology of Hueng and Yau (2006) to estimate the amount of specific risk in portfolios at each portfolio size directly and find the point at which the specific risk is zero. Second, to avoid timing biases due to changes in the risk/return performance resulting from a fixed holding-periods we follow Chong and Philips (2013) and use randomise start dates with 5-year and 10-year holding periods.

Using quarterly returns over the period 2000:1 to 2020:4 for 77 ‘property assets’ and simulation, without replacement, the linear model of Evans and Archer (1968) indicates that even after holding all 77 ‘property assets’ specific risk was still not zero. Confirming the results of previous studies. In contrast, using the multivariate curve fitting approach of Hueng and Yau (2006) the results show that investors can reduce about 95% of the specific risk with only five or six ‘property assets’ and that specific risk is zero at the 11 ‘property asset’ portfolio level. Thus, we reject the idea that investors in private commercial real estate should continue to increase their portfolio almost indefinitely.

In real estate transactions, the parties generally have limited time to provide and process information. Using building documentation and digital building data may help to obtain an unbiased view of the asset. In practice, it is still particularly difficult to assess the physical structure of a building due to shortcomings in data structure and quality. Machine learning may improve speed and accuracy of information processing and results. This requires structured documents and applying a taxonomy of unambiguous document classes.\nIn this paper, prioritized document classes from previous research (Müller, Päuser, Kurzrock 2020) are supplemented with key information for technical due diligence reports. The key information is derived from the analysis of n=35 due diligence reports. Based on the analyzed reports and identified key information, a checklist for technical due diligence is derived. The checklist will serve as a basis for a standardized reporting structure.\nThe paper provides fundamentals for generating a (semi-)automated standardized due diligence report with a focus on the technical assessment of the asset. The paper includes recommendations for improving the machine readability of documents and indicates the potential for (partially) automated due diligence processes. The paper concludes with challenges towards an automated information extraction in due diligence processes and the potential for digital real estate management.

Due to numerous documents and the lack of widely acknowledged standards, the capture and provision of information in transaction processes frequently remains challenging. Since construction and maintenance come with substantial costs, the evaluation of the structural condition and maintenance requirements as well as the assessment of contracts and legal structures are important in real estate transactions. The quality and completeness of digital building documentation is increasingly becoming a factor as deal maker and deal breaker. Artificial intelligence can well assist in the classification of documents and extraction of information

This research provides fundamentals for generating a (semi-)automated standardized technical and legal assessment of buildings. Based on a large building documentation set from (institutional) investors, the potential for digital processing, automated classification and information extraction through machine learning algorithms is demonstrated. For this purpose, more than 400 document classes are derived, reviewed, prioritized and principally checked for machine readability. In addition, key information is structured and prioritized for technical and legal due diligence.

The paper highlights recommendations for improving the machine readability of documents and indicates the potential for partially automating technical and legal due diligence processes. The practical recommendations are relevant for investors, owners, users and service providers who depend on specific real estate information as well as for companies that develop or use software tools. For policymaking, the research offers some guidance for standardizing documents to support digital information processing in real estate. The recommendations are helpful for improving information processing and in general, promoting the use of automated information extraction based on machine learning in real estate.

Property investors generally rely on rent payments to meet their property-level debt service requirements. However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, a majority of European countries have adopted rent moratoriums or passed legislation to protect non-paying property occupants from eviction. Following, this paper investigates the relationship between public policy on rent payments and real property asset pricing in three major European housing markets (Amsterdam, London, and Paris). Through a mixed-methods methodology, the paper aims to determine if there is a clear relationship between contemporary policies surrounding rent collection and investors interest in properties within Amsterdam, London, and Paris, as reflected by asset pricing. The paper will rely on quantitative data from the Real Capital Analytics property transaction database to determine changes to housing property prices following the Covid-19 pandemic and identify investors active within each city to interview for the qualitative portion of the project. The qualitative portion of the project will showcase in-depth interviews with investors active within each property market, focused on their perceptions of rent and tolerances for non-payment of rent when it comes to purchasing real property assets. Ultimately, the paper aims to contribute to real estate and urban scholars understanding the role of rent payments within investment decision-making – and more specifically, how investors see rent payments (or non-payment of rent) within their property-level investment decisions.

Foreign buyers of residential properties in London have been rightly or wrongly blamed for rising residential property prices in the city. Similarly the perceived social impact of the presence of foreign buyers in the London Housing market, such as gentrification and ghost neighbourhoods, has been a “celebrated” news in the media and one of the topical discourses in previous research on foreign buyers in the London market. Notwithstanding, there has been no rigorous study to establish that the presence of foreign buyers in the market indeed causes housing price inflation. This paper is therefore aimed at ascertaining the prevalence of foreign buyers housing price premium, if any, attributable to asymmetry of information between informed and uninformed residential property sellers, and whether any such premium is sustainable over time. The study leverages on the concepts and theories of information asymmetry and uses econometric models to analyse housing transaction data from the Land Registry and the Private Eye over the period of 2000 to 2014 inclusive. The analyses are based on the Broad Rental Market Areas and Post Code Sectors of London to ensure comparability of the houses under investigation. The preliminary results show that the presence of foreign buyers in the London housing market creates information asymmetry between informed and uninformed sellers to lead to statistically significant foreign buyers house price premium for virtually all the Broad Rental Market Areas of London. However the premium reduces over time as information gradually trickles through the market mechanism to the uninformed sellers group at the entry point of foreign buyers in the market. The results of the study\nwould be of interest to developers, investors, fund providers and policy makers related to the London housing market as well as practitioners and researchers.

Securitized Real Estate is known for extreme return movements in secondary capital markets. Accordingly, the Gaussian assumption of normality has been empirically falsified for public equity positions including REITs. Thus, literature has intensified the research on Extreme Value Theory and Generalized Pareto Distributions for exceedances above a certain threshold. These observations in the tail of the return distribution can be empirically characterized by scale and shape parameters. Nonetheless, descriptive statistics are regularly enriched by inductive models to provide explanatory power of independent covariates. The central aim of the present study is the establishment of statistical significance between explanatory covariates to model scale and shape parameters statistically across time. Time-variant parameterization appears to be highly important, since empirical literature has shown volatility clustering, implying differently volatile market phases.

Although there exists some scientific literature concerned with pricing on the Austrian real estate market (Helbich, W. Brunauer, et al., 2014; Kuntz and Helbich, 2014; W. Brunauer, Lang, and Umlauf, 2013), there is surprisingly little quantitative research on housing rents, their spatial structure and drivers. Expanding the existing literature beyond house price prediction is especially important in the Viennese case, where according to the Austrian Mikrozensus, 77.5% of the population live in a rented flat (Statistik Austria, 2020). Thus, quantitative research on the Austrian housing market cannot primarily focus on price formation regarding private real estate property but needs to also consider rental markets. W. A. Brunauer et al. (2010) provide a notable exception from the lack of quantitative research on the Viennese rental case as well as an interesting approach using a Generalized Additive Model with spatial scaling.

Fortunately, there is also a growing body of econometric literature on housing rents and their drivers onthe international stage where one could draw ideas from. Recent examples can be found in Tomal (2020); McCord et al. (2014) or Efthymiou and Antoniou (2013.) Usually in the spirit of hedonic house price models, housing rents are regressed onto certain characteristics of the respective flat as well as some indicators measuring the quality of location. However, the Viennese housing market has several special features which have not been properly addressed in housing rent modeling up till now. An important feature of the Viennese accommodation market is the fact that roughly 43% of households live in a flat provided by the social sector, which consists of municipal as well as cooperative (non-profit) housing. The private rental sector on the other hand accommodates about a third of the households (Tockner, 2017). Thus, dynamics in the comparatively small free market segment cannot be adequately understood if considered independent from the larger social sector (Kemeny,Kersloot, and Thalmann, 2005). A further important aspect is the strong regulation of rent prices through the Mietrechtsgesetz (MRG) that basically constitutes two regulatory regimes within the private market segment. On the one hand flats located in buildings erected before 1945 or built with state subsidies experience strong price controls. On the other hand, flats that do not fulfill the previously mentioned criteria as well as single family houses do not experience any such price controls. However, the introduction of location bonuses to the price-controlled segment led to spatially very uneven price increases over the last years (Kadi, 2015).

We propose a hierarchical generalized additive model (HGAM) to model squaremeter prices by smooth functions of flat characteristics such as size, age, and time within the sample. Additionally, various dummy variables enter the model as linear predictors and random effects are used to model subdistrict specific location bonuses in the baseline model. Going beyond the existing hedonic housing rent literature this study also proposes several extensions to model, addressing the aforementioned special features of the Viennese rental market. Thus, the baseline HGAM is modified to incorporate regulatory-regime heterogeneity in its parameters as well as spatial heterogeneity with respect to time trends in order to properly address the differences in the development of location bonuses. Varying degree of competition from the social sector in each subdistrict is also tested as a potential impacting factor onto rents. As spatial autocorrelation might be an issue given the spatial nature of the data, we do not only use random effects for the location bonuses but also add a spatially structured predictor using markov-random-fields. 

The Data available for this study was kindly provided by the DataScience Service GmbH and consists of over 84,000 observations of flats offered on the Viennese rental market between 2012 and 2020 with a very high coverage rate during the more recent years. Asking prices, GIS data, very detailed real estate characteristics including size, age, furnishing and many more, as well as a multitude of socio-economic variables on the respective area such as share of academics, proximity to medical infrastructure or accessibility of public transport are available for the given dataset. Due to the constant excess demand on the accommodation market in Vienna for the given period, asking prices are assumed to hardly deviate from market prices and can be seen, as a legitimate approximation.

First results suggest that all proposed extensions to the baseline model add significant predictive power.

The need for housing has continued to increase rapidly due to migration and population growth. The excess demand for urban centres in particular has led to an increase in land prices and therefore the transition to tall buildings has accelerated. The housing ownership rate for households in the urban areas is observed to be 60%, and investment in housing acquisition has been rapidly increased over the last 10 years. In addition, households with more than one residence in cities or second housing investments had increased continually. With the increase in high-rise buildings over time, management problems also began to arise. In order to meet the social needs of the owners sitting in high-rise buildings, special arrangements were needed to address the problems arising from the existence of areas subject to common area use of real estate. In order to solve the existing problems, the Law No. 634 dated 23.06.1965 were enacted and come into force and then the amendment of the Law No. 5711 with the title of “Special Provisions Concerning Condominium Buildings” together with the Law No. 634 article 66 and other clauses have been added.

Management of detached housing, multi-storey housing and sheltered sites and co-operative sites is carried out by the management chosen by the floor owners board according to the Law No. 634.Nevertheless, there are significant problems in the management of common areas by floor owners in terms of service delivery, quality of service and compliance with legislation. It is not possible for floor owners to be experts in real estate law, facility, and real estate management in general and to provide management services in accordance with the legislation. In the last two decades, it is observed that different models are applied together in the management of housing structures due to the increasing management problems and the changing of nature of housing investments. These are such as sites managed by floor owners, real estate in which management services are partially or completely outsourced, and facilities managed by cooperatives. In according to building regulations such as; parking, elevator, waste water discharge, energy performance, thermal insulation, shelter, central heating, fire protection, annual management fee payment, notification law and work times regulations, professional practices in building management is missing and need to be implemented to fil the gap.

In the field study, the results of in-depth interviews, surveys and observations made with the buildings and site managers in the northern part of Ankara Urban Transformation Project and Dikmen Valley Urban Transformation Project were evaluated. In the buildings and site managers’ survey; questions were asked regarding the demographic characteristics of the interviewees, the formation of the management bodies, the management model of the site, management problems and development opportunities. In this way, attention was paid into analyzing the management of condominium buildings in the transformation areas, identifying the problems that restrict development opportunities, and conducting interviews within the framework of questions prepared to analyze the approaches of managers and users to management of condominium buildings.

In the case of Turkey, it is observed that managers were chosen by the floor owners in many housing projects. The chosen manager is usually coming from one of the floor owners, but in some cases he or she may come from outside and usually a non-professional. However, the management of condominium buildings is also an area that requires some expertise to deal with. Leaving the management of many floor owners and structures with common and joint ownership areas to persons with no legal expertise raises many problems in practice. As a result of poor management practices, there are losses in collection management fees and value losses due to the increase in vacancy rates. In the projects where management is carried out by a facility management firm and expertise, it is seen that existing problems are resolved easily and the demand for the projects increases. Particularly in the complex buildings or super structure with social facilities, different security gates and personnel, it has encountered that there is a problem of high dues and costs which must be reduced from execution of management by a facility management company makes an effective difference in solving existing problems.

The fact that the management of the mass housing by a facility management company brings a higher burden in terms of cost, it is seen that the management of these real estate by facility managers provides higher profit gains in the long run. However, in small housing projects, the difference in the tax rate is a deterrent to the transfer of management to a professional facility management company. Lack of adequate knowledge and experience of managers chosen among floor owners or from outside; personnel and heating costs, leasing of common areas, etc., causes wrong decisions in many aspects and causes cost increases in the long run. When the selected two large mass housing settlements in Ankara province were examined, it is concluded that the success of the facility management has an important role in the formation of brand value. In recent years, the demand for brand housing has increased. It is observed that the success in facility management was influential in the increase in demand of housing investment. In addition, the management of facilities by professional companies is important to ensure the sustainability of residential buildings. It has been found that facility management, which is seen as an interdisciplinary field of study, has become a requirement in residences and additional social and commercial buildings within the framework of the examples studied, has a direct effect on raising the satisfaction ratings of residents and in particular increasing the value of investment.

The investments for the development of thermal timeshare facilities have started to grow rapidly. Timeshare property can be defined as a guaranteed, transferable and alternative right that allows its owner(s) to have a limited-term vacation, guarantees to spend at the same time and place every year, provides comfort and legally registered in the land registry. Timeshare properties are used only during a certain period of the year, leasing the remaining times to prevent the facilities from being idle, and this investment model allows a significant contribution to the local economy through the right holders. In this study, the development of timeshare investments in the field of thermal tourism has been examined in general, and in the second stage, interviews were conducted with the right holders and investors of timeshare investments in selected districts of Ankara Province. According to the Turkish Legal System ,the development and management of timeshare investment projects, the buildings and independent sections in the timeshare system must be residential properties, the beneficiary period of each  property right holders should be not less than 15 days, the timeshare right can be transferred and left as a heritage to heirs, the facilities must be furnished with the annual maintenance-repair and other operating expenses equally shared, the facilities can be rented in case it cannot be used by the right holders, and the management of the facilities must be realized in accordance with the legal regulations regarding the condominium properties.

The research results represent that in timeshare projects based on a condominium-principled ownership system; the total present value of the property price paid by the right owners for a certain use in the selected period of the year and the annual operating expenses are much higher than the present value of the annual rental prices, there is an option to have a holiday in comfortable conditions with the sum of the current value of the annual operating expenses and the cost of the timeshare acquisition, and consequently, timeshare investments are not rational. In the districts where field studies were conducted, although the rental prices/fees and sales values of the real estate subject to timeshare properties are 2-3 times higher than the equivalent properties in the district centre, it has been determined that the attraction of timeshare investments is low for the right holders. It should be emphasized that timeshare facilities need to be analyzed together with both timeshare investor and project developer, and that project development, appraisals, financing, construction, facility and property management services are carried out under the responsibility of real estate development and management experts to increase the project and investment success.

The real estate market is undergoing a “major evolution and transformation” (Karamitsos et al. 2018, p.177). In only a few studies, however, the application of a complexity theoretical perspective has been investigated. Here we view the real estate market as a complex adaptive system. Complexity theory provides a framework that has the potential to bridge the gap between traditional “pure” science, which makes clear assumptions that are not necessarily based on reality, and the “applied” sciences, which focus on practical value (Thurner at al 2018). The blockchain reflects the core attributes of complex adaptive systems and thus appears to be a “natural fit” for complex adaptive systems applications (Zavolokina et al. 2018). Furthermore, given its size, the real estate market is relevant to everyday human life. These are all indicators that the interconnections among of complexity theory, blockchain, and the real estate market is worth investigating. Blockchain technology is expected, for example, to create opportunities to outsource services currently provided by incumbent middlemen in the market thereby increasing market efficiency.

The energy performance of rented dwellings is a crucial aspect of energy policy in the Walloon region in Belgium, where one quarter of households are tenants on the private market. The paper deals with the imperfect information problem that concerns the energy performance certificates (EPCs) and its impact on rental market. Four aspects of the problem reported in the literature are discussed, namely: 1) different energy evaluations of the same dwelling; 2) performance gap between theoretically estimated and real energy consumption; 3) insufficient coverage of the rental market by EPCs; 4) often weak appreciation of official EPCs on the rental market.

The originality of the paper is that it compares the official EPC labels with the labels reported by tenants in a recent survey (N=2.892). While an existing EPC is often unknown for tenants, their awareness depends on the households’ socio-economic characteristics. Four groups of tenants are distinguished: those with correct answers, “dreamers” overestimating their energy performance, “complainers” underestimating their energy performance, and “indifferent” tenants who don’t know the existing label. The differences between groups are analyzed with descriptive statistics and a discrete choice model. According to the hedonic regression, the impact of an official EPC on housing rents varies for households with different perceptions of energy performance. In particular, the “dreamers” more severely penalize the worst energy classes, while the “indifferent” tenants a bit undervalue good EPCs and a bit overvalue bad EPCs.

The indifference concerning the EPC slows down a progressive introduction of the impact of the energy performance on a residential rental market. In a policy context, the availability of a clear information on EPC for all tenants is an important condition of the functioning of the residential rental market in a manner that stimulates the renovation of old housing stock and the maintenance of high energy standards.

In the coming decades, many countries need to improve the energy efficiency of their building stock, to realize the climate and renewable energy goals. In the Netherlands, this involves more than 5 million dwellings and many billions euros in costs. A considerable part of these costs has to be carried by home owners, and the challenge is to motivate them to timely invest in energy retrofitting.

Households experience various barriers on their way to energy retrofitting of homes. Most prominent are: a high cost of gathering and verifying the information, financial constraints, risk aversion (Gerarden et al, 2017,

Busse et al., 2013, Allcott and Wozny, 2014, Cattaneo, 2019). In the recent years various attempts have been made to address these barriers exploiting the possibilities of new digital communication technologies. Supported by (local) governments, new online platforms provide home owners looking for energy-efficiency investments with different services. These include: tailor-made advice on best energy-efficiency investments in specific homes; preselection of suppliers of a certain chosen technology (e.g. insulation, solar panels, high return boilers); setting up a collective purchase campaign for a neighbourhood, etc.

There exists a small literature studying the effectiveness of online platforms in reducing consumer search and verification costs for products (Goldfarb and Tucker, 2019). For various domains (airlines, book stores, holiday homes) studies show that digital environments increase the share of successful matches between customers and suppliers. Still, not much is known yet to what degree this also holds for digital platforms that support purchasing of new home energy technologies. Further, little attention has been given so far to the heterogeneity of the consumers: for which groups of customers online platforms work well or for which not. Our study aims to fill these two knowledge gaps.

We exploit unique data from a Dutch online platform that supports home owners in their collective purchase of various energy efficient home technologies. The data include information on some 10.000 platform participants and 300 collective purchase campaigns during the period 2013-2020. The data are merged on household level to the restricted access information about the socio-economic characteristics of the households and to their energy consumption. We study the determinants of the energy-efficiency investment choices households make on the platforms. These determinants include: the socio-economic characteristics of the households, their energy consumption pattern, the type of energy-efficient technology that is being purchased, etc.

This paper has practical implications. Research shows that households differ in their energy consumption patterns and in their attitude towards energy transition (e.g. Albert and Maasoumy, 2016; Motlagh et al., 2019; Ossokina et al., 2020). It is therefore important to provide customized information to the consumers and select precise tools for specific household groups. Our study provides insights on how to do this using online environments that are being used more and more to support and stimulate energy transition in homes.

