Real Estate Interests Research Articles

O Bixiga em disputa: ambiente, cultura, memória e interesses imobiliários

Bixiga is currently experiencing a critical situation that threatens the preservation of what constitutes its most unmistakable cultural and environmental heritage, associated with the strong impact caused by the advance of real estate interests, announced by new buildings recently approved by Conpresp in its territory. Particular concern is the vulnerability to which the area known as Grota do Bixiga is being exposed, despite the existence of protective legislation agreed since the early 2000s. Concern is intensified by the fact that these developments create reckless precedents for others to be approved in the near future, thus putting an end to the possibility of preserving what remains of Grota do Bixiga. This approach allows us to look at a whole process of study, inventorying and consolidation of knowledge produced within the Historical Heritage Department, which began in the 1980s, linking architectural assets to the structuring elements of the urban fabric and to the social relationships that not only populate the memory of the place, but are kept alive in the cultural practices of the present. It also allows us to deal with the impasses between cultural heritage preservation policies and urban policies of a broader nature. It also allows us to deal with the impasses between cultural heritage preservation policies and broader urban policies. Finally, it allows us to analyze another layer of latent memory, unveiled by the discoveries linked to the excavations carried out for the construction of the Orange Line Subway Station. The recent archaeological finds have sparked an important debate about the origin of occupation of the neighborhood associated with the presence of the Quilombo Saracura, strengthening the memory of the black population, due to its representativeness and its persistence over time, as an essential element of the culture of the place, which cannot be erased or made invisible.

The financialisation of contemporary urban planning policy discourse: insights into Serbian and Irish planning legislation

ABSTRACT While existing literature highlights the role of private real estate interests in shaping urban policy agendas, few studies have examined formal changes in planning legislation as a key site of influence. This paper investigates planning legislation reforms in Serbia and Ireland as illustrative cases of a broader trend of reducing investment risks and enhancing the financial viability of real estate development. Employing critical and context-sensitive narrative analysis of policy change, we present three key insights. First, we reveal how planning has been transformed into a tool for creating real estate assets driven primarily by financial considerations. Second, we demonstrate that public interest is often subordinated to private interests under a policy narrative dominated by financial sector logic and document how legislative and policy changes frequently introduce new barriers that restrict democratic engagement in planning policy formation. Third, we identify an increasing centralization in planning administrative structures, which undermines the principle of subsidiarity and provides opportunities for certain lobby groups to exert undue influence over policymakers. As the financial sector's influence on built environments grows globally, this study calls for more research into how real estate finance and planning systems affect each other, and how this plays out in practice.

Superblock Model for Social Housing in the context of the Modern Movement Review: Lucio Costa’s proposal for Alagados

The approach to the urban development plan by Brazilian architect Lucio Costa for the Alagados neighborhood (1972) emphasizes the dimension of social housing in its urban planning, highlighting the incorporations carried out in response to the revisions of the modern movement. The study contextualizes revisionist approaches in urban plans, focusing on housing clusters in superblocks and their relationship with public facilities, bringing out the organicist paradigm, aiming for flexibility in urban planning. An approach is taken that includes a specific architectural historiography and design theory, reviewing Lucio Costa’s proposal through the analysis of documents, plans, and works. Given the disagreement between social housing policy based on utopian ideals and real estate interests, Lucio Costa’s superblock proposal presents its adaptable morphology, concluding that the implementation of Lucio Costa’s proposal could possibly have provided substantial positive results to Alagados.

What drives the real estate market? Could behavioral indicators be useful in house pricing models?

