This paper performs a theoretical-empirical analysis of the effect of globalization on buildings’ height in Latin America and Southeast Asia. We develop a principal-agent model where global architecture firms use extra height as advertising in the tallest building per city, adding it to what determined by cities’ fundamentals of economic and geographic size. The model develops two ideas: (1) global architects have prestige advantages that allow them to add extra height, an advertising feature of their technical expertise and specialist competence, and (2) international architects of the Global South have additional reasons to use extra height compared to their Global North peers. The model is tested using a 2000–2018 panel database comprising 55 cities (from 25 countries). We find that in addition to economic and geography fundamentals, globalization and the location of architecture firms are strong determinants of buildings’ height, as predicted in our theoretical model of height as advertising.

This research suggests improvements to the macroeconomic housing indices of a thin real estate market, such as that of Cyprus, by testing various index construction methods with transaction-based data. Authors employ around 80% of the total number of apartment transfers documented at the Department of Lands and Surveys (DLS) of Cyprus, spanning from the first quarter of 2015 to the second quarter of 2022. They utilize this data to generate comprehensive indices at both the national and district levels. Authors studied, analyzed, and identified the deficiencies of the DLS database and tested the sample with six different methods. Log-linear time dummy hedonic models were found to explain the variation of prices better than other methods, mainly due to their ability to handle the diversity of properties in terms of location and physical characteristics and proposed techniques to deal with the issues of the standard time dummy (STD) and rolling time dummy (RTD) methods, regarding index revisions and low transaction volume during periods of downturns, respectively. Furthermore, a hybrid dependent variable of actual and appraised prices, that is, the accepted price, extracts explicit significantly better statistical measures. Additionally, the overall model fit was enhanced by introducing locality dummy variables and, through different combinations of attributes, captured the optimal results per district. Eventually, when the introduced transaction-based indices were compared to the corresponding existing published indices, which are based on non-actual data, we saw some resemblances, but overall, there were wide deviations.

This study extends the work by Sirmans et al. (2005) by providing a review of the hedonic pricing model literature published in real estate journals from 2005 through 2021. A total of 252 studies are reviewed with 150 of these being published in the top three traditional real estate journals: Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Journal of Real Estate Research, and Real Estate Economics. An additional 42 papers are published in the housing-specific journal, Journal of Housing Research. A review shows that real estate research is global in both authorship and data usage, although most of the studies use U.S. data and are performed by U.S. researchers. In addition, real estate modeling is quite expansive, including spatial or geospatial autoregressive models, difference-in-difference models, quantile regression, and other advanced techniques.

Interest in sustainable real estate has grown since 2009 when the American Real Estate Society launched its open access Journal of Sustainable Real Estate. Using this as a catalyst, we abstracted and analyzed 265 articles published in the nine other journals in the ARES/IRES sustainable real estate space, documenting the evolution of sustainable property research for research topic, geography, methods, and property types. From an article count, the most numerous types of studies in this corpus are from North America, using regression analysis or another quantitative technique to evaluate residential property. Popular research topics of late were the sustainable/green category, building efficiency/operations, negative proximity influence and urban form. Dynamic research topics that are consistently of interest over the past ten years are climate change and flood, earthquake, hurricane risk. Green retrofitting of buildings and green development were popular over the past five years. Regression analysis using citations as the dependent variable revealed that variables positively associated with more citations are green certification, survey research, theory building, and JRER. On the negative side, Asian markets, case study, financial and economic analysis, other research methods, building operating efficiency, and other property types are less likely to be cited.

This is the eighth release of the Real Estate Academic Leadership (REAL) rankings for authors and institutions. Similar to the previous seven releases, the rankings reflect articles contained in the top three real estate journals (The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, The Journal of Real Estate Research, and Real Estate Economics) based on multiple indices. Unlike trends from the previous rankings, minor changes regarding academic institutions reflected one of two scenarios: faculty retirements and/or deaths; and faculty and recent PhD graduates transitioning to positions in industry rather than academia. Larger changes in the rankings related to academic institutions continue to reflect movement of productive research faculty from one university to another university.