In the coming decades, many countries need to improve the energy efficiency of their building stock, to realize the climate and renewable energy goals. In the Netherlands, this involves more than 5 million dwellings and many billions euros in costs. Around half of these costs will be carried by public housing providers who are required by regulation to radically improve the insulation and heating in their extensive dwelling stock.
Existing research suggests that the energy savings from energy retrofitting in homes strongly depend on residents’ behavioural responses. Savings predicted by engineering models are often not realized due to the rebound effect – consumers tend to increase their energy consumption after retrofitting (e.g. Fowlie et al., 2018, Davis et al., 2014, Alcott and Greenstone, 2017, Aydin et al., 2017). Much less is known however about the determinants of the rebound on a household level: how does it differ by type of technology, type of household and dwelling. Our study aims to fill this knowledge gap, specifically for the public housing sector.

We exploit unique dwelling-level data on some 2 thousand energy retrofitting investments performed by Dutch public housing providers between 2015 and 2018. Detailed longitudinal information on the energy efficiency measures per dwelling is merged to the restricted access data about the socio-economic characteristics, dwelling characteristics and energy consumption of the resident households. We identify econometrically the effect of retrofitting on energy savings with a propensity score matching methodology, by comparing the changes in the energy use in retrofitted dwellings and in similar non-retrofitted houses. Then, the rebound effect is derived and its determinants are examined. We extend the literature by providing new microdata-based evidence for a European country, comparing the behavioural effects of various energy-saving home technologies and looking specifically at the public housing sector.

This paper has practical implications. Detailed insight in the size and determinants of household behavioural responses to retrofitting measures is crucial to optimally shape energy transition (e.g. Ossokina et al., 2020). Our paper will give public housing providers tools to anticipate on behavioural responses of tenants by customizing energy retrofitting measures and selecting tailored investments for specific household and dwelling groups.

Among the statistics published by Eurostat are housing price statistics but also many other housing related statistics. These statistics are key for policy makers but also for households due to their economic, social and environmental importance.

European statistics on house prices are part of the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP), which is a surveillance mechanism that aims to identify potential macroeconomic risks early on, prevent the emergence of harmful macroeconomic imbalances and correct the imbalances that are already in place.

In the surveillance of the COVID 19 impact on economic activities housing prices play a role as well.

Every quarter, Eurostat publishes indices on:

• house prices with a breakdown for new and existing dwellings,
• owner occupiers housing price indices,
• numbers and volumes of house sales.

Beyond these indices, Eurostat also publishes many economic, social and environmental statistics related to housing allowing analysis of trends and correlations as well as comparisons between countries and European averages. In particular, they aim at providing answers to questions on:

• How do we live? With indicators on (a) tenure status (owner or tenant), dwelling type (house, flat) by degree of urbanisation, (b) the size of housing, (c) the quality of housing and (d) the environmental impact of housing.
• What does housing cost? With indicators on (a) the evolution of house prices and rents and (b) housing affordability.
• What is the importance of the construction sector in the economy and land use?

An overview of these statistics can be found in the following online publication released for the first time in December 2020: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/digpub/housing

The presentation will guide to find the relevant information on the Eurostat website which is free of charge and can be consulted on https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/.

Social preservation areas, so-called 'milieu protection areas', are currently a popular instrument in urban policy of major German cities such as Berlin, Hamburg, or Munich, which promises to protect residents from displacement. Ownership rights are restricted here, e.g., through modernisation regulations and controls on conversions from rented to owner-occupied flats. In the popular Berlin district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, for example, 40 % of the area has now been designated as a milieu protection area, with corresponding effects on the property markets. The federal government is currently planning an amendment to the Building Act with similar regulations. Therefore, we take a closer look at the effects of these restrictions on the property market for Berlin and address the central question How have purchase prices for condominium in Berlin's milieu protection areas developed and how does milieu protection affect them? We look at housing transactions from 2015 to 2019 provided by the Expert Committees for Property Values, relate these to further neighbourhood data and regress the transaction price using hedonic modelling in the various spatial submarkets inside and outside the milieu protection areas. We conclude that milieu protection areas are placed in areas where higher prices are paid beforehand and milieu protection itself does not reduce the attractiveness on the markets. In addition, modernisations are made more difficult, which in turn is associated with larger price increases for features (e.g., balconies) in the areas. The much-criticised converted flats cannot be associated with luxury refurbishment in the study. Our paper contributes to the discussion on urban development laws that focus on property restriction activities.

The Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) market has become an increasingly important vehicle of alternative investment for equity investors. While existing research examining the cross-section of REIT returns usually employs standard risk factors in the in-sample models, it can only show ex-post predictability of REIT returns. The goal of our paper is to examine the ex-ante predictability of REIT returns (i.e., the ability of investors earning abnormal returns in real time). We employ the out-of-sample methodology of Cooper, Gutierrez, and Marcum (2005), and our findings show that ex-ante predictability of REIT returns is rather weak. For about half of our 19-year sample over the period of 1999 to 2017, the portfolio performances of REIT firms chosen ex-ante do not beat the performances of the FTSE-NAREIT or the CRSP Equal-Weighted index. After adjusting for transaction costs, the REIT portfolios significantly underperform their benchmarks. Overall, our findings show that the market is relatively efficient in the REIT sector, and it is difficult for investors to devise trading strategies that improve the ex-ante predictability of REIT returns based on the standard risk factors.

Economic changes, increasing competitive pressure, and growing dynamics in organizations require flexible and efficient provision of space. These altered occupier requirements lead to changes within the office sector. In today's knowledge work, the purpose of office space is extending from a place of pure space provision and productivity to a social place that allows social interaction, creativity, and more space for informal meetings. To address these new requirements, corporate real estate no longer measures the provision of space in terms of pure costs, but increasingly includes factors such as employee satisfaction, quality and service, collaboration, and social interaction.

Flexible Office Spaces, or so-called “Coworking Spaces,” are characterized by the provision of temporally and spatially flexible space with a high service orientation. This operator model has the potential to change the real estate value chain. The operator leases larger areas on a long-term basis, (sub)leases individual managed workplaces to the user and thus provides a risk and maturity transformation. With an operator as an intermediary, the way in which commercial space is provided is changing. This process within the real estate industry is driven by the occupiers.

This research project investigates to what extent Flexible Office Space meets the (new) requirements of the occupiers for provision of space. We apply a model of requirements and value contribution of space provision on the provision of flexible office space. For an empirical analysis, 59 corporate real estate managers from large German companies were surveyed. Correlation and bivariate regression analyses were used to show which of these requirements are related to the use of Flexible Office Space.

The results indicate that Flexible Office Space is an alternative form of space provision for large companies. We find that requirements for flexibility, innovation, collaboration, and creativity as well as employee well-being and satisfaction correspond with Flexible Office Space. However, they do not associate Flexible Office Space with an increase in work productivity, corporate identity, corporate social responsibility, or a strengthening of employer branding. The results enable CRE managers to assess which requirements for space provision are addressed by Flexible Office Space. This helps in deciding whether it is appropriate to use Flexible Office Space within the real estate strategy.

Flexible workspace providers have disrupted the traditional office market by offering space with different levels of curated services available to hire on a membership basis. Initially considered a solution for freelancers and start-ups, the current market of flexible workspace has grown in the number of operators, size of take-ups and clientele, which now also includes large corporations. Despite the growth, the flexible workspace business model raises concern, along with the covenant strength of its operators. The great initial expenses flexible workspace providers incur to fit out space, associated with a volatile revenue stream obtained from subletting the space in short-term and flexible memberships might trigger landlords to put a risk premium on top of the rent. On the other hand, it can be argued that housing flexible workspaces is a way to add an amenity to the building and capture end-users that would not be reached by a conventional lease. Furthermore, flexible workspace providers usually make more substantial lease commitments, both in terms of size and length, which might lead landlords to apply a discount to such tenants. This study investigates whether flexible workspace providers pay a higher, equivalent, or lower rents than other tenants within the same building by comparing their effective rent using data from the London market between 2011 and 2021. The results of the analysis suggest that there is a negative statistically and economically significant difference in the effective rents paid by flexible workspace providers in comparison to their peers.

Investments into built environments have become a major economic driver, and throughout Europe, regions compete to attract (international) investment capital. Over decades, regional economic analysts have explored and theorized processes of change to adequately plan for regional development. Changes connected to financialized property markets, however, challenge some of the most fundamental assumptions and principles of regional economic analysis: when the built environment is considered as a tradable investment asset, and liquid capital only temporarily fixes in land and property as a by-product, prominent spatial models and theories that centre for example around the role of industry clusters and the locational choices of firms for regional economies, become largely uninstructive. 

This paper calls for new avenues in regional economic analysis that incorporate financialized property markets and the spatial cognition of investment actors. I argue for a combination of territorial evidence, commercial property investment transaction data, and in-depth insights into the spatial cognition of property market actors in regional investment decisions. The paper begins by reviewing dominant approaches in regional economic analysis. I evaluate the extent to which commonly used indicators capture and reflect financialised property market dynamics and subsequently develop an adapted framework for regional economic analysis. The framework particularly emphasises the need to move beyond widespread assumptions on the rational economic behaviour of property investors by including their perceptions, emotions and intersubjectivities influencing investment locations.  

The twofold analysis follows a mixed-method approach. First, I conduct a fine-grained analysis of regional economic indicators and their link to residential property investment patterns in continental Western Europe on the basis of detailed territorial evidence from the European Spatial Planning Observation Network. Then, I cross-analyse the territorial evidence with commercial property investment data. By mapping datasets conjointly, I can identify major (mis)matches in regional trends between territorial indicators, transactions volumes and investor profiles. Lastly, I zoom into the Amsterdam Metropolitan Region to unravel context-dependent cognitive structures of investment actors through in-depth interviews with residential property investors to explain these (mis)matches. I end the paper by reviewing the framework and stressing the importance of including territorial data in real estate studies, conducting novel regional analysis valuable for real estate and regional studies scholars and practitioners alike. 

Visual representations play a paramount role in real estate sales, and thus valuation, therefore we show pictures of two different apartment conditions to experimental subjects. We investigate in a 2 x 2 experimental design if a furnished apartment (where the furniture is explicitly not included in the purchase price) is valued differently compared to the same apartment without furniture. The test treatment contains pictures of a flat with average furniture (no style elements or costly products). The control treatment depicts the same apartment without furniture (toilet and kitchen line are included). We show the two sets of pictures in different sequences to university student subjects and let them post a value estimate for both groups of apartment pictures.

In preliminary research we find evidence that disorder, which should not have an impact on property valuation, has a significant influence on value estimates lowering the mean price estimate by around 13%. Due to the evidence on the influence of disorder, we hypothesise that the presence of furniture increases the attractiveness of the presented flat and therefore has a positive impact on price evaluations.

Urban shrinkage is a significant challenge in many countries across the globe. However, it is a serious challenge, especially in European countries. For instance, it has been estimated that one-fifth of European cities have experienced population loss between 1990 and 2010. Urban shrinkage will cause significant problems for the local real estate market, such as decreasing real estate prices and values, the decay of buildings, segregation, increasing vacant and abandoned properties. Uncertain value development of the local estates can drive the total economic base of the city at risk. In addition, the current unsustainable real estate market development causes many negative consequences that can have far-reaching implications for the future development of the real estate market.

Our research focuses on future real estate market development in shrinking cities, aiming to identify and explain the future consequences of the forces of change affecting the local real estate market. First, the forces of change such as megatrends, trends, wild cards, driving forces, and weak signals were identified by utilizing the Environmental scanning method. Second, the future consequences of the forces for change were analysed by utilizing the future wheel method. This method is mainly used in future research to reveal primary, secondary, and tertiary consequences of trends, events, or emerging issues. The results of our research are useful for several parties operating in the real estate market, such as urban planners, real estate investors and owners.

An impervious surface generates high storm water runoff volumes which overwhelm drainage systems caused frequent urban flash flood episodes. Green roof is a highly efficient green infrastructure in reducing urban storm water runoff. Studies have agreed on most important green roof characteristics that contributed in reducing storm water runoff are substrates depth, type of vegetation, and roof slope. However, to date, no study has drawn a connection between these performances and cost that contributes to the performance. This is important as cost is the utmost barrier for green roof implementation. Therefore, this study motivates to assess cost and benefit of substrates depth, type of vegetation, and roof slope for intensive and extensive green roof. Roof slope is the utmost cost-efficient green roof characteristics for storm water runoff reduction at 1: 1.5 and 1: 2.2 for extensive and intensive green roof. Type of vegetation contributes to the highest cost for both green roofs. Substrate depth is only cost-efficient for intensive green roof at ratio 1: 1.4. This study is significant in encouraging building owner and investor to implement green roof by providing substantial evidence on it efficiencies and cost that contributes to the effectiveness. This will eventually promote the growth of green building within building sectors.

In Ankara, capital of Turkey, the neoliberalism in the 1980’s has differentiated the manner of housing supply. The period of housing for all segments of society have begun besides affordable housing. Such an economic development has caused urban sprawl with the impacts of land speculation, increase in transportation facilities and some incorrect public policies. All these drivers of urban sprawl are most closely associated with the housing market, so housing demand dynamics in particular are become the main determinants of uncontrolled urban growth.

The leapfrog development of Ankara’s western corridor in the last four decades remains a challenge for central-local governments. Land consumption, insufficient public transport for the expanding urban area, socio-spatial segregation, and urban infrastructure imposing additional financial burden threaten both environmental and economic sustainability. Today, although there are enough vacant lots in the city center, the city is growing outward and there is great pressure on the rural-urban fridge where farming still occurs. Furthermore, spatial development in this region and upper scale plan decisions are in conflict with each other. It is obvious that the driving forces of urban sprawl will be better understood by determining the housing demand dynamics.

In this study, a hedonic model is established to analyze the dynamics of housing demand, which is the hidden driving force of urban sprawl in Ankara. The in-situ study including 303 face-to-face surveys is conducted in Alacaatli and Yasamkent Neighborhoods -approximately the size of 2,420 hectares- on June 2018 and data obtained as a result of the survey are used as variables in the hedonic model. The findings reveal that factors such as security and crime that reduce welfare in the city center and low-quality or traditional housing types in the city center stimulate the urban expansion towards large open spaces. The results show that socioeconomic status and lifestyles are related with the preference to live in urban sprawl areas, and the city center is not preferred for residential purposes since it is seen as unsafe and chaotic. It is proposed that the domain-specific housing demand dynamics in urban sprawl areas must be considered in spatial planning assumptions for the sustainable development of Ankara.

We investigate whether and the extent to which buyer’s characteristics affect housing transaction prices. Using the transaction data of existing apartments from 2014 to 2017 in Guangzhou, China, our results show that buyer’s locality, motivation and financial ability affect the transaction prices. Non-local buyers pay a premium. First-time buyers gain a discount. Experienced repeat buyers for upgrading pay a premium. We also find that buyer’s financial ability affects purchasing power and transaction prices. The buyers paying the acquisition through mortgage gain a higher discount or pay a lower premium than their counterparts paying in cash. Internet using itself won’t affect transaction price. When it is combined with buyer’s other characteristics, the buyers using internet to obtain the property information have information advantage over the ones using tradition method and gain a higher discount or pay a lower premium than their counterparts using traditional method. This finding is important for market participates and regulators to improve information efficiency and transparency through technology.

Large-scale urban development projects in the post Global Financial Crisis (GFC) era are often assessed with a substantial focus on financially driven decision making by property market actors, above other considerations. In this contemporary period of constant renovation of cities anchored in deindustrialization, this focus is quickly interpreted as commodification a result of financial globalization and common associates, without thorough consideration of post crisis development from the market actor perspective, and their relative relationship to urban planning actors. The following research study assess the transition of the identity of the South Axis (Zuidas) financial business district in Amsterdam to a mixed-use neighbourhood that accelerated after the GFC, and examines what catalysts were in place for a more ‘flexible’, yet large scale, mixed-use development project to emerge. This location is distinct for two key reasons: the first, that Amsterdam has concentrated a record share and volume of foreign commercial real estate investment in the post-GFC era, and secondly that plans for high density Class A office space have been quickly replaced by residential complexes of a similar variety, maintaining a degree of standardization. This can be used to highlight that during this same period the commercial real estate sector has shifted from mono-functional nodes and single asset classes, to mixed-use and multi-asset portfolios, demonstrating that property market actors are actually moving closer to urban planning paradigms. Further trends such as walk-ability and human-scale design are also attributes that are appearing in the world of commercial real estate, principles that have been long advocated by the world of urban planning. The following research paper sets a qualitative analysis using actor interviews and planning documents along an evolving backdrop to dissuade the archetypal pure financial motivations of actors involved in the business of city building.

Higher Education in Real Estate and Facility Management is provided at Universities and Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS) in Switzerland. The first Master of Science Program in Facility Management has been established at the Institute of Facility Management in 2008 at the Department of Life Sciences and Facility Management at Zurich UAS. The MSc in FM achieved accreditation by IFMA and attracted a high number of international students. Referring to IFMA all competence fields and the entire life cycle in Real Estate and FM where addressed. About ten years later the first Master of Science in Real Estate Management has been established at the School of business and finance at the UAS Luzern. Before that and in addition to the Bachelor and Master of Science Programs academic qualification was provided at Universities and UAS within professional training courses on academic level. The swiss education system provides several qualification tracs and involves training on the job and continuous education programs towards lifelong learning possibilities. Today about 18% of Bachelor graduates decide to continue studying on Master level at Swiss UAS. Higher education has become more and more important. Continuous education in the context of Real Estate and FM has been provided in Master of Advanced Studies (MAS) and Certificates of Advanced Studies (CAS) at several UAS and universities in Switzerland. Table 1 (see attachment) provides an overview of Higher Education programs in Real Estate and Facility Management in Switzerland, Netherland, and Norway at business schools and at faculties of architecture and the built environment. Research, education, and practice at the IFM are integrated towards an interdisciplinary approach. The IFM has expertise in strategic facilities management, real estate management, workplace management and business skills, as well as hospitality and service management, property technology, sustainability, and digital transformation.

Research and Education at the Institute of Facility Management (IFM) at ZHAW: ZHAW is the largest UAS in Switzerland with 13’000 students and about 3000 employees. The Zurich UAS is located on three campus areas and is structured in eight schools from Architecture to Social Sciences. The IFM is located at the School of Life Sciences and Facility Management (LSFM) at the Lake of Zurich (Campus Wädenswil, Canton Zurich). In addition, IFM has a long tradition in the provision of continuous education courses in Zurich (Campus Zurich, Canton Zurich). Zurich is a very attractive location and ZHAW in the canton of Zurich and Winterthur provides an excellent environment for higher education in MSc REFM. In 2020/21 about 250 students have been enrolled in the bachelor in FM program. Main areas of education and research are: Workplace, FM in Health Care, and Real Estate and Service Management. Around 60 new Master students per year are expected with the new Curriculum of the MSc REFM starting by autumn 2022. Considered the interdisciplinary context of Real estate, architecture and engineering industry FM has become the missing link between realization, operation, and usability of the built environment.

Reengineering of a Master of Science study program in Real Estate and Facility Management: The former Master of Science program came to the end of its life cycle after more than 13 years in existence. How should an existing Master of Science program be reengineered to attract students? Didactically, the heterogeneity of the students’ background must be dealt with in many Master of Science programs. This is also true for this MSc REFM. The article introduces fundamental considerations and presents a structural framework that is tailored to a reengineered teaching and learning process.