PurposeThe objective of this paper is to examine the determinants of the Greek house market during the period 2006–2022 using not only economic variables but also behavioral variables, taking advantage of available information on the volume of Google searches. In order to quantify the behavioral variables, we implement a Python code using the Pytrends 4.9.2 library.Design/methodology/approachIn our study, we assert that models relying solely on economic variables, such as GDP growth, mortgage interest rates and inflation, may lack precision compared to those that integrate behavioral indicators. Recognizing the importance of behavioral insights, we incorporate Google Trends data as a key behavioral indicator, aiming to enhance our understanding of market dynamics by capturing online interest in Greek real estate through searches related to house prices, sales and related topics. To quantify our behavioral indicators, we utilize a Python code leveraging Pytrends, enabling us to extract relevant queries for global and local searches. We employ the EGARCH(1,1) model on the Greek house price index, testing several macroeconomic variables alongside our Google Trends indexes to explain housing returns.FindingsOur findings show that in some cases the relationship between economic variables, such as inflation and mortgage rates, and house prices is not always consistent with the theory because we should highlight the special conditions of the examined country. The country of our sample, Greece, presents the special case of a country with severe sovereign debt issues, which at the same time has the privilege to have a strong currency and the support and the obligations of being an EU/EMU member.Practical implicationsThe results suggest that Google Trends can be a valuable tool for academics and practitioners in order to understand what drives house prices. However, further research should be carried out on this topic, for example, causality relationships, to gain deeper insight into the possibilities and limitations of using such tools in analyzing housing market trends.Originality/valueThis is the first paper, to the best of our knowledge, that examines the benefits of Google Trends in studying the Greek house market.

Inclusionary Housing Policy in Cities of the South: Navigating a Path Between Continuity and Disruption

Inclusionary housing policy (IHP) encourages developers to provide affordable housing in well-located areas. This can add to their costs and risks, so the process of policy adoption is complicated and contested. This paper provides a synthesis of the literature and then analyzes the efforts to implement IHP of two South African cities, Johannesburg and Cape Town. The core proposition is that making residential development more inclusive requires at least three ingredients to ensure meaningful change. First, the case for reform needs popular support and an active civil society to secure the backing of political leaders and officials facing resistance from entrenched real estate interests. Second, the policy needs to be feasible in an economic sense and calibrated in an incremental way that will not jeopardize private investment. Third, a robust legal framework is required to institutionalize the changes and to limit disputes and disruption.

Estimating the Importance of Civil Construction for the Brazilian Economy Through Hypothetical Extraction of the Input-Output Matrix

This paper aims to undertake a systemic analysis of civil construction to verify whether public investments made from 2007 onwards were able to increase the sector's productive linkages in the Brazilian economy. For this, the hypothetical extraction method of the input-output matrix and the official matrices of the country from 2005 and 2015 are used. The results show that the importance of the productive structure of the construction sector - total extraction - exceeds 7.42% of GDP in 2005 to 10.06% in 2015. This fact reveals that the civil construction sector in 2005 was the seventh most important moving to the fourth in 2015 in a total of twelve sectors considered. Another important finding lies in the fact that despite the construction sector presenting an increase in the complexity of its productive structure, it showed strong backward linkage, but low forward linkage, in both analyzed periods. Through these results, it is possible to conclude that the tax exemption of some inputs, reduction of real estate interest, expansion of credit for housing through public housing and infrastructure policies may have been essential for the increase in the complexity of the sector's productive chains between the years' from 2005 and 2015. Such findings are useful for the scientific literature that investigates the sector by bringing evidence to Brazil and to policymakers given that possibly the construction sector can be used as a strategy to promote and stimulate economic activity in times of crisis.

People, Property and Territory: Valuation Perspectives and Economic Prospects for the Trazzera Regional Property Reuse in Sicily

As in many parts of Italy and Europe, the Sicilian Trazzera regional property has been for a long time the main land infrastructure supporting the agro-pastoral economy. Throughout its slow evolution, this land heritage has been affected by transport transformations and illegal appropriations by neighboring landowners, which have reduced its potential public function in the current renewed prospects of sustainability and a new balance between territories concerning the issue of the inland areas. A further issue concerns the management of the relationship between private interest and prospects for public reuse in progressively urbanized territorial contexts where this infrastructure takes on considerable economic and real estate interest. The current regional legislation suggests some measures for inter-municipal planning that also include the legitimization of illegal appropriations. From this twofold prospect, according to the wide-spread information and communication technologies (ICTs), and also including the geographic information systems (GIS), this work provides the application of two assessment tools based on a GeoDatabase of the current heard roads in the two areas of quantitative–monetary and aesthetic–qualitative assessment. The first shows the extent to which the fair compensation to be charged for legitimizing land parcels is underestimated today, to the detriment of urban social fixed capital development. The second demonstrates the way that common awareness of landscape value can be nurtured for the benefit of land and ecological–environmental rebalancing.