Although a potential to improve revenue mobilisation of local authorities, it is claimed Ghana’s local real estate tax provision on capital improvement is a penalty on land development. This work evaluates the claim in the context of equity and economic efficiency. Findings from the work support the claim. Compared with undeveloped lands particularly in cities, the tax is discriminatory to capital improvements, which situation could incentivise investment in undeveloped lands and be a potential cause for a lot of undeveloped lands, uncompleted and leap-frog developments in cities. It is also not neutral and diminishes the return on capital and the capacity of landlords to keep their buildings in constant repair thereby discouraging capital improvement on land. Coupled with factors like the current poor tax collection, this could affect the revenue mobilisation and socio-economic development efforts of local and central governments. Thus, the tax policy stands a plea for a reform.

While some studies have attempted to prove the existence of positive benefits associated with homeownership, the so-called “homeownership effect,” few studies have been able to isolate the impact of homeownership on low-income families from neighborhood effects. In a pilot study using survey data collected from applicants to the U.S.-based housing charity Habitat for Humanity, I employ a quasi-experimental design to compare changes in the lives of those who were selected into the Habitat for Humanity housing program to those who applied for housing but were denied. In addition, since the recipients of Habitat houses remain in the same general area as their original residence, this provides a unique opportunity for the comparison of treatment and control groups to examine the impact of homeownership apart from neighborhood effects. I find that, in comparison to denied applicants, Habitat homeowners report more positive changes in their overall life, economic situation, and their level of community involvement, but less evidence of reported improvements in their children’s educational outcomes.

Financing of Residential Real Estate Development (RRED) projects has not received due attention in India beyond affordable (social) housing. RRED projects continue to finance themselves through customer advances, which has been disrupted because of recessionary market conditions, supply glut, and the tough stance of the Reserve Bank of India. This has resulted in thousands of stalled RRED projects across the country for which developers cannot raise finance through any source. This paper extensively examines options of RRED project financing, across developed and emerging markets, in principle and practice. An extensive review of traditional and innovative methods of financing for RRED projects has been undertaken, and gaps have been identified in the Indian context. Authors have validated identified gaps through primary research using relative importance index and principal component analysis.

Extant studies on Self-Help Housing (SHH) have centered on the types, processes, value, and challenges, but rare on the criteria for assessing its affordability. This paper presents a comprehensive review on the criteria based on published literature in 32 peer-reviewed journals. 81 relevant peer-reviewed papers were used for the study. A total of 8 criteria set, including 31 associated determinants were identified to have influence on SHH affordability. The criteria were; financing, access to land, building quality, development controls and planning regulations, building cost, location, infrastructure and services, and social issues. A framework method was adopted to select the papers. Authors from both developed and developing countries were noted to have made various pioneering contributions to SHH studies. The mean SCImago Journal Rank indicator obtained was above1.00, which showed that the journals used for the review were quality within the time frame of 1997 to 2020. Limitations were mainly seen in our dependence on Scopus, the few search engines, and the selected papers used. This study's outcome will broaden understanding of SHH affordability in developing countries on; policy formulation, housing market conditions, and research This review provides the opportunity for further empirical studies on SHH affordability metric development.

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) measures continue to grow in both academic and industry relevance. This review focuses on the commercial real estate literature related to ESG measures. The environment section outlines the significant bodies of work on that area, which are well researched. Related work discussing literature on ISO 14000, the system accepted by the United Nations Financial Council on Climate Change for carbon reporting is also reviewed. The social and governance portions explore the growing literature in those areas. The literature identifies research gaps particularly in social and governance measures, as many ESG requirements move from voluntary to regulated. Questions on the form and impact of governance—especially in private markets—remain largely unasked. Similarly, the nascent social literature continues to look for uniformity of definition for social measures and defining their business and community impact. These and other research gaps provide meaningful future research opportunities.