Based on interviews with executives from the private sector and public administration, an expert workshop with participants from senior management from the private sector and public institutions, market and internal research at the IFM, student surveys, and requirements of the FM professional associations, it is shown that the (future) specialists and executives in real estate and facility management are confronted with challenges which require a holistic management of infrastructures - starting with the planning and creation through the use up to the dismantling (see also “Real Estate Economics: Volume 1 - Business Basics”, 3rd edition, edited by Karl-Werner Schulte, Munich, page 374). These requirements are also reflected in the GEFMA 100 guideline of the German Facility Management Association. Furthermore, the disciplines that are primarily to be located in a real estate life cycle, such as architecture, business administration and engineering, are supplemented by an entrepreneurial dimension consisting of content from disciplines such as personnel management, change management, law, operational technologies, building technology and IT. In addition, knowledge about topics in sustainability and digitalization is a nowadays must, nearly independently of the chosen study program.

Instead of reengineering the MSc program on its own, the IFM choose to build strong cooperation and links with other departments at the ZHAW, and partners in the public and private real estate sector. The Reengineering of the MSc REFM curriculum has been also developed in cooperation with the division Banking Finance Insurance (ABF) at the School of Management and Law (SML), which is located in the city of Winterthur (Campus Winterthur, Canton Winterthur).

Conclusion and outlook: Master of Science in Real Estate and Facility Management has become an academia and industry driven program IFM’s mission is the sustainable development of healthy work and living environments. Research and education are guided by basic understanding of Facilities Management definition as the integration of people, process, place, and technology. The institutes international network with universities and UAS, like international PhD Program with NTNU, participation in European research and students exchange programs is developing further. The IFM is looking forward to strengthening collaboration in research and education and starting the new interdisciplinary MSc REFM in autumn 2022. 

Among the housing statistics published by Eurostat, housing price statistics are available for more than a decade. However, house sales statistics in number and value of transactions are publicly available only since summer 2020 capturing quarterly information for many European countries at least since 2015.

Housing statistics are key for policy makers but also for households due to their economic and social importance.

In the surveillance of the COVID 19 impact on economic activities, housing prices did not yet show a huge impact of the economic downturn in many countries. In contrast, house sales indicated a slowdown of housing market activities. Consequently, these indicators are essential for analyzing crisis developments.

During the ERES conference begin June 2021 the data for all the quarters in 2020 will be available in the Eurostat database encompassing house sales indicators for 24 European countries.

Every quarter, Eurostat publishes the following indicators:

• house prices with a breakdown for new and existing dwellings,
• owner occupiers housing price indices,
• numbers and volumes of house sales.

These indicators support not only medium and long-term analyses of this key sector of the economy but in addition allow monitoring crisis effects.

The presentation provides a preliminary analysis for European countries and will guide to find the requested information on the Eurostat website which is free of charge and can be consulted on https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/.

The world’s housing affordability “epidemic” has vindicated Charles Abrams that as far as housing is concerned, “the whole world is underdeveloped”. Notwithstanding all the advances in knowledge and technology, a solution has thus far proved elusive. The paper takes a holistic view to discuss the multifaceted nature of the housing affordability problem to conclude that the insuperability of the problem is buttressed by the vested interests of the advantaged power brokers. The root-cause of the problem is poverty. The problem can be solved if we have the will to make economics serve mankind (humanomics) instead of mankind serving economics.

This paper analyses the differences on housing poverty across EU countries. By using EU-Silc data base, the metrics of housing poverty are estimated by country during 2005-2019. The paper analyses different aspects of housing poverty as the incidence, the relationship with poverty, the tenure effect on this type of poverty and the relationship with the household type. By using panel data methodology, the paper explores the housing-related reasons to explain the poverty likelihood in the 27 EU countries.

The purpose of this research is to examine housing price volatility and its determinants in Auckland, a housing market that has experienced an upward trend in real estate prices with fluctuations. This study is different from existing literature by differentiating two types of transactions: leveraged investment and leveraged owner-occupancy. The housing price volatility of these two groups is estimated using GARCH-M models. This study then builds two VAR models as frameworks to conduct Granger causality tests, impulse response analyses and variance decomposition analyses. It is found that the volatility of those two types of sales responds differently to shocks in variables. In addition, a shock in the growth rate of housing prices, especially a negative shock, is the most significant determinant of the housing price volatility for both leveraged investment and leveraged owner-occupancy. The findings of this research bear implications for policy-makers.

Nowadays, the professional figure of “workplace manager” is achieving greater relevance due to changes affecting the nature of contemporary ways of working. Managing today’s workplace complexity requires professionals who can satisfy promptly a variety of user needs through an interdisciplinary approach ( World Economic Forum, 2018). Despite the emergent market demand, this profession is relatively young and its job description remains largely undefined in between many fields of knowledge (Appel-Meulenbroek, Clippard, & Pfnür, 2018).

We undertook a large investigation of academic classes and professional courses in EU to understand the extent to which structured education programs are supporting the background of the future workplace managers. We compared about 490 academic classes in real estate and 20 professional courses through a desk research, and created a critical framework of the current educational offer. This analysis. Afterwards, data were cross-examined thanks to 10 interviews with workplace professionals.

We found that few programs focus on workplace management, therefore educational courses cannot fully meet the market needs, yet. This lack is partially filled with professional courses, but they only consider some aspects of the workplace and miss a fundamental transdisciplinary approach.

Consequently, our investigations suggest that education in workplace management should evolve and gain the relevance of an autonomous discipline. This would probably contribute to find a better match between the job market demand and the academic training.

The theoretical model of Merton (1987) predicts a positive relation between idiosyncratic risk and returns, for investors who are not fully diversified.  Investors in the private real estate market hold particularly undiversified portfolios due to lack of information, transaction costs, liquidity requirements, taxes, etc..  Therefore, it is especially important to see whether private real estate returns are significantly related to idiosyncratic risk.  

The lack of research in the private real estate market due to the lack of high frequency data needed to construct measures of idiosyncratic risk.  To overcome this problem we use the cross sectional variance (CSV) as our measure of idiosyncratic risk, as it is calculably at any frequency and is model free.  

Using monthly data for 35 real estate market segments over the period 1987:1 to 2019:12 the results indicate that CSV is highly correlated with idiosyncratic risk measured by the average variance of errors from the market model.  Therefore, we consider CSV a good proxy for idiosyncratic risk in the private real estate market.

Then using quantile regression methodology we find that there is a positive relationship in the higher quantiles but an insignificant negative effect in the low quantiles for average market returns 1, 3, 6, 9 and 12 months ahead.  Lastly, we find high idiosyncratic risk portfolios produce significantly higher returns than low idiosyncratic risk portfolios.  

The results indicate that idiosyncratic risk significantly affects private real estate returns.  The study therefore provides important implications for investors and fund managers, as well as researchers.  

Limited economic feasibility due to high investment costs and relatively small energy cost savings are seen as a major reason for low energetic refurbishment rates of the building stock in many countries. Improving economic feasibility can therefore be essential to increase refurbishment rates. Carbon tax or subsidies are possible ways to achieve this. To assess the impact and potential of these instruments, typically life cycle costing (LCC) methods are used.

In this research, a typical single-family house in Germany is taken as an example that can also apply to other countries. Traditional and innovative refurbishment concepts in line with national climate goals are examined regarding their economic feasibility when accounting for the full costs of the refurbishment. The LCC of refurbishment concepts are analyzed with and without the impact of carbon tax.

It is found that carbon tax reduces the amortization time of the full refurbishment costs from 55 years (w/o carbon tax) to 38-56 years for gas heating systems and 32-51 years for heat pumps (strongly depending on carbon tax after 2025). This can be improved further by earmarking carbon tax revenues from the building sector as funding grants for energetic refurbishments.

Without earmarking the tax revenues, substantially shorter amortization periods can only be achieved through initially higher or steadily increasing carbon tax rates. A steady increase of the carbon tax rate, which translates into an annual growth of 3-4% in energy costs of fossil fuels, can lead to the desired steering effect. Furthermore, it allows for rather low initial carbon tax rates in 2021-2025. An increase in funding grants further shortens payback periods. While carbon taxes should be used preferably to improve economic efficiency, funding grants can reduce investment hurdles. By concentrating grants on low-income building owners, the impact on barriers to investment should be maximized.

Earmarking the carbon tax revenues as funding grants can mitigate the yearly increase of carbon taxes and at the same time decrease investment hurdles. Depending on the carbon tax levels and the development of the building stock (greenhouse gas emissions, refurbishment rate), the funding grants can improve the feasibility significantly. Initial estimations have shown that already through the reinvestment of the initial carbon tax revenues of 2021 in Germany the investment costs for the full energetic refurbishment of single-family houses can be decreased by roughly 10%.

This study examines the impact of municipal land use planning on land values in Hamburg, Germany during the time period 2010-2018. While the study of zoning has been well documented in the United States (McDonald & McMillen, 1993 & 1998; Asbere & Huffmann, 1991; Glaeser & Ward, 2009; Kok et al., 2014), this is the first study that directly examines zoning in Germany. Since the principles of municipal zoning vary considerably between traditional American and German applications (Hirt, 2007), this study aims to bridge the prevailing literature gap and extend the research to Europe. Unlike most previous studies, this research also examines the impact of rezoning as opposed to initial zoning (Munneke, 2005).

The German land use plan (Flächennutzungsplan) discloses the long-term land use and forms the basis of the legally binding development plans (Bebauungspläne) of the city. Over the 2010-2018 time frame, the city of Hamburg has issued 53 changes to its land use plan that have resulted in adaptations to the development plans of the city. These changes can be broken down to 115 individual changes by type, which are grouped to determine the overall impact of different types of land use changes. They range from new green spaces to residential, commercial and mixed zones. Since the zoning classification is provided by one source, a comparable definition of zoning is applied throughout. Fixed-effects panel estimation is used to identify the impact of 4 different types of land-use changes on adjacent land values. The impact analysis is done for land values of different property types, including single and multiple family homes, stores and office buildings, and for different distance buffers. Using time lags the responses at different periods in time after the announcement are explored.

The present study analyses the relationship between home tenure status and life satisfaction applying fixed-effects regressions. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984 to 2018, we first find that compared to renting a home, owning one has an overall significant positive effect on life satisfaction. Hereby, we confirm results of already existing studies. Secondly, by examining homeowners and their different financing conditions more closely, we show that having a real estate loan impacts homeowners’ life satisfaction negatively by 0,048 points on a 10-point Likert scale. Taken together, these two antagonistic effects sum up to a null effect, which opposes most of the conclusions of related literature. By choosing to compare indebted homeowner, and not homeowners in general, to renters, we intend to contribute to a more thorough understanding of the effects of tenure status on life satisfaction. Additionally, we examine the temporal effects five years before and after the change in tenure status. As we obtain mixed results, the effects of anticipation and adaptation of life satisfaction remain to be further investigated.

Purpose: The paper discusses the problematic aspects of the valuation of a property or related investment project using the discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis. The exact formula of the method is obtained taking into account the variability of the discount rate.

Design/methodology/approach: Well-known formulas of DCF analysis were refined in the case of the discount rate variability using the induction method.

Findings: The exact formulas of the DCF method with a variable discount rate are obtained.

Originality/value: The use of the obtained exact formulas reduces the calculation error from using the traditional formula with a constant discount rate.

Time and again, after crises in the course of history, stricter building regulations occurred and not only had a sustained impact on the occupants but also the operator and the builders. For example, after the fire of 1942 in the Coconut Grove nightclub in Boston, outward-swinging doors and emergency exit signs were implemented and became the international standard. Unbreakable glass and concrete core constructions resulted from the experience of 9/11. The corona pandemic, which has been spreading since the end of 2019, presented unforeseen challenges and uncertainties, not least for institutional investors of office properties or Corporate Real Estate Managers. The home office, which was previously often negative, had to be implemented rapidly on an unprecedented scale and led to very low occupancy rates in office buildings. Companies ran into cash flow problems and government assistance was necessary to cover the rental costs for unused workspaces. Despite positive developments for a vaccine, experts predict a permanent upheaval in the design and planning of workplace demands.

This analysis of the latest literature is focusing on the physical and organizational provisions being debated in terms of infection-resistant work environments and the associated impacts on the real estate office market are deducted.

As it's now well-established that COVID-19 transmission commonly occurs in closed spaces by particles containing the virus, the demands for stricter hygiene measures and effective heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system could pave the way for a new type of office with a hospital-like character. The predicted increase of remote working concepts ensures (social) distancing, but increases the need for digitalization and leads to low occupancy rates and therefore reduced demand for office spaces. Alongside these aspects, physical implementations in existing office buildings like high-walled booths, wide corridors, one-way traffic, and air inlet systems could influence construction costs and office fit-outs.

The line of discussion will focus on the predicted solutions for infection-resistant offices and the impact on the real estate office market which are associated with their implementations.

Many different factors influence the market value of real estate. These include the general location as well as the areas of the land and the living space, the type of building and the year of construction, etc.

In Germany, publicly derived standard land values, property interest rates or marked adjustment factor (in the cost approach) describe the structural differences in location. Investigations on the relationship to socio-economic indicators and facilities of social services of general interests (e.g. family doctors, primary school, supermarkets), especially regarding their accessibility, do not exist. But an indirect relationship does exist. The standard land values and other required data also reflects the supply situation close to the place of residence. This research gap will be closed by examining corresponding data for their value relevance.

In Germany, a major problem is the availability and associated with this the investigability of relevant data. The Atlas of Services of General Interest of the Federal State of Lower Saxony (DVAN) will address this problem in the future. The DVAN is under development in a research project of the authors. For the first time, various map layers on infrastructure facilities in the areas of education (kindergartens, schools, libraries), health care (family doctors, ophthalmologists, psychotherapists, hospitals, etc.) and retail will be available in an internal administrative web application, which can be combined with population and accessibility data for the means of transport pedestrians, bicycles, pedelecs, cars and public transport. Further topics and different analysis methods for describing the supply situation will be integrated in the future.

For the valuation, it is important that the neighbourhood of a residential real estate ensures at least basic services. The following applies: A high quality of life implies good accessibility to public social services. The better the supply situation, the higher the quality. Also, the demand on the location is higher. Therefore, a value relevance for the access to social services of general interest can be assumed.

For the presented investigation, the processed data and other generated variables of the DVAN, as well as the purchase cases of the last few years from the purchase price collection, were analysed in regard of their market value relevance. After the theoretical consideration of possible value relevance, the modelling is carried out in factor analysis and then using structural equation models. We would like to present the interim results and discuss the research question: Does a parameter 'social service of general interest close to home' improve the understanding of the composition of the market value of residential real estate?

In the future, the results are compared with the established hedonic models and validated through expert interviews.

In current European practices, actors in real estate and urban transformation are highly dependent on one another. Contemporary inner-city transformation projects are particularly challenging in terms of collaboration and financing, as they need to address the need for housing as well as new demands in mobility, health, energy, climate adaptation and other sectors. Among other things, such cross-sectoral projects need to allocate funding from multiple public and private sources in a timely fashion, which is a challenge in its own right. Moreover, long-term urban transformation projects require large sums of up-front financing due to high land assembly, site preparation and real estate construction costs. Such financing is usually difficult to obtain. Project proposals face strict conditions from private lenders and investors, and limited availability of government funding, value capturing, and legal co-financing possibilities (Daamen et al., 2020). In many countries, these and other trends have spurred a quest for innovative financing instruments for real estate development (e.g. Squires et al., 2015).

The Netherlands is a case in point. Here, innovative financing arrangements that combine the realization of public values and private return are believed to offer great potential for inner-city transformation projects. As part of a study funded by a Dutch government-industry coalition, we identified and assessed two of such innovative financing arrangements: Revolving Funds and Area Improvement Districts (Heurkens et al., 2020). The essence of the Revolving Fund is that public bodies – once private finance due to estimated risks in unavailable – pre-finance the realization of local public amenities and/or private real estate investments with sustainability objectives such as energy transition or shared mobility solutions. Such pre-financing has the precondition that the loan is repaid (with interest) to the fund, thus making it available for reinvestment—hence its revolving nature. The idea of an Area Improvement Districts is based on the financing mechanism behind Business Improvement Districts practiced in the US. These are aimed at obtaining a proportional financial contribution from property owners, investors and (potentially) developers for collective amenities or infrastructures in the area. These contributions are based on the expected increase in real estate value and the social impact of investments, which are pre-financed from a privately managed fund.

Both innovative financing arrangements provide possible answers to, and might reinforce, increasing interdependencies between the public and private sector in urban planning and development (Heurkens et al., 2015). In addition, they aim to arrange and designate finance collectively in order to synthesize public and private values in the built environment. Potentially, they could prove to be beneficial for financing specific urban transformation projects with innovative sustainability solutions that have not yet proven to generate satisfactory returns. Nonetheless, both arrangements might also involve institutional changes – ranging from adapting government legislation, rethinking real estate financing structures, or changing actor behaviors and cultures – that prohibit a widespread adoption in practice. Moreover, one might ask whether such hybrid financing arrangements, and associated interdependencies such as shared risks, are desirable from a political and financial risk management point of view. Therefore, further research necessitates a closer examination of the features of, conditions for and effects of applications of innovative financing arrangements in urban transformation practices.

The Norwegian state housing bank offers economic subsidies to stimulate instalment of elevators in existing apartment buildings in which stairway is the only passageway. The subsidy constitutes about 50 percent of the total costs of installing elevators, provided that certain conditions are met. The political motivation for this subsidy is to reduce the likelihood that residents in such apartment buildings will have to relocate if their mobility is reduced, e.g., due to old age.

In this paper we study the economics of investing in elevators, both from the societal point of view and from the residents’ point of view. Elevators might enable residents to continue to live in their apartment even if their health deteriorates. Hence, installation of elevators will have both monetary and non-monetary consequences. In this study, focus is placed mainly on the monetary implications of such an investment. An elevator may reduce the likelihood that residents suffer injuries associated with falls when climbing the stairs and subsequently also affect costs associated with health and social services. Moreover, installation of an elevator may enable residents to live in their apartment for a longer period, and subsequently alter the costs of public services, among which are housing, institutions and health and social services. About 70.000 Norwegians at the age of 80 years and older live in an apartment placed on the first floor or higher of a building without elevator. It is a political ambition to enable people to age in place, and for the health and social services to be provided in the recipients’ home.

In this study, we estimate the potential societal economic savings from reduced need for public living arrangements and institutions, reduced traveling and time costs associated with provision of services to elderly residents, as well as expenditures associated with falls in stairs. Also, we estimate the resident’s potential private economic benefits from investing in elevators (as measured by changes in the market price of dwellings). Our findings will shed light on whether installation of elevators in older apartment buildings is economically beneficial to the society and consequently: whether the subsidy of a yearly 4,9 million EUR is economically justifiable from the societal point of view.

For more than a decade, we have seen a rise in real estate prices simultaneously with a decrease in interest rates. In this article, we demonstrate how and to what extent interest rate changes influence prices in real estate markets. We apply a vector autoregressive model with cointegrating variables to examine this relationship during the years between 2007 and 2020. Using times series of different segments of the real estate market, we find significant negative responses of investment property prices and rents to a positive interest rate shock while apartment and house prices positively react. Considering mortgage interest rate shocks, we again find a divided picture, which fosters the perception of different behaviour of real estate segments responding to interest rate shocks. The results suggest that these differences can be explained by the different composition of investors and planned utilisation in the considered segments.

The development of purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) in the UK has been significant and substantial since the global financial crisis of 2008. As we will demonstrate, such growth has been supported by increasing institutional investment flows into this contemporary real estate sector. PBSA is underexamined in academic research and is an ‘emerging niche market that deserves more attention’ (French et al, 2018: 578). Recognising the growth of non-traditional real estate, IPF (2015) commissioned a report which determined that PBSA was perceived as being the most ‘mainstream’ of the ‘alternative’ real estate investment opportunities. Through this paper we take the opportunity to question how the terms ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’, ‘mature’ and ‘emerging’, are defined, considering how they are understood from the variegated perspective of market actors. We unpack nuanced perspectives on risk and opportunities within the PBSA market, considering perceptions of resilience, diversification and investment strategies more broadly.