Research and Citation Trends in Sustainable Real Estate

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.

Meriton’s Strong development in Australia and its globalization

With the sustainable development of Australia’s property development, there are a considerable number of investors presenting a dramatic interest in Australian real estate. Not only that, the boom of immigration in Australia leads to the undersupply of the Australian real estate market. For this reason, the success of the immigrant market will increase the domestic competitiveness of Australian property development companies. In this situation, the leader of Australia’s property development, Meriton have published a series of strategy to occupy the immigrant market and it is also incredibly significant for the public to have an awareness of the distinctive advantage for Meriton in Australia’s property development. In this situation, this essay will provide a detailed analysis of Meriton and its strategy for immigrants, which includes marketing strategy for immigrants and globalization of Meriton, one of the most successful property development companies in Australia. This essay will introduce Meriton to investors and the sustainable development of Meriton to address the increasing importance of immigrants in the Australian property development industry.

The Ritual Solidarity of Masked Processions in Calabar, Cameroon, and Cuba

The Ritual Solidarity of Masked Processions in Calabar, Cameroon, and Cuba

Analysis of the Relationship Between COVID-19 Infections and Web-Based Housing Searches

Abstract The study used Google search query data on real estate interest for several countries in the Baltic area. The dynamics of public interest in housing have been compared to the dynamics of the COVID-19 infections in Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Sweden. This study uses the Vector autoregressive (VAR) model to forecast such time series. VAR is a multivariate linear time series model in which the endogenous variables in the system are lagged functions of the values of all endogenous variables. The increase in COVID-19 infections negatively affected society’s interest in housing. The study used Google Trends and R software.

Participatory Methods: the Exemplary Case of the Bela Vista “Island” in Porto (2013-2017)

The authors summarize the origin and evolution of the urban “island” of BelaVista in Porto, Portugal, since the 19th century. Despite local residents mobilizing in the wake of the revolution of April 25th 1974 in the context of the urban housing and design initiative (Local Ambulatory Support Service — Serviço de Apoio Ambulatório Local, SAAL), they were unable to renovate the crumbling neighbourhood. The Residents’ Association, resisting the onslaught of demolition strategies that were driven by real estate interests, eventually managed, with the support from a technical team of architects, social scientists and activists, to mobilize residents and ensure the political commitment of an independent parliamentary candidate in order to rehabilitate the “island” of Bela Vista. The project was also subsequently supported by the Councillors of Culture and Urbanism. Though various quantitative (survey) and qualitative (interviews, life stories) methods were applied in the study, the article highlights and expands on the action-research method opposite to positivist assumptions.

How to balance the goals of urban planning and real estate? A view from above the parapets

Despite being subject of many studies, the fields of urban planning and real estate are usually seen as incompatible in terms of their goals, even if the ingredients dealt with are much the same: the built environment. This viewpoint addresses some of these familiar concerns, and then suggests extended cooperation in the design process as a solution to overcome the disagreements. Potentially the result is a win-win situation. This argumentation also gives insight into how such mutual benefit is achievable by inviting corporate real estate interests to the negotiations about planning, and by using urban design for creating both quality and value in one and the same process.

In Case You Haven't Heard…

From the Department of Strange Bedfellows: A group that is allied with real estate interests in Harlem is claiming that there are too many opioid treatment programs (OTPs) there. In fact, this group, called the Greater Harlem Coalition, has steadfastly and relentlessly tried to prevent the siting of any OTPs (for their recent op‐ed in a local newspaper, see https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny‐oped‐harlem‐is‐overdosing‐on‐methadone‐20210716‐d3634ejjbredphqobz5d3e3jhq‐story.html). Who else is opposed to OTPs? Many people in harm reduction, including Helen Redmond, producer of the documentary Liquid Handcuffs and a proponent of the idea that methadone should be given out more freely. As OTPs continue to battle communities that for various reasons — stigma, mainly — don't want treatment programs in their midst, they must be wondering about how to counter these enemies from very different sides.

Understanding the Effects of Influential Factors on Housing Prices by Combining Extreme Gradient Boosting and a Hedonic Price Model (XGBoost-HPM)

The characteristics of housing and location conditions are the main drivers of spatial differences in housing prices, which is a topic attracting high interest in both real estate and geography research. One of the most popular models, the hedonic price model (HPM), has limitations in identifying nonlinear relationships and distinguishing the importance of influential factors. Therefore, extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), a popular machine learning technology, and the HPM were combined to analyse the comprehensive effects of influential factors on housing prices. XGBoost was employed to identify the importance order of factors and HPM was adopted to reveal the value of the original non-market priced influential factors. The results showed that combining the two models can lead to good performance and increase understanding of the spatial variations in housing prices. Our work found that (1) the five most important variables for Shenzhen housing prices were distance to city centre, green view index, population density, property management fee and economic level; (2) space quality at the human scale had important effects on housing prices; and (3) some traditional factors, especially variables related to education, should be modified according to the development of the real estate market. The results showed that the demonstrated multisource geo-tagged data fusion framework, which integrated XGBoost and HPM, is practical and supports a comprehensive understanding of the relationships between housing prices and influential factors. The findings in this article provide essential implications for informing equitable housing policies and designing liveable neighbourhoods.

Painting over precarity: Community public art and the optics of dispossession, gentrification and governance in West Oakland, CA

Large-scale arts-led urban regeneration strategies are typically distinguished from the grassroots authenticity of community art projects, but this article examines how the trope of community facilitates gentrification in Oakland, California. Community murals of the 1960s to 1990s played a critical social role by making visible minority concerns and galvanizing movements for social justice, but questions emerge about contemporary community art in relation to neoliberal values and urban precarity. The Black neighbourhood of West Oakland has been resistant to gentrification due to decades of disinvestment and through robust activism against displacement in one of the most progressive cities in the United States. Based on longitudinal ethnographic research and situated visual analysis, I show how neighbourhood resistance was only overcome when change appeared to come from the ‘community’ itself, through the specific imagery and spatiality of community mural projects that resignify the neighbourhood to accommodate gentrification. I critique gentrification as a dualistic insider and outsider dynamic; such structural analysis elides ‘community’ as a contested category that may be complicit with urban restructuring. Real-estate interests also appropriate signifiers of ‘community’ to reshape neighbourhood identity, valorize property, and police public space. I argue that in West Oakland the ‘community mural’ is vertically integrated in municipal and capital logics that serve to dis-embed, rather than support, historic neighbourhood populations.

Mangrove Park of Recife: A century of extreme uses and abuses (?)

Recife, in Northeast Brazil, was surrounded by the Atlantic Rainforest and its associated ecosystems (e.g., flooded mangrove forests and vegetated dune), intertwined with numerous channels and other naturally occurring water features, until the mid-1800s. Today, it is the core of a metropolitan area with the usual urban problems that affect all coastal cities, including conflicts with the remaining mangrove forest. It is possible to analyse the conflicts between the urban growth of coastal cities and their environment and ecosystems through three dimensions: urban–physical, socio-demographic, and socio-environmental. We present an analysis of the urban area expansion density variation in Recife over nearly a century (1951–2014) in terms of its conflicts with the remaining mangrove forest patch. Improved GIS data (compilation of orbital images, aerial photography, aerial mapping, and vector data) and qualitative analysis of the master plan were used. The results indicate an unexpected expansion (in area) of flooded mangrove forests, with the replacement of other wetland areas or channels with urban growth. The fact that the mangrove park is surrounded by urban areas represent an increasing risk of being occupied. There is a great real estate interest on the edge of the park facing the neighbourhoods of Boa Viagem and Imbiribeira. Knowing how urban development interfered with natural areas to provide space for coastal cities can help researchers understand how ecosystems are characterised by different growth models. Thus, it will be possible to contribute to the development of new approaches to coastal development that include the better use of ecosystem services that guarantee better living conditions in cities by reducing conflicts and increasing the exploitation of flow control, thermal regulation and the possibility of co-existing with a flooded urban forest and all its associated biodiversity.