Findings are drawn from an ongoing European project into residential investment flows (https://whatisgovernedincities.eu/), and we triangulate perspectives drawn from literature, data and primary research on the development and transition of PBSA as a ‘maturing’ asset class. Quantitative analyses of investment trends in the UK between 2005 – 2020 using data provided by Real Capital Analytics (RCA) will be presented, combined with findings from semi-structured interviews. Provisional findings will be presented, reflecting on the perceived level of maturity and resilience in the UK’s PBSA market.

The emergence of e-commerce over the last two decades has substantially disrupted the business of retailers operating physical stores. As a result, the question arises as to how e commerce in turn affects pricing of retail real estate assets and thus investors should be concerned with e-commerce. Using return series data of shopping centers from the NCREIF property index for the period of 2000 Q1 to 2018 Q4, we find that e commerce sales can predict changes in retail real estate market returns. In particular, an increase in the share of e commerce sales to total sales results in lower capital and total returns for retail real estate. In contrast, no impact on income returns was found. Alongside revealing that e commerce has informative value for investors, this study contributes to the broader literature on asset pricing in commercial real estate markets while bridges this gap in the retail real estate literature.

In this paper we start from the observation that various features of the profession and of the service they provides makes property valuers particularly vulnerable to principal-agent-issues. Positioned between regulations, interests of their clients, and their own business needs, property valuers constantly have to decide how to balance these often conflicting demands.We argue in this paper that job satisfaction is an important prerequisite for property valuers to act ethically. Or, said differently, a valuer who is not satisfied with her/his job is more likely to bend the rules and regulations in order to gain some unjustified advantage.

We analyze this relationship empirically based on surveys conducted in both Poland and Austria. This allows the comparison between two rather different regulatory regimes: the Austrian one which goes back over a century and defines the basic framework of the valuers' work, and the Polish one which is fairly new and comparatively much more detailed. We use established measures for job satisfaction and for ethical attitude in the survey. The study shows that there is a positive relationship between job satisfaction and ethical attitude. Other factors that influence ethics are the segment in which the valuer mainly works and the country. Valuers in Austria tend to express higher ethical attitudes than their colleagues in Poland.

Stereotypes of the „dull municipality“ vs. the „cash-hungry developer“ persist and hamper the collaboration – especially if municipal administrations tend to focus on problems rather than solutions or if developers disregard local specifics and focus solely on their return expectations. Yet, it seems municipalities and developers repositioning themselves in Germany: While municipal administrations digitize and keep design processes in-house again, developers shift their focus from specific asset classes to development of entire neighbourhoods. Moreover, planning tasks to design sustainable projects are becoming increasingly complex requiring more coordination between both parties. Therefore, understanding the perspectives and needs of both stakeholders will promote a more constructive collaboration.

A qualitative study with more than 30 experts from planning agencies, councillors, project development companies, services providers and organisations, revealed 3 types of factors shaping the project collaboration: Unique soft, unique hard and generalising factors, with unique referring to factors applicable to one specific person or project context only. Some examples for “unique hard factors” are urban planning framework conditions or local real estate market structures, and “unique soft factors” such as local decision-making structures, the professional background or past experiences of the persons involved as well as the matter of mutual trust. Generalising factors can be grouped into promoting and impeding, such as frequent and transparent communication or vague objectives of urban planning. One of the areas of tension lies, e.g., in the detail level of information. If the developer approaches the administration with already made concepts and the final floor plan, the necessary room to jointly develop the project is lacking from the very beginning. Municipalities admit that they need to articulate their urban development objectives more clearly to provide developers with the appropriate framework conditions for the project.

The conference contribution will highlight more findings of the interviews in detail. Drawn conclusions and recommended actions will be put up for discussion.

With the development and advances in life science over the past 10 years, this real estate market has seen rising demand for space due to the development of new drugs and diagnostics on a worldwide basis, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area. The challenge for life science start-up companies are rising costs of tools to carry out experiments, need for proper security equipment, and limited availability of working spaces. Small companies are facing significant challenges to developing and delivering new products and drugs to market. 

As stated by Cushman and Wakefield (2019), people over 65 years old are forecast to double over the next 10 years, driving the urgency to create potential cures; this is projected to have a direct impact on profitability of life science businesses. Life science profit margins can be enhanced directly through the use of life science incubators. 

According to the Georgia Department of Public Health, COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), also known as the Coronavirus Disease (2019), is a disease that was identified in Wuhan, China. This disease has spread rapidly throughout the world, and at this point has encouraged individuals to take multiple precautions throughout their daily life. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), just in the United States as of August 2020, there are over 5.8 million infections and 180,000 deaths, with no vaccines or drug treatments anticipated until 2021.

With this new and unpredictable pandemic, declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) as of March 11th of 2020, significantly impacting the role of life science as a target investment property sector for the real estate industry. The pandemic will drive significant demand for life science space from the funding of new and legacy biotechnology companies, as they fight the disease with the development of new testing, vaccinations, and potential treatments. 

The pandemic is projected to attract significant capital to the analytic and life science sectors, as investors (venture capitalists) understand the importance of life science investments. However, there will be certain real estate sectors that will suffer, particularly the office sector as reflected in low and falling occupancy rates, negative net absorption, falling rents and values. This is an opportunity to convert existing and fully functionally obsolete and physically deteriorated space to the highest-best-use of life science campuses and incubators. 

This paper explores and defines the life science incubator concept, as well as the market opportunities, comparative advantage, employment, venture capital flows, and commercialization. Based on this research we recommend investment in life science real estate.

The following section discusses the impact of COVID-19 on the life science marketplace. 

In this paper we provide an extended analytic framework beyond the conventional mean-variance optimization to evaluate the diversification effects of the listed infrastructure equity as an asset class in the context of portfolio optimization. The robust optimization methodology overcomes many disadvantages in the mean-variance optimization by allowing optimization amid uncertainties in parameters. Along with the new measurements effective number of bets in diversification and risks and return, we make the case of investment in the listed infrastructure index. In the multi-period context, the asset under examination performs relatively better with robust optimization and the contributions to the portfolio are stable. The comprehensive reevaluation of the listed infrastructure as an asset class is relevant for institutional investors and the framework is instrumental to similar analysis in the broader area of real estate assets.

Local railway service is a key instrument to support the survival and the growth of small towns increasing the demand by individuals that are not interested to live in the main cities and that could accept the cost of commuting day-by-day for working. The existence of a local railway station connected with the main surrounding cities reduces the transportation cost for people leaving in small towns that cannot work in the town and reduces the risk of migration of citizens to the main cities.

The paper analyses a representative sample of Italian towns in the Lazio area for the time period 1996-2017 in order to measure the contribution of the local railway service on the land value for housing investment. Results show that the existence of local railway service matters for both the rental and ownership market but the effect may be different on the basis of the type of service provided by the railway company. The main features that affect the house value are the number of train lines servicing the station, the distance from the main cities and the number of towns served by each train line.

Purpose: Adaptive reuse (AR) of heritage buildings is a complicated process, which includes many steps. Several steps should be considered and followed in the reuse process to provide an appropriate result, which is preserving the essential qualities and values of heritage buildings, improving them to be used in the present, and transferring them to the future. The purpose of this paper is identification of the steps of the AR process of heritage buildings and developing a model to structure this process.

Design/methods/approach: A Literature review was conducted to explore the state of the art in the AR process field. This followed four steps: (1) formulating the research question and the aim of the review; (2) screening of the available publications and selection and evaluation of the relevant studies (3) analysis of the publications, (4) reporting the results and developing the conceptual model based on it.

Findings: The analysis of the literature revealed that the AR process of heritage buildings as a whole system has not been widely studied. Some common steps in the AR process have been mentioned by different researchers, which are “initiative”, “analysis of heritage buildings”, “value assessment”, “definition of adaptive reuse potentials”, “definition of design strategies”, “decision-making”, and “execution”. Several studies have also mentioned “maintenance” and “evaluation after years”. In the publications related to the AR process of heritage buildings, there are two approaches to the study of the process: one is mainly from the perspective of architects and the other approach is from the perspective of other stakeholders (producers, investors, regulators, and users); however, in the publications which are from the perspective of architects, these two later steps have been rarely mentioned.

Originality/value: This analysis provided an overview of the publications on the AR process of heritage buildings and also resulted in developing a conceptual model (9-steps-model) for adaptive reuse of heritage buildings, which includes the main steps of the process. This model can act as a comprehensive theoretical basis for further studies on the analysis of the AR process of heritage buildings.

We a) compute a Time Dummy Method index based on a Generalized Additive Model allowing for smooth effects of the metric covariates on the price utilizing the pooled data set. We b) construct an Imputation Approach model, where we fit a regression model separately for each year. Our work aims at constructing a global model that captures relevant interactions of the covariates with time, where time intervals are selected on a model basis. We therefore c) fit a model-based recursive partitioning tree to partition the time span and to account for parameter instability. We d) fit a global model, in which we interact the covariates with the time periods obtained from the recursive partitioning tree. We analyze the respective performance and choose the optimal model with respect to out-of-sample prediction accuracy.

We find that parameter instability over time plays a role as the Imputation Approach outperforms the Time Dummy Model. However by choosing model-based interactions with time, we are able to reduce both model complexity and out-of-sample prediction error. We find the interaction between location and time appears to be the most important.

Our work provides a model-based approach to account for parameter instability over time in the context of hedonic price models and index construction. We are able to reduce bias compared with standard Time Dummy Method indices, and receive less volatile results compared with the typical Imputation Approach. Further, our assessment no longer naively selects time periods that are interacted with the other explaining variables. We expect these improvements to be useful especially for smaller, e. g. regional data sets.

This paper investigates how a public housing policy with pro-marriage design impacts the rise and fall of marriage and explores a consumption channel interacted with parents’ housing status. In 2001, Singapore launched a Build-to-Order (BTO) scheme to build and allocate new public housing, with a pre-requisite of forming family nucleus. Using administrative data and government records from 1996 to 2019, we first show stylized facts on the rising number of marriage and divorce, which coincide with the launching and expanding of the BTO scheme. Couples living in the BTO flats are significantly younger and more likely to have short marriages compared to those under non-BTO schemes. Using supervised machine learning, we find that BTO and private consumption have the strongest impacts on marriage decisions. To explore possible channels, using high-quality consumption data between 2010 and 2012 and a propensity score matching method, we find that married BTO residents under 35 years old consume 7% less monthly—especially on necessity goods—compared to singles in non-BTO public housing. Evidence on mortgage reveals a possible trade-off between personal expenditure and housing mortgage. The consumption drop is more severe for married BTO residents born to parents in public housing. However, no evidence is shown among singles above 35 living in BTO flats, who are no longer bound by the purchase pre-requisite of forming family nucleus. It is likely that the BTO scheme spurs early marriage; though the consumption friction due to budget constraint induces dissolution of marriage in short span, especially for those born in humble families. Our paper sheds light on the spill-over effects of public policy between housing and marriage market.

Increasing amount of empirical evidence has shown that the local land use regulatory environment has substantial effects on the housing market. It is widely acknowledged, however, that measuring the degree of land use restrictiveness is challenging. The heterogeneity of regulations, as well as the unavoidable difficulty of assessing the relative importance of different types of regulations, are the primary reasons for that. Another often brought up shortage of the existing land use regulation measures is the lack of temporal dimension, which makes it difficult to separate the effects of regulation from other local characteristics that might correlate with land use regulation. This study is set to reassess how to measure the local land use regulatory environment, and possibly, to address some of the shortcomings previous studies have reported.

Empirically, the focus of this study is on the Finnish planning system, where land policy and planning decisions made at the municipal level most strongly control land use. Within a set of legal boundaries, each municipality independently decides which land policy instruments to employ, and further, by utilizing the so-called planning monopoly, lays planning restrictions that guide the (residential) development of land.

To construct a measure of the restrictiveness of local land use, this study combines data on municipal land use planning and policy decisions for some 30 largest cities in Finland derived from multiple sources. Interviews with key municipal representatives responsible for local land policy actions are used as a primary data source. The interviews covered several themes with the aim to capture differences in the land use policy and planning actions across cities. The study also utilizes official statistics and municipal documents, such as strategies of land use and development, land use agreements and financial documents for measuring and modeling the degree of local land use restrictiveness.

Measuring the impact of land use regulation and planning on housing markets has been a significantly growing topic and the local land use regulatory environment is understood as an important contributor to the elasticity of housing supply. Yet, the formulation of a quantified measure for the restrictiveness of local regulation has received less attention, especially in the context of statutory planning systems. This study addresses this gap and outlines a new kind of approach to measure local land use environments that builds on data from multiple sources.

An essential task for residential property companies to maintain their long-term viability is to secure the future rentability/marketability of their buildings. In this context, the property and real estate industry is currently facing the challenges of a dynamically changing environment (megatrends such climate change, shift in social values, further development of political framework conditions). On top of that, they should and want to assume more responsibility for the environment and society to contribute to sustainable development. Both tasks are closely interlinked. The question that arises is which current and future requirements for location and building characteristics result from a changing environment and which instruments companies should use to control the further development of their building stocks?

Dealing with the requirements arising from megatrends, in particular the derived opportunities and risks, plays a decisive role in the management of institutional building stocks (portfolio). Instruments for portfolio analysis and portfolio management that link location and building characteristics with rental success provide one approach. These traditional instruments for managing the development of building stocks, however, have so far not - or only inadequately - taken sustainability aspects and changing user requirements into consideration.

The paper describes a concept that supports the advancement of portfolio analysis methods, which integrates, in addition to traditional aspects, those characteristics of a building that may influence the (risk) assessment of the building in the future and have not or only inadequately been considered in traditional analyses. In particular, the paper presents and discusses the interdependencies between the dimensions 'environment' / 'location' / 'building' on the one hand and 'location' / 'building' on the other hand. In addition, interdepencies within the individual dimensions are analyzed and modeled. Thus, the predictable consequences of climate change (climate risks) at the respective location lead to increased demands on technical quality of the buildings, in terms of resilience of the buildings' construction to the consequences of climate change as well as on the quality of summer thermal protection. At the same time, the increase in the relative importance of these characteristics is taken into account in the aggregate assessment of the dimension 'building characteristic'.

In Addition, indicators (KPI's) are identified that are directly related to sustainable development goals (SDGs). The paper describes a model for integrating sustainability aspects into portfolio & risk analysis of building stocks, visualized by a two-dimensional matrix which can capture the required level of complexity by introducing additional sub-dimensions into the analysis. The model intents to improve the transparency of the opportunity - risk profile of buildings, considering a changing environment and changing user requirements for location & building characteristics. By modelling the correlation between the impact of the respective megatrend and the underlying building assessment, the model can support portfolio managers of residential property and real estate companies in their work. In addition, the dynamic approach of the model enables to adapt to a changing market environment and a changing demand, which could result from changing stakeholder preferences. The results of a dynamic analysis can serve as an early warning indicator and build the basis for recommendations for action on the portfolio strategy.

Whereas the use of specific smart technologies in various sectors of the tourism industry has been under greater scrutiny in recent years, research that investigates tourists’ acceptance of smart technologies applied as a whole to hotels is underexplored. To address this shortfall, a study with a focus on tourists’ acceptance of experience-enhancement smart technologies has been conducted. A technology acceptance model based conceptual framework was developed, followed by a series of interviews with the managerial staff of ten hotels in Hong Kong that adopt experi-ence-enhancement smart technologies. Based on the interview findings, a questionnaire was de-signed for use in a survey in which data were collected face-to-face from 312 tourists. Structural equation modelling was utilised to reveal the interrelationships between nine technology ac-ceptance parameters. This study contributes knowledge to both real-world practice and research in tourism management.

National and international agreements aim to limit climate change and thus call for a reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to nearly zero. A wide range of technologies promise to reduce the heat demand of buildings and also promote renewable energies. One of these technologies is the use of solid building structures as thermal storage, so called thermally activated building parts or TABS. Thermal simulations of such energy concept for a typical single-family house with 140 m² living space featuring a heat pump, a solar thermal collector and TABS show that the share of solar heat for heat supply can be increased, resulting in a decreased use of the heat pump and thus a lower demand of electric energy. This leads to reduced greenhouse gas emissions and lower operating costs. Furthermore, the simulations show that larger sizes of the TABS and the solar thermal collector lead to lower demand of electric energy. To secure a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and costs over the whole lifecycle of a building also production and dismantling, disposal and recycling must be considered.

A Life Cycle Cost (LCC) Analysis shows that TABS in combination with solar heat reduce LCC, expressed as present values, by app. 34%. The reductions are mainly due to the lower operating costs of the heating system. Increasing the size of south-facing solar collectors leads to asymptotically decreasing costs. For the less favourable orientations to the West and East, the optimum size of the collector is between 30 and 40 m², depending on the orientation and the size of the TABS. A minimum size of the TABS must be available, while additional TABS do not lead to further reductions.

Also in an ecologic sense, the use of TABS in combination with solar heat is beneficial. The simulations in this research show that the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over the whole lifecycle can be reduced by 27%. Again, the reduction mainly results from the decreased demand of electric energy and only slightly higher GHG emissions from the production of the TABS. Larger collector sizes lead to asymptotically reduced GHG emissions, when south facing. In contrast, orientations to the East and West lead to increased GHG emissions as the size of the collector increases.

Integrated systems of heat pumps, solar thermal collectors and TABS could also be considered for multi-family housing and other building types. Simulations of LCC and LCA offer a suited means for assessing economic and ecologic impacts of innovative buildings concepts and should be used on a wider scale, ideally in combination.

The public and academic discourses have prominently pointed to local oppositions, often qualified as “Not in My Back Yard-attitudes” (NIMBYism), to explain why housing is increasingly difficult to build and unaffordable to many, especially dense urban areas. This claim relies on the assumption that “Not in My Back Yard” does translate to “Not in My Constituency” on the political level. Yet research on the politics of planning policies and decisions is rather scant.

The paper replaces residents’ preferences in the political and institutional context, relying on the example of Greater London. Using detailed data from the London Development Database (2007-2017), the paper finds solid evidence that the number of housing approvals per ward as well as the share of affordable units are strongly linked to median voter preferences in the constituency, which are estimated using micro-data from the British Social Attitudes Survey (2010, 2014, 2016). While these results support the “NIMBY-Hypothesis”, they are only one part of the story. Regression analysis indicates that party politics and regional planning targets matter as well and may counterbalance local oppositions to new housing constructions.

In Germany only 45,5% of all residential units were inhabited by their owners in 2014 while more than 80% of households would prefer to live in their own home. One of the stated reasons for the latter is that property is perceived as a good investment opportunity, especially with regard to pensions and old-age provision. While it can strongly be doubted – especially in today’s market conditions in Germany – that residential investments of non-professional individuals will ever reach the risk-adjusted profitability of diversified investment funds, the decision to invest in real estate has strong positive effects on the discipline regarding payments for private pension provision. Another reason speaking for home ownership is the perceived freedom, while the lack of flexibility in relation to changing life circumstances, including mobility requirements for work, speak against it. Last, but not least, the majority of Germans has only below-average net assets and thus simply lacks the equity for a solid real estate acquisition.

The question arises whether there are alternative models that keep the advantages of residential ownership for non-professional individuals while minimizing the disadvantages of the ‘traditional’ model?

To answer this question, the ‘traditional’ model of residential acquisition and operation over the life cycle is depicted, as are upcoming alternatives, including a new ownership concept that creatively combines established legal, financial and operational constructs with new considerations. Based on empirical research and financial models for typical family constellations, the advantages and disadvantages of traditional and new residential ownership models are compared and discussed.

The predominantly conceptual paper indicates that the traditional model of residential ownership for non-professional individuals is not well suited for the current and expectable conditions, including individual flexibility and mobility requirements of people living in multi-storey housing in cities. New models are needed that require some major changes, maybe even legal adaptations, but offer very promising results, not only for the affected individuals but also for the society.

Given the well-developed state of European office property markets, these markets remain still highly under-researched in literature. This paper bridges this gap in literature by presenting the first holistic view on European office price formation with regard to the macroeconomy, monetary policy and real estate idiosyncratic factors. For this purpose, we employ a panel data analysis of 29 European cities covering a time period from 1995q1 to 2020q1 and measure the effects on office capital values. By means of dummy variables we are able to split the time frame into before, during and after the financial crisis and examine whether and how the effects on capital values change. The results reveal that real estate fundamentals such as rental growth or vacancy are found to be most important price drivers. The findings of our regional cluster regression indicate that Germany and Switzerland perform most stable amongst other European markets during and after the GFC. Thus, the perception of Germany being a safe haven market holds true. Finally, we find evidence that office markets react very heterogeneous to different market conditions such as the GFC. Our results are robust to some changes in parameters. This study could help investors in improving their risk assessment as well as their portfolio diversification in European office markets.

The Corona Pandemic made it very clear that the city in which we live today, unexpectedly can no longer be used as we were used to. The “traditional” and long-accepted zoning and design of public spaces, such as squares, street spaces, parks or green spaces, has to be rethought, and adapted almost overnight. Distancing rules, quantity restrictions or behavior codes determine the new space usage and movement behavior in public spaces. It turns out that many places and situations are not designed for this new situation: Sidewalks are too narrow for the necessary distance, footprints in front of shops are too small, there is hardly any space between the parking spaces for the outdoor dining tables, which now must be further apart. Meanwhile, the wide lanes of car traffic are orphaned. Parks and green areas offer attractive employment opportunities in the fresh air with less risk of infection, but hardly manage to adequately distance groups of the permitted number of people from each other.

The objective of the BMI-funded 'Nationale Stadtentwicklungspolitik'-project 'Open public space' is to analyze which potentials from current movement patterns and space usage in times of the pandemic can be used to create new open public spaces, streets and green spaces for resilient, liveable and walkable neighborhoods. Based on case studies and detailed image and movement data analysis, we analyze and create guidelines for urban design and public space design. The guidelines will be implemented in city centers, in a combination of digital and real-life designed tools, to create well-designed public spaces, which can be used by intuition and orientation, not by barriers and prohibition signs – and far beyond the pandemic.

In the project, (geo) data and image specialists work together with scientists from the fields of urban planning and architecture, thereby creating an innovative and direct link and interaction between pattern analyzes of different data sources and practical scientific knowledge of urban planning and design. Various institutions are currently working on spatial science and planning issues relating to the corona epidemic . A broad-based derivation and development of design guidelines for public space from the systematic examination of image, video and tracking data with the aim of finding permanent solutions for cities worth living in, beyond the pandemic to research, however, is pending.

The approach implements the question of what idea of a city we pursue - regarding the requirements for usage and movement behavior in public spaces upcoming now. Urban quality is based in particular on complexity, a high density of encounter and communication, as well as functional, social and cultural diversity – aspects that are being pushed back by the changing requirements, and which could be innovatively supported by “crisis-proof” design, with new approaches, concepts and instruments. Developing urban spaces that can synchronize “distant behavior” with the rich, complex, integrative idea of the city.

Machine Learning (ML) can detect complex relationships to solve problems in various research areas. To estimate real estate prices and rents, ML represents a promising extension to the hedonic literature since it is able to increase predictive accuracy and is more flexible than the standard regression-based hedonic approach in handling a variety of quantitative and qualitative inputs. Nevertheless, its inferential capacity is limited due to its complex non-parametric structure and the ‘black box’ nature of its operations. In recent years, research on Interpretable Machine Learning (IML) has emerged that improves the interpretability of ML applications. This paper aims to elucidate the analytical behaviour of ML methods and their predictions of residential rents applying a set of model-agnostic methods. Using a dataset of 58k apartment listings in Frankfurt am Main (Germany), we estimate rent levels with the eXtreme Gradient Boosting Algorithm (XGB). We then apply Permutation Feature Importance (PFI), Partial Dependence Plots (PDP), Individual Conditional Expectation Curve (ICE) and Accumulated Local Effects (ALE). Our results suggest that IML methods can provide valuable insights and yield higher interpretability of ‘black box’ models. According to the results of PFI, most relevant locational variables for apartments are the proximity to bars, convenience stores and bus station hubs. Feature effects show that ML identifies non-linear relationships between rent and proximity variables. Rental prices increase up to a distance of approx. 3 kilometer to a central bus hub, followed by steep decline. We therefore assume tenants to face a trade-off between good infrastructural accessibility and locational separation from the disamenities associated with traffic hubs such as noise and air pollution. The same holds true for proximity to bar with rents peaking at 1 km distance. While tenants appear to appreciate nearby nightlife facilities, immediate proximity is subject to rental discounts. In summary, IML methods can increase transparency of ML models and therefore identify important patterns in rental markets. This may lead to a better understanding of residential real estate and offer new insights for researchers as well as practitioners.

In all advanced economies, there is a general tendency toward reforms of higher education institutions (HEIs) and education systems. In addition to their traditional educational role, and their second mission of conducting scientific research, they are expected to participate in various types of innovation initiatives as part of their third mission.
With the transformation of the universities, the campus usage for innovation processes is also changing. From being the grounds where university buildings are providing settings for basic and applied research, it has become both the birthplace and test ground of innovations. Many universities want to practise what they preach on their own campuses: what is invented here is also applied here. On top of that, they want to set a good example of being innovative institutions, not only academically, but also in campus management and services.

However, the scope and dynamics of the implementation of their own innovative ideas vary significantly. It is clear that universities need to develop their campus according to their own conditions/needs and features. But while some universities take the opportunity for wider adoption of on-campus innovations to support university performance, others are not as successful in the innovation implementation for many reasons.

In this article both the drivers and the barriers that may hinder the implementation of campus innovations at Dutch research universities are studied.

This study investigates the convergence of 18 regional housing markets in Poland using quarterly data from 2000 to 2019. The objective of the paper is twofold. First, we test whether the house prices in Poland are converging over time and identify convergence clubs. Second, we compare the housing market convergence before and after the 2008 financial crisis.

The test results suggest that there is little evidence of overall convergence. We identified two major convergence clubs in Poland formed during the study period (2000–2019). The results differed when we considered subperiods (2000–2007 and 2007–2019). In both subperiods, we identified four clubs and some divergent housing markets.

The paper fills the gap in knowledge on the convergence of regional housing markets within an emerging economy setting. Little is known about this phenomenon in Eastern European Countries with their unique institutional framework. Additionally, we address differences in house price convergence before, and after the financial crisis, a topic often overlooked in other empirical studies.

The price-rent ratio is one of the most important measures for monitoring the housing market. This paper outlines and adopts a hedonic Spatio-temporal methodology for estimating quality-adjusted price-rent ratios for apartments in 21 major cities in Germany. With the user-cost equilibrium condition, it is subsequently possible to derive estimates of the cross-section of expected real capital gains. In addition, quality-adjusted property price and rental indices are computed at the city-level. Using this new hedonic method applied to prices and rents over the period 2014Q2 – 2018Q1, we find a large degree of heterogeneity across cities and time. These findings deliver deep insights into the dynamics of the German housing market and have important implications for housing investment and urban planning.

The corresponding and determining success factors of construction projects are essentially quality, deadlines and costs. Cost planning is therefore already a component of the planning service in early phases and has a significant influence on the pros and cons of project implementation. Digital tools and new process flows have been established in the construction industry as part of the digitalization process. Model-based construction cost estimation is used in BIM-based construction projects and obtains element sets and information from digital building models, which consist of objects with alphanumeric and graphic properties. The model-based cost planning processes are not sufficiently scientifically proven and are not subject to a standardized procedure. An ideal-typical model-based target cost estimation process is determined via literature sources. This cost estimation process is reviewed by expert interviews and their analysis by a qualitative content analysis. The result is an actual cost estimation process from current practice, which describes approach and shows process gaps in the area of integration of specialist planner models as well as cost control and cost management.

For this purpose, we use a mixed method approach. First, we use graph theory and social network analysis to determine which stakeholders have the strongest influence on real estate developers. The data basis is a quantitative survey of 249 decision-makers in the real estate industry. Based on this, we conduct 28 semi-structured interviews with relevant stakeholders in real estate development in order to describe and contextualize the changes and actions that have an impact and to derive the concrete need for action.

The results show that real estate developers, as central actors in the real estate transformation, are strongly affected, while at the same time they are also the source of significant influences. Changing occupant requirements increase the demand for holistic services provided by developers. Cooperation between developers and occupiers helps to adapt existing space to the current requirements of new working environments and at the same time provides potential for developing innovative forms of space provision in the sense of space-as-a-service. In order to be able to offer holistic solutions for space provision, an integration of real estate value-added stages is emerging. For developers, digital technologies provide potentials to bundle services as a central real estate player, although uncertainties and a lack of standardization still pose hurdles.

The findings help to understand the change processes of the real estate industry transformation more profoundly. For real estate developers, the results provide strategic options for adapting their business models due to changing business conditions.

The contractual obligations of a property manager to a property owner in property management include but are not limited to the selection of good tenants who can pay initial and subsequent rents for occupied property, thus ensuring that there are no voids, and also take decision on appropriate rents for different properties based on location, services provided, type of accommodation etc. The property manager is also obligated to conduct routine inspections of the properties, collect rents and render account of such to the property owner and conduct routine inspections. With the outbreak of COVID-19, the work of the property manager is expected to become more tasking though may vary from country to country and from region to region as a result of anticipated job losses, drop in income of businesses and informal workers etc. which may in turn affect the ability of some tenants to pay due rent and add to the property managers task of effective rent collection. There is also the challenge of businesses shifting to online transactions The study which is quantitative in nature adopted the survey approach in addition to desk review of relevant literatures. The study population consists of estate surveying and valuation firms in Nigeria. It was revealed that the usual method of collecting rents and carrying out routine management inspections by property managers in Nigeria will no longer be obtainable as social distancing methods are now adopted. This in turn will result to more expenses for the property manager and property owner who are already grasping under the pains of delay and non payment of rents by tenants. The study proposes that rather than allowing properties to remain void during the COVID-19 periods thereby leading to loss of income to the property owners, moratoriums should be offered to tenants and tenants should be encouraged to pay partial payments. The property manager should also communicate with the tenants regularly through affordable means that encourage social distancing.

Property markets are social constructs. However, understanding the complex behavioral patterns of property market actors is equally complex. Moreover, the analytical frameworks and fine-grained empirical applications that center around the characteristics and diversities of property market actors are rare. To fill this gap, in this presentation we put forward a multidimensional framework we developed to read the changing landscape of property investors. Our framework combines investor’s scale of operation, the utilized type of capital, the ownership composition of the investment body or company through their locational and strategic behavior. Establishing a methodology and a frame of analysis to understand what we call 'actor landscapes', we aim to provide an alternative and actor-centered framework to systematically unpack the effects of property investment market shifts on urban built environments. We argue that changing actor landscapes have tangible effects for cities as they channel investments into the urban built environment. Quantitative data analysis of investment transactions and investor profiles, and qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with a wide range of property investors are utilized to examine property markets between three distinct periods defined by market shifts in Amsterdam before and after the 2008 financial crisis.

Retailers, like many businesses, operate in a fast-moving competitive environment and need to rapidly change to keep pace with their competitors. There is nothing new in this but the nature, scale and pace of change has intensified in recent years with many retailers reported to be struggling to manage the rise in operational costs and the disruptive effects of technology, greater competition from online retailers who appear to operate more efficiently, changes in consumers’ spending habits and, more recently, the unsettling disturbance of business operations by the Covid pandemic restrictions. As a consequence of this prolonged period of change, many well-known high street retailers have entered administration or been forced to use firefighting measures to avoid bankruptcy. There is also the general recognition that many ‘bricks and mortar’ retailers are being forced to downsize their property portfolios as a way of reducing their overheads. Such store closures have a visible impact on the high street and one which is increasing as the number of vacant units continues to grow.

The concern of policy-makers has also been well documented and debated. The sheer scale of the contraction in the retailing sector, an industry which dominated most urban economies, has resulted in obsolete building stock and the physical decline of these urban centres. The challenge is for them to find new ways to encourage and support the adaptation of urban centres into multi-functional places that are less dependent on a single land use and more resilient to future change. Yet, the effects of these urban changes and the implications for landlords have largely been ignored within the high street debate. This is surprising as many of the tactics being employed to make urban centres more attractive and competitive – such as the re-development of obsolete stock, experimentation with land use innovations, creation of mixed-use developments and the re-imaging of the public realm– rely heavily on private-sector investment. If policy-makers are going to succeed in encouraging future investment in the continued renewal and adaptive of urban centres they need a better understanding of the market changes experienced by property investors, and the impacts on the investment quality of retail investments and property ownership.

This paper seeks to address this knowledge gap. It reports the findings from a larger ongoing project that is exploring the adaptation of the retailing sector using the five case study cites of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Hull, Liverpool and Nottingham. This stage of the study, using linked data from a number of secondary sources, examines the spatial changes that have occurred over time in the principal retailing areas of these cities. It does so by monitoring shifts in land use and heterogeneity of occupiers, and mapping the spatial patterns that have occurred in these land use changes as new developments have occurred before investigating the resultant changes in property investment behaviour. The paper ends by examining and discussing the consequence of these outcomes for the retail investment market, investors and the High Street.

Purpose: The Permanent Observatory on Local Public Administrations (OPPAL) survey aims at:

• offering an opportunity to promote the territory by promoting transparency about and disseminating the practices adopted for investment licensing procedures;
• providing valuable support in defining the strategic investment choices of Real Estate operators.
• providing a unique tool at national level, for attracting investment for the enhancement of Real Estate Assets.

The research presents the survey's results of Permanent Observatory on Local Public Administrations (OPPAL), which deals with the efficiency of the permit-issuing procedures applied by the Local Public Administration (LPA) in Italy with a focus on innovative strategies and tools for the enhancement of cities and territories. Nowadays, more than ever, cities are experiencing financial difficulties, with limited funds for public works and many bureaucratic limitations in the allocation of public money.Therefore, different ways must be identified by which Public Administrations could collect additional resources to finance a sustainable cities development and the enhancement of built environment. To overcome the difficulties of the Public Administrations, setting public works, more and more effective long-term Public-Private-People Partnerships (4P) are needed. Today’s revolution lies in the interconnection of new technologies and global networks. Innovative tools as Civic Crowdfunding and Green Bonds could serve as tools to solve this critical situation and support the public authorities in implementing public projects. Civic Crowdfunding and Green Bonds are in their development phase. They are spreading fast and are more often adopted by the local Administrations, thanks to the social and economic benefits.

Scope: The study investigates the characteristics of these interventions, their methods and intended use. These innovative financial tools are not extensively adopted for the development and enhancement of cities. Their promising future is mainly due to the transparency of the decision-making process in implementing projects of public interest, giving citizens the opportunity to participate in the development of territories.

Conclusion: These innovative financial tools can enable Local Public Administration (LPA) to carry out redevelopment and enhancement interventions transparently and fund projects that can contribute to environmental sustainability.

The way work is physically organized in a society is subject to constant change. While life and work took place in one place before industrialization (First Place), work shifted to the office with a growing proportion of knowledge-intensive activities (Second Place). Due to the Corona-Pandemic, work for many knowledge workers shifted back home quickly. Before COVID-19 work from home was limited to individual cases or to a few days. While some studies have looked at the office real estate factors influencing work success, there are hardly any studies analyzing real estate factors and their effects on work success when working from home. The contact restrictions since March 2020 now allow large-scale examinations of how knowledge workers work from home.

The aim of the paper is to identify dependency structures between real estate factors and success factors in working from home. Specifically, the direction and size of the effects of the individual real estate factors on satisfaction and productivity in working from home are quantified.

Based on a literature research, important real estate related factors are identified that influence the success of work in general. This is followed by a quantitative survey of knowledge workers in Germany who have already gained experience in working from home. Multivariate analyzes are carried out, focusing on satisfaction and productivity as success factors for work from home.

First results, by using mean value comparisons and correlation analyzes, suggest that property-related factors of the home in particular are closely related to the success in working from home.

While the office workplace is explicitly developed for the purpose of efficient work, work from home takes place in a location that is not designed for this purpose. The study provides important implications on how future housing should be planned and designed to make working from home sustainable.

We assess the benefits of diversifying a portfolio of commercial real estate assets across gateway and non-gateway markets, a topic of significant relevance to institutional investors. Using simulation analysis and property-level data for the U.S., we compare various performance metrics for portfolios containing buildings in gateway markets only, both in gateway and non-gateway markets, and in non-gateway markets only, respectively. Our results suggest that the risk-adjusted performance is similar across types of markets. Gateway markets have higher appreciation and total returns, while non-gateway markets exhibit higher income returns even after accounting for capital expenditures. Downside risk appears to be slightly greater for gateway markets than for non-gateway markets; however, full drawdown and recovery lengths tend to be shorter for gateway markets. Our results further show evidence of momentum in appreciation returns, although no differences exist across types of markets. Income returns also appear to affect real estate pricing significantly, this effect being stronger for non-gateway than for gateway markets. By considering a large spectrum of performance metrics in a realistic investment setting, the results of the paper should provide investors with valuable information when allocating funds across gateway and non-gateway markets. The paper also provides important insights regarding how best to define gateway markets.

After solving the double-spending problem of digital tokens with blockchain technology, the market for digital tokens has increased enormously over the last few years. Mostly real assets, which are not easy to divide, costly, and involve regulation effort, are identified as the most suitable assets for digital tokenization – properties and land are obviously among them. Even if the key element of solving the double-spending of digital tokens – the blockchain – is widely known, the specific regulations and procedures of this young and its infancy being technology are still not been researched and analyzed exactly. This paper analyzes the theoretical benefits and challenges of real estate securitization via blockchain and how different these “new” assets are from traditional securitizations based on empirical data (return, risk, holding ratios, fee, pricing) of the first token transactions.

Shopping malls have revolutionized the retail landscape by their ability to efficiently internalize retail externalities. Based on anecdotal evidence and studies on consumer behavior, we expect that the location of a tenant within a mall can be an important determinant for the extent to which this tenant benefits from the presence of retail externalities in the mall. In this paper we examine this empirically. We make use of a unique dataset that contains 1,170 shopping mall tenants and their monthly sales numbers. These tenants were present in 9 Turkish shopping malls over a 4-year period. We specifically focus on the retail externalities generated by the presence of anchor tenants and the presence of competitors. Preliminary results suggest that anchor presence is an important determinant of non-anchor sales. The size of this externality seems to be dependent on the type of products the non-anchor tenant sells. We also find that the positive externality generated by anchors quickly decreases when distance to the anchor store increases. This seems to confirm our hypotheses that retail externalities have a spatial pattern within malls. Our results for the externalities generated by competitors show large heterogeneity dependent on the product category of the tenant for both the sign and size of the externality and its spatial pattern.

Purpose – Building adaptation has been viewed as a strategy towards the sustainable development and circular economy, as it contributes to the reuse of the built assets and reduce their environmental impacts in the long term. Relevant research focused on defining the determinants of the sustainable building adaptation, while the comprehension of that from the perspective of the circularity is still needed. Thus, this paper intends to present a reconceptualisation of the built environment adaptability through incorporating determinants of circularity.

Design/methodology/approach – An integrative literature review, using systematic search, was conducted on relevant sources to the adaptability and circularity domains, to identify potential determinants of circular building adaptation and incorporate them in a novel conceptualisation. Integrative literature, as a research approach, was followed to critically analyse the components of both concepts, and thus, conceptually synthesis their determinants in an integrated formulation. Two matrices were developed to depict the determinants of both concepts with their brief description, and thus, the conceptual incorporation was accordingly conducted.

Findings – Based on the initial literature review, it was concluded that circular adaptability of buildings comprise a series of technical, physical, legal, legislative functional and spatial determinants that should be incorporated with a set of the R-strategies to efficiently closing the loop of the resource consumption. The R-strategies could encompass the reuse, refurbish, recycle and remanufacture of the building components.

Research limitations/implications – The paper provides a basic comprehension of the building adaptation within the context of the call for circular built environment, which can be a foundation for the development of pragmatic strategies towards achieving the circular economy prospects.

This paper explores the stock returns of German real estate companies from 1991 to 2019. In contrast to previous studies we use a forward-looking approach and alternative risk measures to better reflect investor behavior. At first the paper constructs a traditional five-factor Arbitrage Pricing Theory model to measure the sensitivity of real estate stock returns to the stock, bond and real estate markets as well as to inflation and the overall economic development. The analysis shows that German real estate stocks are more impacted by changes in the economy and the stock market than by changes in the real estate market. We then apply a pseudo ge-ometric Brownian motion concept combined with a Monte Carlo simulation to model future asset prices. Value at risk and conditional value at risk are used to quantify the downside risk for an investor in listed real estate. The paper finds that listed real estate is less risky than the general stock market, which is in line with our expectations.

We study a new type of securitization, mortgage-receivable-backed securities (MRBSs) issued by real estate developers. Unlike traditional mortgage-backed securities (MBSs), the major risk of underlying assets of MRBSs is payment delay instead of default and prepayment. Using unique loan-level data, we estimate proportional hazard models and detect factors that affect the risk of underlying assets of MRBSs, including bank characteristics, property-loan-household characteristics, local market conditions, and macroeconomic conditions. Especially, we find that the effects of house prices and LTVs on MRBS risk are the opposite of those on traditional MBS risk. Based on the estimates, we simulate cash flows of an underlying-asset pool and analyze the shortfall risk of the corresponding security tranches. We find that the securitization process imposes a natural adverse selection on the underlying assets. Our analyses provide a benchmark for conducting appropriate security designs based on the composition of the underlying asset pool, increase the transparency for investors on the risk pattern of MRBSs, and provide implications for pricing and regulation.

The paper builds the cycles of transactions and prices in the short-term rental market since almost the beginning of that this rental activity becomes relevant for cities during the second decade of the XXI century. The paper shows the data elaborated building a micro database with Airbnb information for 46 cities around the world. The analysis reaches the cycles by extracting millions of observations and shows the periods where the rental was more relevant for the cities. A model relating short rental visits with macroaggregates allows for learning the main drivers to explain the explosion of short-term visits using housing rental sharing as the means for hospitality.

The Corona virus pandemic and the subsequent economic slowdown provide an opportunity to examine the relative performance of US REITs during a period of extreme market disruption. In this study, we investigate the short-term response of US REITs to this global event employing four market models and three distinct pandemic related event dates. In order to examine the performance across market sectors the returns on REIT indexes are considered instead of individual REITs. The empirical results provide additional evidence with respect to the performance of REITs relative to the overall market and the benefits derived from including REITs in a portfolio during adverse market conditions.

In the light of the rise of the World Wide Web, there is an intense debate about the potential impact of online user-generated data on classical economics. This paper is one of the first to analyze housing demand on that account by employing a large internet search dataset from a housing market platform. Focusing on the German rental housing market, we employ the variable ‘contacts per listing’ as a measure of demand intensity. Apart from traditional economic methods, we apply state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, the XGBoost, to quantify the factors that lead an apartment to be demanded. As using machine learning algorithms cannot solve the causal relationship between the independent and dependent variable, we make use of eXplainable AI (XAI) techniques to further show economic meanings and inferences of our results. Those suggest that both hedonic, socioeconomic and spatial aspects influence search intensity. We further find differences in temporal dynamics and geographical variations. Additionally, we compare our results to alternative parametric models and find evidence of the superiority of our nonparametric model. Overall, our findings entail some potentially very important implications for both researchers and practitioners.

Periods of high volatility in house prices increasingly occur synchronously in the housing markets of different countries and also at a disaggregated level within countries. Such contagion, or volatility spillovers are often captured by ARCH type. While many studies have examined international patterns in house price movements or considered regional housing market relationships, relatively few have researched how house prices diffuse over local housing markets. In this paper we employ data at local authority level in the UK for major cities and their surrounding areas to examine not only potential connectedness between cities but particularly focusing on price diffusion and spillovers between cities and their neighbouring local authority areas as well as considering price leadership and the ripple effect, or contagion.

Specifically, we examine volatility spillovers between housing markets in different local authority areas following Diebold and Yilmaz (2014). Our analysis will permit a dynamic analysis as over time, any local authority can be both a net transmitter and a net receiver of shocks.

Furthermore, Attanasio et al., (2009) noted that there may be some form of common causality that links regions therefore leading to significant correlations. This may be prevalent at a more disaggregated level and linking to previous studies on ripple effects (Meen, 1990, 1999), may imply contagion spreading from leading housing market areas to followers.

In this paper we test for contagion between housing markets using house price data from the local authorities. We consider different approaches such as extreme value theory and ARCH based models.

"Modern Architecture" and "Modern Urbanism" are increasingly proving to be old, outdated and obsolete. The European city of short distances, which is still popular, beautiful and attractive today, has all too often been transformed with brutal radicalism into a functionally divided, car-oriented city of long distances, which not only harms our environment, but also our health. The mere "re-framing" of this non-sustainable planning ideology cannot solve the very damage and problems it has caused, certainly not in a sustainable and human way.

The most important question is: Why and for what purpose do we develop and build cities? What is the goal and purpose of our projects? What is the meaning of urban planning and real estate development?

This paper identifies the need for change in the school and practice of urban planning and real estate development. It is intended to promote discussion and lead to a “new” paradigm that considers timeless and ubiquitous principles of beautiful cities that sustain life on earth.

The increasing policy emphasis on reducing carbon emissions has yielded a number of policies in various countries. In the UK, the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard (MEES) made it illegal from April 2018 for landlords to let properties that did not meet a minimum energy performance standard - an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating of E or higher. Although this policy has a relatively low cap on costs that landlords are expected to spend to upgrade their buildings, a dilemma for policy makers has been the trade-off between the compliance costs for owners and occupiers and potential improvements in energy consumption. An expected effect of introducing MEES is that improvements will be capitalised into the prices of properties. Implicitly, it is also expected that removing properties rated EPC F and G from the market will lead to changes to the relative demand and supply of policy compliant and non-compliant properties. The result is then increased demand for compliant properties and higher price differentials between compliant and non-compliant properties. Using a large dataset of residential sales transactions from 2009-2020, we study the price impact of MEES with a difference-in-difference approach and a regression discontinuity design. Our dataset allows us to compare the price trajectories of rental properties to the general housing market both before and after the introduction of the policy for the entire spectrum of energy efficient buildings. Although properties can hypothetically be switched between the owner-occupier and the private rental segments, we expect a stronger effect on the latter. Our research design also controls for a number of minor and major fiscal and regulatory changes since 2015 that have been introduced independently of MEES that could potentially distort the findings.

In the past decades many cities and regions underwent structural transformations – e.g. in old industrialized ‘rust belts’ or in peripheral rural areas. Many of these shrinking cities have to face the challenges of long-term demographic and economic changes. While in the USA, shrinkage is often related to postindustrial transformations in other countries like Germany for example, the causes are related to changing demographics with declining birth rates and the effects of the German reunification. Many cities have tried to combat shrinkage and have thus developed a variety of policies and strategies like establishing substitute industries. To assess the sustainability of this approach this presentation shows the results of investigations regarding the cities Cleveland/USA and Bochum/Germany in a comparative analysis following the most similar/most different research design. The research shows new development paths for shrinking cities.

Goal of this paper is to present a roadmap for real estate operating companies to transform themselves into tech-centric enterprises. The research focuses on the impact of technology on physical real estate assets and organizational structures. The revolution in real estate technologicalization will come from new ideological thought and management paradigms. Over the last 20 years, the real estate industry has been affected by the introduction of new technologies; however, over the last 5 years, and the last 5 months due to COVID-19, has seen a massive transformation in the use and utilization of space. New technologies are rapidly changing how investors, tenants and managers use, invest, and finance property. The introduction of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, blockchain, virtual reality, tablets, cell phones, apps, 5G, etc. is putting pressure on real estate organizations to change. These changes are long overdue and the future, modern real estate company, will take a hybrid proptech form. A company focused on delivering high quality products and services to its clients in real time. The revolutionary change for the industry will be in its organizational and industry structure, away from the traditional hierarchical-mechanistic form, to a virtual-open-agile-innovative organizational form. Due to the current state of the economy, effects of the pandemic, and rapid adoption of new technologies will radically change the way real estate companies are organized, how they add value and innovate, and how they are led by management. The revolution in real estate technologization will not come from the application of these technologies, but from the rapid change of ideological thought and management-leadership style and culture.

There is a large and diverse range of stakeholders with interests in the city centre. Yet, despite this diversity, they are seen to share a common desire, or aspiration, for resilience. There is diversity in how aspirations for resilience are envisioned, including, variously, the city centre as a hub for economic growth; a capital investment opportunity providing returns to meet obligations; commercial accommodation to enable sustainable business opportunities; a community hub for socialising; an attractive environment for visiting and spending time; a focus for local identity; and so on. Despite this diversity in interests, and the increasing challenges faced by all stakeholders, the common aspiration for resilience serves to bind the components into an assemblage.

This research, therefore, sees the city centre through assemblage thinking and seeks to apply this theory to explore the ways that city centre assemblages may function to foster economic growth, or to hinder adaptive capacity. An assemblage approach has not been utilised in the commercial real estate discipline previously. It is adopted here to best reflect the complexities of the real estate market and wider environment, and to explore relationships between components of the assemblage (both human and non-human), to identify characteristics and capacities of elements and relationships that can hinder, and those that can enable, the adaptive capacity of city centres.

Here we present insights into how the city centre can be explored using assemblage thinking, what insights are enabled by adopting this approach and some preliminary results of empirical analyses. Utilising examples of change across five UK case study cities (Edinburgh, Glasgow, Hull, Liverpool and Nottingham) the involvement of land and property owners and developers are explored to reveal the ways that social structures may work to create unique retailing destinations, or to hinder adaptive capacity.

Since housing is one of the most expensive commodities in Turkey as in many countries, credit and housing markets are closely linked. However, based on the literature review in this study there is no research on the relationship of credit with house price for Turkey. Thus, the study aims at examining whether there is a causal relationship between mortgage credit and house price in Turkey. For achieving this aim, we apply four causality tests for the period between 2010 and 2020 at monthly frequency: Granger causality tests, Toda-Yamamoto causality tests, Granger causality tests with Fourier approach, and Toda-Yamamoto causality tests with Fourier approach. The findings of the empirical analysis show that there is a strong one-way causality between house prices and mortgage credit and that the direction of the causality is from credit to house prices. The results of all the different causality tests reach to the identical results.

The advent of COVID-19 has brought significant challenges to the delivery of real estate modules which attempt to integrate a number real world elements as part of the learning process. Such elements are essential to enhancing the commercial awareness and employability of real estate graduates and at a wider level act as a means of embedding opportunities for personal and professional development. This paper presents a case study of taking an industry facing MSc level capstone module online while still retaining it core learning outcomes. The module requires students to work as part of team over a six week period addressing three assignments related to an international field trip, an industry challenge and a real estate strategy game.  In a normal year the module involves inputs from over 100 real estate professionals. The case study outlines the approach taken to replicating this module online, including the creation of appropriate supports to facilitate students working effectively as part of a remote team. It examines a range of challenges from putting in places the learning resources necessary to support the creation of a virtual field trip experience to the hiring of industry coaches to critically appraise students outputs from a real world perspective. The paper concludes with a critical assessment of the experience and from this attempts to identify any pedagogic innovations which would be retained going forward.

In this study, we analyzed the impact of COVID-19 on house rents and prices in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. Hedonic indexes indicated a slight increase in prices (ca. 1.2%) and a substantial drop in long-term rents (ca. -7.7%) between March 2020 and December 2020. The largest decline in rents occurred in centrally located neighborhoods, influenced mainly by the inflow of new housing supply from the short-term rental market (the Airbnb Warsaw market shrunk by almost 30% in December 2020 y/y). Using hedonic methods, we highlighted the influence of the shrinking Airbnb market on the drop in long-term rents. The study indicates the elasticity of rents with respect to Airbnb supply, with a 1% change in Airbnb listings leading to a 0.031% change in rents.

Purpose: This paper highlights the criteria that affect the success of adaptive reuse strategy as one of the recent strategies which is implemented to regenerate heritage buildings globally. Despite the fact that there is a noticeable improvement in this field, we are still facing projects that have not achieved the desired result of adaptation. Accordingly, the paper seeks to answer the questions what are the criteria that lead to the successful adaptive reuse projects? Or how can we best adapt heritage buildings to assure the success of the conversion process?

Design methodology/approach: This study is framed by a systematic literature review of relevant articles published or in press. The methodology is based on using a PRISMA diagram to address the number of articles which are screened in each step of Identification, Screening, Eligibility and Included. First the reviewed articles are selected by applying inclusion criteria in the titles, abstracts and key words and in the next step,selected articles from the first review are ready for the final evalution.

Research limitations/implications: The limitations of this study are defined in urban scale and urbanism due to the broad area this research is limited in a building scale.

Findings: This paper will provide a category of successfully effective factors in adaptive reuse of heritage buildings. Insight will further facilitate the path of more innovative conservation strategies for design makers, architects and developers.

In official real estate price statistics it is common to consider only actual asset deals as real estate transactions. These are, for instance, transfers of real estate ownership as recorded by Land Registry Offices or real estate sales documented in purchase agreements by real estate agents. In these cases the transfer refers to the reallocation of legal ownership of a real estate object. In the real estate trading market however, there is another way to transfer property. Real estate can be accommodated into a separate company, referred to as a Single Purpose Entity (SPE), that is specifically established to legally own the real estate. If using an SPE and if company A intends to transfer real estate to company B it may transfer shares of the SPE instead. In this scenario there is no shift of legal ownership of the property, but merely a shift of economic ownership as the SPE gets a new shareholder. These sales are not registered as real estate transactions and are therefore omitted from ‘traditional’ commercial property price indicators (CPPIs). Statistics based on either share or asset deals could therefore be distorted if the aim is to reflect market developments. In this research the size of real estate share deals in the Netherlands is studied to evaluate to what extent share deals should be included in CPPIs. Various official key registers in the Netherlands were linked to estimate sales numbers, total sales values and price developments of share deals. The results were compared to similar figures of asset deals. The outcomes will show the contribution of share deals to the volume and value of real estate transactions, and indicate possible price differences between share and asset deals.

Companies over the years embarked on initiatives intended to ensure that building designs and techniques enhance office environments that also enhance productivity and attract more employees. As a result, buildings are designed in such a way that they reduce downtime and the office designs consider employees as the main users of space. Previous studies conducted have emphasised on the impact of the physical office environment on occupants, and as such, a wide range of variables must be taken into account while ensuring comfort and well-being of occupants (Haynes, 2007; Martens, 2011; Parkin, et al., 2011). The focus on the physical office environment has predominately given attention to the design of office layouts that promote comfort to the occupants (Haynes, 2008). The aim of this research is to explore the effects of workspace design and performance of employees in green buildings as compared to those in conventional offices (buildings).

The work environment has been identified to influence employee satisfaction and work performance. In order to develop and provide work environments that meet the preferences of as many employees as possible, more information about user preferences and possible preference differences between different kinds of users is required. The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding concerning office users' work environment preferences. The aim is to investigate whether there are differences in the preferences of office users based on their age, gender, their mobility, and whether they work individually or with others.

A mixed-method-approach was used consisting of interviews, observations and a survey. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the interviews while statistical analysis was used for the survey.

The analysis gives an indication that green buildings generally outperform conventional buildings in most of the aspects of IEQ. By virtue of a better level of satisfaction by occupants in green buildings, there is a justification in literature that occupants’ satisfaction leads to employees productivity and perform without hesitation due to an environment that encourage pleasant workspaces.

The research is limited to City of Johannesburg the findings may not apply to other areas. Further studies is needed in other areas to see if there will be similarities or differences.

The paper provides useful information to developers, space planners and Human Resources in knowing some of the issues that affect employees’ productivity and the importance of green buildings.

With the increasing need for urban green space in urban area to improve the climate adaptation of cities, the spatial planning of residential land-use faces new challenges. Therefore, land-use allocation models offer a useful tool to shed light on the trade-offs and generate suitable solutions for housing allocation problems. A critical prerequisite for housing allocation models is, however, that the value-function is specified such that it accurately represents buyers’ willingness-to-pay for dwelling and location characteristics in the housing market. Hedonic price analysis is the predominant method to estimate willingness-to-pay values based on housing transaction data. Due to high correlations between spatial factors, however, the ability to identify the parameters of spatial factors involved in such value functions is limited. The objective of this study is to apply an alternative method to accurately measure households’ preferences of housing location and its neighborhood characteristics that is based on a stated choice experiment.

In this paper, we present the results of a stated choice experiment that we developed for this purpose. The population consists of homeowners (households) in middle-sized to large-sized cities in the Netherlands. The experiment consists of two parts to measure preferences for neighborhood characteristics and for accessibility of urban amenities respectively. The price of the dwelling is an attribute in both experiments so that a single discrete choice model can be estimated based on the pooled data from the two experiments. The experiments are implemented in an on-line survey and data is collected for a large national sample of homeowners in the Netherlands. This study will provide quantitative insight into homeowners’ preferences (willingness to pay) regarding spatial characteristics of a dwelling. By doing this, we obtain an empirically estimated housing land-use allocation model. This model offers a tool to municipalities and housing developers to optimize urban housing development taking into account financial, climate, and social objectives (match demand and supply of housing). In the paper, we describe the design of the experiments, the data collection, the results of a loglikelihood estimation and we show how the estimation results can be used to specify a state-of-the-art housing allocation model.

The commercial real estate sector contributes a sizable share to greenhouse gas emissions from the built environment due to its structural characteristics. The existence of an energy efficiency gap (EEG) between potential cost-effective measures and the actions being undertaken by the property industry has been subject to debate in the extant literature. Proponents of the EEG point to principal-agent problems, regulatory and technological risk and uncertainty over future energy prices as important drivers. Despite government-led efforts to decarbonise the sector through incentivisation of energy efficiency retrofits, evidence has emerged that a simple “fix and forget” approach will not suffice for large air-conditioned properties with complex systems and numerous stakeholders involved. Specifically, several studies have found that there is relatively little correlation between the proven energy efficiency of a building in operation and its energy performance certificate. This study tests if US office buildings with proactive energy management practices 1) consume less energy and, as a result, 2) command higher rental premia. Hence, the suggested study sets out to first survey and classify the efficiency of operational practices of a building, which past studies have not taken into account. These components can be found in the existing LEED dataset and include the frequency of commissioning and implementation of capital measures to upgrade energy efficiency equipment, the presence of building automation systems and advanced metering infrastructure. These measures are then analysed with a difference-in-difference approach and more advanced techniques. The results of this analysis will be valuable to policymakers, particularly in the UK and other European countries that are about to embark on an ambitious net zero carbon policy for commercial and domestic buildings. Information on achieved rents, as available from the CompStak database, is regressed on the constructed operational efficiency variable while controlling for a number of confounding variables. The insights shed light onto the potential financial returns to these measures in the office sector.

This research aims at developing a real estate management theory that overarches the different classes of real estate management like e.g. corporate real estate (CRE) management and housing management, who all operate within a specific narrative, apply a particular range of concepts and terminology, and refer in their own way to general theories like asset and portfolio management. These specificities create barriers for communication between the different classes of real estate management and hamper the exchange and development of knowledge in the field, what we consider undesirable.

The challenge of developing a broad real estate management theory is to avoid that little more is done than to repeat general management, economic or sociological theories. The aimed broad real estate management theory should approximate the concreteness of the specific theories and cover their core, while still being relevant for practice, research and education.

For this research, real estate management is considered the ongoing process of aligning the built environment and the needs of users, which happens at all scales of the built environment, for all types of users, and for all real estate aspects such as location, cost, function, time and quality.

Based on this definition, the research will addresses three components: demand side, supply side and the delivery models that coordinate both sides. The research on the side of the real estate demander searches for similarities and differences between e.g. the way the demander is organised internally, the real estate procurement is executed, what is outsourced and why, what performance criteria are used, how financial markets are accessed. The research on the side of the supplier of the built environment may address topics like e.g. what is the relation of the supplier with the user, what drives production, what are context constraints, what is the status of the sustainability discourse. The search for similarities and differences in the delivery may address e.g. what models are in place, what types of institutions operate in this delivery, who intervenes in this alignment and why, what is the nature of the markets, what is the role of state intervention, what type of alignment is searched for, what performance criteria are used.

The comparison of different classes of real estate management may reveal e.g.:

• that theories on CRE management subsequently position the CRE management department inside the user’s organisation boundary, whereas theories on housing management position this group most often outside the households’ boundary;
• that current practices in CRE and housing management both strive after a portfolio of conventional assets and keep away from the representative objects like monuments;
• that there is a trend that households want to be more involved and co-producing their house than before and thereto want to bypass the current institutional setting (sort of insourcing, self-production), whereas within organisations the trend has been for decades to less involve in the management of their accommodation and to rely on the possibilities offered by the CRE and related services market, although since a few years in-sourcing and self-provision seem to be revalued;
• that there is recent trend that private companies engage in the delivery of housing for their employees to deal with failing housing markets like they did in the beginning of the 20th century, and that households are re-initiating work at home, for which they need a different type of dwelling; both types of users seem to breach the institutionalised division of actors by real estate function installed for almost a century.

This type of observations – and many more and of very different natures – trigger an explanation of causes and mechanisms, and together with the main theories used in the different classes of real estate management (Pestoff, 1993; Brandsen et al., 2005; Henderson & Venkatraman, 1993;…) they are the basis for building the aimed broad real estate management theory. In concreto the research method consists of theory design, academic literature study and interviews with academics.

This treatise is a by product of long research inteding to study the urban form in the United States in the broad context of sustainability. Articulating its urban and suburban communities, history and type, the outcome of the anaylsis lead to reaching a model that cohesively conciles both in a harmoniose overall.

The analysis takes a genealogical approach establishing the past and present context of urban and suburban communities. As syentsis, it reaches a group of principals that lead to a new paradigm, one that can serve as foundation for a cohesive and sustainable regional and national strategy.

The design and planning of the proposed new paradigm, a semi-urban model tightly connected to a major population center, take into consideration data and elements such as densities, architectural types, urban types, transportation models, sustainability thresholds and state of art components such as electronic applications (apps), and explores their potential use in an urban and semi-urban context.

While we are perfectly aware of the recently observed health risks associated with urban living, we envision nonetheless that such risks to be dissoluble through the proposed strategy, by reincrating existing urban building types through new health conscious building regulations and the insertion of highly desirable open space urbansitically and architecturally.

The commercial real estate market is opaque and build upon complex relationships of countless property market and macroeconomic factors. Yet, office markets are due to its sheer volume and importance for numerous market players such as investors, developers, mortgage underwriters and valuation firms broadly researched. Especially, the prediction of property market indicators found strong interest among researchers and practitioners in the field of commercial real estate. Thus, the literature proposes three main frameworks for predicting office rents, among other. The estimation via multiple equation models such as error correction mechanism models (e.g. Hendershott et al., 2002; Ke and White, 2009; McCartnery, 2012) or interlinked demand and supply models (e.g. Rosen, 1984; Hendershott et al., 1999; Kim, 2012), reduced form single equation models (e.g. Matysiak and Tsolacos, 2003; Voigtländer, 2010; Kiehelä and Falkenbach, 2014) or autoregressive models (e.g. McGough and Tsolacos, 1995; Brooks and Tsolacos, 2000; Stevenson and McGarth, 2003). However, the limitations of the applied methods lay within the econometric methods itself. “Traditional” statistical modeling as an approximation of causality will only understand trends and relationships in the underlying market to the degree the employed econometric methods themselves can mirror. In contrast, more recent methodological attempts such as machine learning can be seen as a process of selecting the relevant features leading to a trade-off between precision and stability of a predictive model (Conway, 2018). This however, creates opportunities to expand and enhance existing efforts – in a way that complex and non-linear relationships within the data are captured. Many studies (e.g Dabrowski and Adamczyk, 2010; Rafatirad, 2017, Cajias and Ertl, 2018; Mayer et al., 2019) apply advanced machine learning methods to residential markets and demonstrate that “traditional” linear hedonic models can be outperformed. While linear models are found to produce less volatile predictions advanced machine learning methods yield more accurate results. Promising results can also be shown in commercial real estate markets. In particular, the aim of research is the performance assessment of the forecasting of office rents in European markets with advanced machine learning methods. A dataset of European markets with office prime rents and market as well as macroeconomic indicators is analysed and advanced machine learning models are estimated. A “traditional” linear regression model (ordinary least squares) functions as a benchmark for the evaluation of the employed methods: random forest and extreme gradient boosting. In particular, the prediction power and forecasting ability is assessed in- and out-of-sample, respectively. The tree-based advanced machine learning methods yield promising estimations in the observed markets. It becomes clear that in commercial real estate markets complex and non-linear relationships are present and can effectively be estimated by non-parametric econometric models. By the application of these methods the estimation error (out-of-sample) can be reduced by up to 60 percent. To the best of the authors knowledge such applications of machine learning methods in commercial real estate markets has not been considered in prior research. However, in the area of textual analysis results show that commercial real estate markets can be forecasted on the basis of market sentiment (e.g. Beracha et al., 2019). The capability of improving the forecasting power with advanced machine learning methods creates value and transparency for numerous market players and authorities. 

The classic department store properties (German: “Warenhaus”) have worked very well for decades, generated attractive returns and usually had a great magnetic effect in the central inner-city locations. The changing consumer behavior and the later emerging e-commerce trend led to a profound change in stationary retail. The death of numerous department stores was the result and let to the questions about possible re-use concepts.

The presentation starts with a definition of the asset class and presents the conceptual, structural and architectural characteristics of department stores. The following points, which are currently being discussed in science and in practice, give the main part of the presentation its central theme:

• Based on the specific conceptual and structural characteristics of a department store property, which are the potential options for the property when the department store closes - demolition and redevelopment of the site or, perhaps better, conversion of the property?
• Analysis of successful redevelopment concepts of German department store properties - risks and opportunities for the real estate market.
• The findings are based on a quantitative analysis of re development concepts in over 50 closed department stores in Germany over the past ten years
• The real estate valuation of department stores before and after the department store closes
• Current practical valuator experiences and benchmarks on redeveloped department store properties
• Summary of the most important findings and an outlook on further research fields

Prof. Dr. Florian Hackelberg MRICS, Professor for Real Estate Valuation at the HAWK University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Germany, will introduce the outlined topic from an academic perspective, while M.Sc. Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Matthias Kirsten MRICS, valuation expert of Value AG - the valuation group will share his view on the latest trends and developments in the market.

GIF, the Society of Property Researchers in Germany, recently published a catalog of key measures for managing real estate risk. It contains a comprehensive list with standardized descriptions along with sample applications. While some of the figures are well-known to everybody working in this field, several others are uncommon either for academic researchers or for practitioners. The prime goal of the catalog is to contribute to the professionalization of real estate risk management. The goal of our paper is different: We want to present the catalog to the scientific community and to suggest paths for further research on risk measures. One direction could be the systematic investigation of heuristic risk measures such as the Herfindahl-Hirschmann-Index (for concentration risk) or the weighted average remaining lease term (for vacancy risk). Another course could be the standardization of risk measures in such a way that benchmarking becomes possible for real estate investors.

The special, dual nature of property as both a consumption and an investment good makes it salient for portfolio choice. In fact, the theoretical literature predicts a constraint imposed by property on investment and the empirical literature has brought evidence that this constraint, in some form, exists, but neglecting to investigate its heterogeneity and to differentiate between owner-occupied and investment property. With reference to the predictions from a stochastic control model, we turn to the Wealth and Assets Survey panel for the UK, which allows to break down in detail households' portfolios, to show empirically how the relationship between property and stockholdings depends on the value of property relative to the size of the entire portfolio. While on average, an increase in the share of property in the total portfolio is estimated to correspond to a slight decrease or to no change in the share of stocks in liquid assets, this nexus potentially goes from positive to negative depending on the weight of property in the portfolio. Consistent with the prediction that only consumption-relevant property places a constraint on portfolio choice, the relationship can be identified robustly for owner-occupied property only.

Our research project aims at raising awareness about the value of biodiversity and urban ecosystem services (UES) for the French real estate market, in the private residential housing.

Public perception of the environmental risks rose sharply over the last decade. What is the perception of biodiversity and UES in the real estate market? The French Observatory of Sustainable Real Estate analyzed the priorities of employees and companies. The issue of biodiversity was considered as important as water and human rights, but well below energy, business ethics, corporate social responsibility, risk management policy, territorial development, mobility, or comfort.

Using GIS data and economic evaluation, by hedonic price methods, we assess the isolated contribution of the explanatory variables of biodiversity and UES on the price of real estate. We analyze the variation of the value for three urban ecosystem services (IDEFESE Project, 2019)—flood control, proximity to green spaces and refreshment—on the price of real estate when a property changes ownership.

Our modeling and mapping focus on the price of transaction (€/m2) at the communal scale from 2014 to 2019. The main variables are internal characteristics of housing (area, kind of housing, heating), external characteristics (accessibility and infrastructure, economic, social, and physical environment such as air pollution, noise), and biodiversity indicators and urban ecosystem services for the Ile-de-France region.

Moreover, we compare environmental values on the enhancement of green spaces, and their impact on residential choices. These studies are very useful for real estate developers, because they enable them to promote green spaces, and municipalities to become more attractive.

The COVID-19 crisis in 2020 has had a major global impact on business and society; this includes commercial real estate. This has seen the global real estate markets significantly impacted at every level in 2020; this includes capital flows to real estate in the global markets. This has resulted in only $759 B invested in income-producing real estate in 2020. Using the Real Capital Analytics database, this paper examines the real estate capital flows to 32 global markets in 2020, compared against previous years (2019 and 2015-2019). Analyses are also presented at a regional level, major city level and by property type, with specific real estate capital flow pathways, investor levels and major deals examined. The ongoing strategic real estate investor implications are also highlighted.

Risk awareness generally increases during times of uncertainty. REITs’ riskiness has been known to be affected by its debt and capital structure decisions. We investigate if the text in REIT financial statements can improve the risk-related information environment by predicting credit behavior. Using a REIT-specific dictionary we extract the net positive tone from REIT financial statements from the first quarter of 1997 to the fourth quarter of 2017. We then use a panel VAR to assess whether the net positive REIT tone can predict credit variables such as leverage, cash and short term investments, unsecured debt and secured debt. In addition, we investigate the predictive value of tone for high and low growth firms based on its book-to-market value. Overall, our findings suggest that 1) REIT-specific tone predicts firm credit behavior and 2) firms differ in their reporting behavior based on their book-to-market value. Firms with profitable growth opportunities, characterized by a low book-to-market value, increase (decrease) leverage and decrease (increase) cash and short term investments following an increase (decrease) in the net positive tone. On the other hand, REITs with limited growth opportunities (high book-to-market value) display an inverse relationship between tone and leverage. Our study contributes to the literature on REIT text analysis specifically within the context of extracting risk related information. Furthermore, our study may have value for REIT practitioners including investors, analysts, financiers, and credit rating agencies who are sensitive to firm risk.

Land resources which are exclusively saving the farming activities, remains inadequate in aspects of size, fertility and productivity rate while operations in farmlands are observed to be fragmented and scattered. The official data reveals that the average farmland size per households in 2016 was 7.0 parcel unit. It is observed that small-scale farm enterprises are widespread, and the average size of enterprises is insufficient and the distribution of lands between the regions and within the households is uneven. Due to increasing population pressure and inadequacy of non-agricultural employment opportunities, land fragmentation remains as a cumulative challenge to land management and administration. To eliminate this problem, legal arrangements have been made and land consolidation projects have been carried out. In the cause of preventing fragmentation to productive arable farmland due to inheritance and sales of agricultural lands to non-agricultural tenacities, the parliament has made some amendments to some of the sections in Soil Conservation and Land Use Law in 2014 concerning the compulsory farmland ownership and land transfer after inheritance and the prevention of land fragmentation which is frequently emerged due to land selling’s. Nevertheless, the Ministry responsible may only allow the transfer of land by considering certain criteria such as farm size, the sufficient level of revenue generated from the farmland, together with economic integrity of farmland.

The aim of the research were to examine the legislations which were enacted to prevent the land fragmentation in agriculture in Turkey, legal lacunas and inadequacies observed in the cause of implementations, and the necessary measures to be taken to solve the problems were outlined. The research results aim at evaluating the causes of disputes over land transfer and to suggest proper solutions to resolve land ownership’s issues based on national survey results as secondary and primary data. Primary data were obtained through the survey and the findings reveal that the main deviations arise from the existing law both at national and in the case of Ankara province. On the other hand, the evaluations of research results were made based on the obtained data from national institutions, and the results of the interviews with the landowners and representative leaders alias “mukhtar”. In-depth interviews and questionnaires were applied in 95 sub-settlements of the district. Interviews were also conducted with a total number of 5 landowners and users in each village, including the neighbourhood representative leaders. Land resources, land distribution based on use types, land ownership, fragmentation and the trends of the enterprises were examined based on the analysis of data obtained from a total of 500 questionnaires. The impacts of legal regulation on land use and land fragmentation were examined and then a situation analysis was conducted in terms of farmland in Polatlı district, one of the oldest human settlements in Anatolia. It is noteworthy that the change in land assets and use in the district is slow, but the practices of tenancy and sharecropping change yearly. It is obviously determined that newly legal provisions and regulations on land resources has a notably impact on the land tenure system, sustainability, land markets and land management strategies and land fragmentations in Turkey. In addition, these regulations have reduced the land mobility and transfer option in local markets and affect land rent and current capitalization rates.

The real estate industry is being known as a late adopter when it comes to change and innovation and whilst it is slowly evolving, parts of the business are increasingly being conquered by property related startups, i.e “PropTechs“. These young and agile companies offer new solutions and use new technologies to increase efficiencies, cut costs and solve omnipresent, industry-wide problems.

The focus of this research is the analysis of the key factors that influence the survival of PropTechs. Whilst many research papers are focusing on data based on surveys, which often leads to a high information density but small samples, this research makes use of a large quantitative data base from one of the most important platforms for private and capital markets globally, incl. Private Equity and Venture Capital. Our results confirm that the success of PropTech is non-linear and is explainable based on size, the number of employees and most importantly the number of investors. Furthermore, a simulation approach identifies the optimal parameters that maximize the survival probability. Our results are important to diversify capital across young and agile real estate related companies.

Unlike many other countries Britain had a weak private rented sector (PRS) for most of the twentieth century. After long term decline for almost a century private landlordism in Britain began a revival from the turn of the millennium. This recovery has still not arguably established a mature sector and this paper examines the steps in its progress by reference to changing returns over time.

The platform for this rebirth was the removal of regulation of the sector and the arrival of buy to let (BTL) mortgages that enabled private individuals to invest in property to let, without being penalised by high (previous) interest rates. The number of BTL landlords expanded dramatically in the property boom of the noughties, supported by high debt gearing and a favourable tax position.

The downturn in the economy/housing market following the global finance crisis had important consequences for the still fragile BTL sector. The subsequent experience of the sector has seen its growth stabilise and it has seen increased taxation. The financial attractiveness of BTL appears severely diminished and raises questions about the viability of the sector. It also begs the question as to whether if these tax changes were in place from 1996 whether the BTL boom could have happened at all.

The paper assesses these questions by a series of financial simulations that examines changing returns through the boom, bust, and recovery from the global financial crisis. In doing so this research technique offers insights into the changing economics of BTL. The research, in particular, considers the role of different levels of gearing through this cycle. It also explores to what extent outright acquisitions would have yielded significantly different returns. It considers the return differentials across eleven regions in Britain and examines the implications of recent tax changes on returns.

Globalization, foreign direct investments (FDI) and international real estate investments have been known as most popular issues in recent years. The fourth phase of globalization have “caused such a multilayered change including economic, political, socio-cultural areas. The free movement of capital is known as the most important component of the economic dimension of globalization taken together the conditions of FDI and it has been determined that real estate investment has an increased share throughout the total investment figures in Turkey. Within this respect it has been provided that internationalized real estate investments will play a leading role for emerging economies. Developing economies need to overcome their own problems in the development process regarding their insufficient capital accumulation and technological deficiencies as well as low income and low savings to reach the capital accumulation they need which takes a very long term. Therefore, it seems natural that they aim to obtain the investment capital from global capital within development process. It is also known that FDI offers important profit opportunities not only for the host country but also for the country investing. It is observed that the effects of the strategies to be implemented at both national and regional levels by both sides of the investments where the mutual win-win approach is valid direct this process. Referring to the mentioned effects in specific to Turkey, FDI is essential for the economy as a developing economy. Legal regulations and incentives to attract investments creates an effective and favorable environment in Turkey. Turkey does not only attract foreign investment, but also invests in, shows that having a role in multiple areas of the global economy.

This paper aims to reveal the relationship between the foreign real estate investments and the macroeconomic indicators in Turkey using both primary and secondary data as well as tackling the studies examining the FDI received in Turkey briefly. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In the next section a quick literature review including examples of developing economies is presented, then legal dimensions regarding FDI in Turkey in addition to international law have been discussed.  Section 3 outlines the economic and political climate in Turkey between the years 2007-2019 prior to tackling with fieldwork results (primary data) in the light of the secondary data. Section 4 concludes the paper and propose a solution for the future perspective. 

Introduction: This study examines the determinants of herding in the U.S. housing market with the focus on the effect of psychological biases on herding. People are motivated to copy others due to a psychological need for social behaviour. If homebuyers see large local inequalities in homeownership, they will have a stronger desire to overconsume relative to areas with more equal housing distribution. This mimetic behaviour will therefore lead to higher levels of herding, with resultant poor economic outcomes. Therefore, we test if areas with more extreme distributions of housing, income and consumption (i.e. areas where people have greater degree of positional concern) will exhibit more extreme herding, while controlling for fundamental economic and housing market variables.

The development of behavioural finance in the 1970s (Kahneman and Tversky 1979) and then its crossover into asset markets shortly after (Shiller 1982) has allowed behavioural factors in real estate to enjoy a growing research interest. It has been shown that an appreciation of sociological and psychological factors provides an understanding of market dynamics beyond the conventional efficient markets approach (West 1988, Lux 1995).

Herding is defined when behaviour is correlated across individuals (Devenow and Welch 1996), especially where it leads to sub-optimal investment decisions and bubble formation. Herding can be rational if informational inefficiency and agency issues lead investors to copy others (Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer et al. 1998), or irrational when they are susceptible to psychological biases (Devenow and Welch 1996).

One motivator for the presence of these psychological biases is the established economic presence of positional goods, whose value is derived from their social status and where the value is based on relative, rather than absolute, distribution. The overconsumption of positional goods creates negative externalities which have wider economic repercussions (Frank 2005). It has been shown that excessive social positional concerns lead to poor outcomes in physical and mental health (Frank 2008), and also sub-optimal investment decisions, such that people over-consume and over-leverage.

Evidence for the presence of herding in institutional investors is mixed (Barber, Odean et al. 2009), and the research in direct residential markets is limited, however the latter has found some significant results (Hott 2012, Ngene, Sohn et al. 2017). The existing evidence suggests that higher levels of herding can lead to bubble formation, and the resulting welfare loss can be extensive (Deng, Hung et al. 2018), as most clearly seen in the fallout from the Global Financial Crisis. Considering the scale of residential property as an asset class (over $33 trillion in the USA alone), and the dual nature of housing as an investment asset and consumption good, then there is an obvious requirement for further research.

Data and Methodology: Urban areas are based on the US Census Bureau definitions of metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) which are the 384 urban centres with a population greater than 50,000. In total they represent over 281 million inhabitants or 85% of the population. The actual house price data is taken from Zillow Research, and the data for social, economic, demographic and property variables is taken from the American Community Survey, administered by the Census Bureau. The time period tested is from 2005 until 2018, and so a panel approach has been used. We test the main hypothesis using the following model:

CSAD=f(fundamental factors)+f(positional factors) + ɛ

Where CSAD is the cross-sectional absolute deviation, a herding measure. The CSAD can be derived from the relationship between price changes in the overarching MSA and the underlying ZIP code locations. It is expected that areas with more extreme distributions of housing, income and consumption will also exhibit more extreme herding as a result, with these positional determinants being highly significant.

Results and implications: The initial empirical results have highlighted the importance of MSA size in determining the drivers of herding behaviour, with smaller urban areas being more impacted by new housing supply and availability of housing finance, whilst larger cities are much more strongly impacted by the relative distribution of house prices. Areas with older housing stock on average exhibit lower levels of herding, which motivates an interest in the causal connection between development and herding behaviour.

These results have motivated deeper investigation into the role of MSA size in determining herding behaviour, as well as local regulatory conditions and supply elasticities which, along with ownership structures, show evidence of interesting results.

The inclusion of various market efficiency-based interaction variables as mechanisms for the propagation of herding behaviour will also add to the literature on this topic, which is of particular interest in property due to its unique market structure.

The research has several important implications, firstly in aiding the identification of market signals which can assist with better informed market forecasting through a deeper understanding of market dynamics. In terms of portfolio construction and risk management, a better incorporation of social and economic drivers could result in superior risk-adjusted returns.

The limitation of the global warming caused by the greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions is one of the majors stake of the XXI century. Numerous international agreements have been released toward this topic as the Earth Summit of Stockolm in 1972, the one of Rio in 1992, the Kyoto’s protocol in 1997, the Climate energy package of the European Union in 2008, the Paris Agreement in 2015 or the 2030 agenda for sustainable development of the United Nations.

15% of these GHG emissions on a global level are caused by road transportation (International energy agency, 2016). However, when an individual mooves it is the most of the time to go from a building to another building in order to enjoy the services that it offers. Thus, what is the role of the real estate in the coconstruction of the sustainable mobility? The interest of this research is to answer this question by focusing on the perception the actors of the mobility and the real estate have of this role. In fact, even if the literature is rich concerning the “real estate” and the “sustainable mobility” concepts, it is very scarce once looking for the study of these two concepts combined.

In order to proceed to this research, the study of different types of materials has been made. Firstly, there has been the creative material coming from the cocreative workshop which has taken place during the 2018 edition of the Movin’On Summit. Secondly, there has been the survey distributed during the 2018 ans 2019 editions of the Movin’On Summit and during the 2019 edition of the Journées de l’Innovation (Innvation days) of the University of Quebec in Montreal School of Management (ESG UQAM).

The results show on one hand that the pair “real estate-mobility” has a potential that should be better exploited, on the other hand it found a subconcious knowledge that exists toward this domain.

University endowment funds have a key role in providing opportunities for universities beyond their normal budgets (eg: student scholarships etc). In many cases, these university endowment funds are significant pools of assets; eg: Harvard ($39B), Yale ($30B), Stanford ($28B) and Princeton ($26B) in the US and Oxford (£7B) and Cambridge (£6B) in the UK; often seeing separate investment management organizations established to manage these assets. The significance of these university endowment funds to university operations highlights the importance of the portfolio asset mix of these endowment fund portfolios. This sees real estate as a key asset in many university endowment fund portfolios. This paper examines the role of real estate in the portfolios of university endowment funds in the US, UK and Asia. A range of critical issues are assessed for these university endowment fund portfolios, including the level of real estate, real estate strategies used, real estate vehicles used, dynamics and risk management procedures used to achieve this real estate exposure. The ongoing strategic issues for real estate in university endowment fund portfolios are also highlighted.

This paper investigates the relationship between strategic default in the US residential mortgage market and household portfolio composition after the Great Recession in 2007. Following the definition of strategic default proposed by Gerardi et al. (2018), we find that in addition to the well-known ‘Double Triggers’ – negative equity and payment ability – households’ portfolio composition can also affect their strategic default decision. Holding a larger amount of non-housing durable assets increases the probability of strategic default, while owning more liquid assets can reduce it through two channels: portfolio rebalancing and relative cost of default.

Background: Various aspects of workplace management are studied in the fields of economics, organisational management, architecture, engineering sciences, medical sciences, psychology, etc. These different areas of research bring diverse approaches to the workplace, concentrating on either people, the environment, or the organisation. Many insights are lost due to disciplinary limitations (such as terminologies, research results presented in different journals and conferences). This paper describes a first attempt to integrate 18 theories that are used in Corporate Real Estate, Facility Management, and workplace research from different disciplines into an overall Workplace Management framework, as a starting point towards developing a grand workplace management theory.

Methodology: 18 theories were integrated into an overall Workplace Management framework. Through concept mapping, the tacit knowledge underlying each theory was made explicit in three to five statements that were provided by 34 researchers working with these theories and that were sorted by 19 experts. Multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis were performed, and statements were grouped into nine concepts within three regions of meaning.

Results: A holistic workplace management framework was created, comprising of three regions of meaning: ‘Aligning organisation and workplace strategies’, ‘Creating workplace experience’ and ‘Creating a resilient organisation’. The framework captures the nine concepts central to a future Workplace Management theory. Many research gaps were identified that require further attention before such a workplace management theory can be fully developed.

Originality: This is a first attempt to connect different theories that are applied into workplace management research into an overall framework that would capture the essence of workplace management.

Implications: The new framework provides insights for practitioners by expanding the understanding what workplace management aspects should be considered. It suggests that practitioners need a continuous approach towards workplace development, clear communication about the changes and the role of workplace, as well as close collaboration with other departments.

In the light of ever growing complexity of real estate transactions, the need for vendors and buyers to better understand the role of vendor due diligence (VDD) is imperative. The purpose of this paper is twofold: firstly, it provides a detailed literature review regarding the role of the conventional buyer’s due diligence (CBDD) and VDD from both the sellers’ and buyers’ perspectives. Secondly, it analyses the value of VDD over and above CBDD in real estate transactions by proposing a theoretical model involving two-stage auctions. The model suggested is able to accommodate the feature that even though the VDD is broadly increasing informational efficiency in the market, its value is limited when the vendors already have sound understanding of their assets and the buyers’ pre-transaction information about the asset is already high. Though the real estate market is considered here, the theoretical model we propose is applicable to any other complex asset transaction decision that support endogenous information disclosure considerations using VDD.

Autonomous vehicles are going to transform the peaceful coexistence of means of transport in urban areas. This development hat multiple effects on participants of the urban transport and the city itself. Overall, four trends can be observed: an increasing autonomous traffic in cities, a growing bicycle traffic due to adapted planning and social development, a revival of the living city and a technical upgrade of the vehicle fleet. These trends necessitate new concepts of planning and technic. This is where the research projects comes in.

Project goals and contents: The goal of the project is to investigate and develop solutions for the coming challenges of bicycle traffic in cities in interaction with autonomous vehicles. In doing so, concerns of transport, urbanistic and technic are taken into account. Essential components are transport-related methods as surveys and test drives to recognize and avoid conflicts between bicycles and autonomous vehicles, urbanistic concepts to design cycle paths in urban areas with autonomous vehicles, technical systems in autonomous vehicles based machine learning to detect and predict movements of bicycles and algorithm development to track and predict trajectories of bicycles in urban infrastructure.

Aspired project outcomes: Within the scope of the research project, the following outcomes are aspired. Based on the survey outcomes, recommendations to recognize and avoid conflicts are given. The survey outcomes themselves are also essential results of the project. Furthermore, a guideline for traffic an urban planning will be developed. The algorithm to track and predict trajectories of bicycle movements as well as the technical systems in autonomous to detect and track bicycles vehicles will be other important project outcomes. Target groups are planning and engineering offices as well as road construction and urban planning offices, vehicle constructors and startups.

Present state of affairs: At the current state, different scenarios for interactions of bicycles with autonomous vehicles are developed and discussed in a project related advisory board. Based on the conclusions, the online survey was designed and completed. The survey is currently in an evaluation process. The outcomes of the survey evaluation will be presented on the ERES conference. Also different scenarios for urban design of bicycle paths are investigated and can be presented and discussed. The suitability of different road types for traffic with cyclists and autonomous vehicles is another important result. Furthermore, the algorithm to detect and track bicycles and other participants in traffic is created. First results of tests with the developed algorithm can be presented as well.

The debate about urban production has been fanned by various drivers. Thanks to the new technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, the merger of the production and service sectors, and advances in environmental engineering leading to reduced harmful emissions, it is now feasible for certain areas of production to return to towns and cities.

Apart from technological innovations, this departure from the usual ‘greenfield’ sites is also favoured by economic, ecological and social trends. They include reurbanization and demographic change, not to mention a growing awareness of sustainability.

Above all, however, what makes urban production so appealing, possibly even imperative, is the growing trends towards individualization coupled with the desire for a better balance between family, private life and work, which is part of the vision for the European city.

Urban production currently lacks a conclusive definition.

Generally speaking, urban production combines modern production techniques with modern urban locations where smart production is enabled by product diversity. Urban production can mean quite a lot, namely:

• urban manufacturing,
• urban industries, and also
• urban agriculture or urban farming.

The paper is concentrated on urban industry. This is partly because central Germany has an industrial background, and partly because there are already a number of research projects on urban manufacturing by artisan businesses.

Furthermore, it is important to distinguish between whether a production site has become urban by chance or by design. Urban production poses very different challenges depending on which situation applies.

The Paper is focused primarily on urban production locations that were consciously developed as such and on the following questions:

What industrial sectors are suitable for (conscious) urban settlement?

• How can existing areas like industrial and commercial estates be suitably upgraded?
• How can business networks be established for the smart, sustainable use of commercial sites?
• How relevant are these findings for real estate management, for example for the revitalization and redevelopment of existing real estate and in particular of derelict industrial buildings?

Furthermore aims are the initiation of ‘Industry and Sustainability’ transformation laboratories, the reorientation of technology and business incubators and Professionalization in the management of corporate real estate.

For all these approaches, it is essential to be aware of the processes behind urban production. Only then can the right concepts and measures be applied in real estate management to create attractive urban locations.

Introduction: Since the wake of the 21st century, rising cases of collapsing investment buildings, renters rejection of properties structurally unfit as business or residential accommodations, and ongoing sealing of suspected weak buildings especially in Nigeria has become a source of serious concern. It is no longer news that the financial/other benefits from many housing investments and owner-occupied homes might be on-the-line sequel to risks of degenerating building conditions in-spite of assurances by the building contractors that their properties would last a hundred years. It has become imperative to make evaluation reports regarding the usage-to-carrying capacity status of these buildings in maintenance and valuations as sustainability measures in directing investors decisions and government actions regarding usage compliances among housing occupiers and owners of real estate facilities. A sincere transformation in the way housing is managed is the key direction.

Goal: This paper makes strong case for mandatory technical checks in real estate facilities before and during letting as measures to checking this ugly trend of building collapses affecting investments and owner-occupied properties. It therefore recommends the designing of housing quality test assurance policy applicable on all in-use and to-use facilities to eliminate/reduce significantly usage impacts on the lifespan of real estate facilities, its effects of investors decisions and public trusts on the Estate Surveyors and Valuers competence to guarantee sustainable durability and financial growth especially for investment-driven real estate developments.

Methodology: Nigeria is taken as study area. Author sort the contributions of 30 Practicing Estate Surveyors managing properties in 20 out of 36 states of the federation by conducting structured exploratory interviews to verify the inclusivity of quality tests in real estate investment practices in Nigeria. The questionnaire was evaluated using the SWOT Analysis technique to substantiate the lack and need for such tests by practitioners. Also, the illusionary experimentation was employed to demonstrate the gap in reporting housing durability alterations and its impact on durational and financial decision projections in real estate facilities. Study outcomes were assessed using descriptive analysis techniques and presented on suitable tables.

Findings: Qualitative Usage Assurance Tests in real estate facilities has not been in in-depth considerations; many houses are let without conducting stability impact tests, lack operational evaluation and most often has irregularly-graduated depreciation effects on their durability. Findings also shows possible future risks of more collapses in high density urban buildings capable of undermining the advisory competence of Estate Surveyors and Valuers in handling Investments in Real Estate Facilities.

Conclusion: Usage Quality Assurance Test should be stepped up as mandatory service in business or multi-level properties, certified by an Estate Surveyor and Valuer to guard the nation against unprecedented records of abrupt investment losses. This is wake-up call to the profession to reconsider the use-to-value implications of facility spaces before, during and after letting to properly guide the investment decisions and project plans of investors in real facilities.

Originality: This study is the first-ever attempt to introduce and advance the application of technical reporting practices on real estate facilities. It is an eye-opener to possible gaps and solutions to checking causes of distrust in professional reports regarding structural durability and usage reductive effects on investment values of real estate facilities.

This paper aims to show that the value of a real estate portfolio can be increased through systematic diversification. This value contribution can, on the one hand, be proven within a portfolio and, on the other hand, by including the owner's remaining assets. A quantification would be a comprehensible proof that a portfolio can generate an investor-specific value contribution through diversification beyond the sum of the individual market values. The basic research approach is proven using an alternative valuation method. In particular a DCF valuation is used, which is extended by a Monte Carlo Simulation. This method addresses all risks that can arise from real estate investments. This approach can help portfolio managers with transaction decisions. Moreover, it is an instrument that demonstrates the competence of the initiator and helps to achieve better financing conditions by showing professional investors the efficiency of the planned fund or portfolio. The paper presents an alternative approach to the prevailing Modern Portfolio Theory, which focuses only on the expected return on the one hand and the corresponding risk on the other. With the method applied in this paper, the value contribution of such a diversification strategy is demonstrated for the first time using market data.

Autoregressive heteroscedastic effects in financial time series have been subject to a broad field of applied econometrics. Both academic research as well as the industry apply GARCH processes to real estate data with previous investigation mostly focused on securitized real estate positions. So far, the common approach in the literature has been to assume normal distribution of the innovation term for the GARCH modelling of direct real estate markets (Miles, 2008). The specified assumption of normality however falls short of the data characteristics exhibited by direct real estate markets, such as returns of real estate prices explicitly not normally distributed and better characterized by a more leptokurtic, skewed distribution (Schindler, 2009). Ghahramani and Thavaneswaran (2007) point out that typically the innovation distribution is selected without further justification. Consequently, the omission of a priori assumptions about the innovation term distributions being fit to direct real estate leading to misspecification and -parameterization of GARCH models is the research aim of this study. The employed analysis will utilize monthly transaction-based data for ten US property market subsets, whilst observing a window of time to encompass different market conditions and volatility regimes (Perlin et al., 2021). Determining how ARCH effects might differ across different US real estate submarkets as well as major and non-major markets builds on and extends previous research focused on geographical disaggregation (see Crawford and Fratantoni, 2003; Dolde and Tirtioglu, 1997; Miles, 2008; Schindler, 2009). Subsequently fitting and estimating each data subset with a conditionally normally distributed GARCH model will be juxtaposed by employing a variety of innovation distributions to the data. It follows the central hypothesis of this paper, that the goodness of fit for GARCH models can be improved by allowing for the conditional distribution to be modeled as a flexible a priori assumption. Investigating the differing goodness of fit for the models and employing the most appropriate models to re-estimate the GARCH parameters will allow an analysis of the differences in volatility clustering effects to the model employing normally distributed innovations. The aim is to show empirically, that non-normal innovation term distribution leads to a potentially better goodness of fit of the GARCH model. The utilization of a priori assumptions of GARCH model specification is of high importance not only for portfolio management of investors, but also risk management for economic institutions such as central banks and mortgage banks (Schindler, 2009). To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no study which scientifically examines the innovation term distribution of GARCH models of direct real estate investments. This paper aims to provide a better understanding of the influence a priori assumptions of the innovation term can take to increase the validity of volatility models for direct real estate investments.

This paper analyses the relationship between the potential demand for purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) properties and their online displayed attributes. Using data from 12 major UK cities, we analyse the effect of the online displayed property information on the popularity score of a PBSA. The results suggest that PBSAs’ tangible and non-tangible attributes are important to students in their online accommodation search, although, these attributes vary in impact. The study also reveals that failure to display key information of a PBSA may make the property less attractive. These insights are valuable in developing student accommodation investment, development and management strategies.

Across the years, environmental consequences deriving from climate change and disruptive natural catastrophes are taking the lead in the governments’ agenda in order to mitigate the effect of environmental degradation. In this framework, the so called “climate risk” and its implication on financial markets are, basically, the object of a huge analysis and increasing interest of financial market players and in particular academics and practitioners has paid deep attention to the climate change implication on real estate market, conceived as one of the most affected from climate risk.

In this scenario, this work aims at exploring the relationship between the volatility in weather-related patterns across the time and its implication in real estate returns, taking into account the existing gap between national real estate markets. The ambitious goals of this research are to provide a contribution to the existing literature on the hot debate towards the aforementioned relation and its implication on an investor perspective and to evaluate practices which allow to consider differences in that impact across different time horizons.

Purpose: Interest in healthy office environments has increased among corporate real estate managers and the real estate sector. Not only workers, but also organizations profit through higher competitive advantages. This study aims to identify office tenants’ willingness to pay (WTP) higher rents for healthier office environments. Depending on the WTP, investing in healthy office buildings can be beneficial for landlords through the ability to charge higher rents, potential decreased vacancy risks and higher asset values.

Approach: A survey with a stated choice experiment was carried out in 2019 among workplace decision makers in office organizations leasing from the CBRE Dutch Office Fund (multi-tenant, multi-service office buildings on prime locations). The 84 respondents repeatedly chose between three hypothetical office profiles, generated from an orthogonal factorial experimental design varying combinations of eight aspects’ quality levels derived from literature: (1) ‘indoor air quality’, (2) ‘thermal comfort’, (3) ‘exposure to light’, (4) ‘noise & acoustics’, (5) ‘office type’, (6) ‘view’, (7) ‘amenities’ and (8) ‘relative rental price’. Data were analysed to estimate preferences and related WTP values using a Multinomial Logit (MNL) model.

Findings: After ‘rental price’, the attributes ‘thermal comfort’, ‘noise & acoustics’ and ‘amenities’ were most important when choosing between office alternatives, plus healthier quality levels were preferred. Although obviously price increases were generally disliked, there was a positive WTP for all healthy office workplace aspects, except exposure to light. Considering all significant healthy office workplace aspects as a whole, the WTP for an improvement from a low to a medium quality office is estimated to range from a conservative 6.37 up to an optimistic 12.33% rental increase, from a medium to a high health quality office from +6.17 up to 12.43% and from a low to a high health quality office from +12.54 up to 24.76%.

Originality: Previous studies generally did not focus on healthy workplace preferences of workplace decision makers. Findings contribute to insights for real estate investors, asset managers and developers in which healthy office aspects to implement in their portfolio/projects.