HOUSING PRICE BUBBLES AND FACTORS AFFECTING THE FORMATION OF BUBBLES: THE TURKISH CASE

Price bubbles may be a leading indicator for financial crises. In history, some of the important price bubble cases occurred in the real estate or housing market. In this study, the existence of a price bubbles, the periods of the existing bubbles, and the factors affecting the formation of bubbles in the housing sector for both Turkey and TR22 Region (Balıkesir-Çanakkale) are being investigated. Data covering 126 monthly housing price indices for the period between January 2010 and June 2020 were used. According to the SADF and GSADF test results, some evidence of housing bubbles for both Turkey and TR22 Region was reached. According to the results of the logit model applied in the study, the increase in the housing loan volume and the real estate interest rates as well as the decrease in the BIST-100 and M2 money supply, increase the probability of a housing price bubble for the TR22 Region. Additionally, the increase in the housing loan volume, real estate interest rates, BIST-100 and CPI as well as the decrease in the industrial production index, increase the probability of housing bubbles for Turkey. Considering those factors, the regulatory authorities in Turkey such as the BRSA and CBRT should take preventive measures to maintain price, financial and economic stability. In addition, those who invest in the housing sector should carefully monitor the existence and causes of price bubbles in this sector.

ОБ ОБЪЕКТЕ И СИСТЕМЕ ВЕЩНЫХ ПРАВ НА ЗЕМЕЛЬНЫЕ УЧАСТКИ В РФ В КОНТЕКСТЕ РЕФОРМЫ ГК РФ

Two concepts have developed around the world - single object and multi-object real estate. The choice of the model determines the systematics of rights in rem over real estate. At the present stage of development of the legislation of countries where a land plot is regarded as a single real estate object, this concept does not always effectively regulate the relations of persons having a legal interest in real estate. The concept of a single object has been replaced abroad by the idea of a parcel unit which allows for the recognition of rights in rem to separate spaces: underground, above-ground and aerial. The concept of parcels implies granting a number of privileges to property owners within the boundaries of a land plot. Analogous to the concept of parcels in Russian law may be the concept of composite immovable property. Applying the concept of composite immovable property to multifunctional complexes, cottage settlements, blocks of flats and property of garage co-operatives with vesting property owners with rights of common ownership of common use property (if any) seems more relevant to the interests of such persons compared to the current regulatory model. The system of rights in rem over land plots in accordance with the concept of a single object in a multi-object real estate will not work efficiently. The approach proposed in the Draft Amendments to the section on rights in rem of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation is aimed at duplicating the already existing structures and giving the rights of obligation in rem and the negative easement the status of rights in rem. This confusion destabilises the circulation of real estate that has developed over decades. Gratuitous and perpetual rights to use land plots must be retained as the basis for the functioning of special public legal entities and the support of subjects for socially important purposes. However, the capacity of the holders of such rights can be expanded by granting the right to own a land plot. In order to distinguish between real and compulsory lease regime, it is possible to distinguish between user (compulsory) lease and user-owner (real) lease. It is also necessary to expand the range of security transactions with respect to land plots by providing for the possibility of leasing and sale with the right to buy it back. For easements in the Russian Federation, an open list of types of private easements should be established, while public easements, on the contrary, should be subject to a closed list. For the Russian Federation, the introduction of a reciprocal easement structure could be relevant. In the case of personal easements, the potential of such rights in relation to land plots cannot be appreciated and the need to duplicate existing rights through such a construction. A similar problem is characteristic of usufruct and rights in rem. In this respect, it would be more reasonable to introduce the property rights in real estate in Russian law that are endowed with a succession effect.

Transnational gentrification: The crossroads of transnational mobility and urban research

This introduction to the special issue introduces the contributors’ articles and identifies key themes relating to how increased transnational mobility has affected urbanisation processes in many cities, resulting in the globalisation of rent gaps. A mix of local and transnational real estate interests work to attract higher-income lifestyle migrants and tourists, often from higher-income countries to lower-income urban space in order to increase its exchange value. In the process, however, they act to reduce the use value of urban space to lower-income residents. The introduction notes that the acceleration of lifestyle mobilities moving through urban spaces, and the development of transnational lifestyles of urban place consumption, have produced new forms of gentrification – not merely the spread of an urban strategy to new cities, but the planetarisation of rent gaps. Transnational gentrification is the form of contemporary urbanisation that occurs as a result of closing these rent gaps through attraction of higher income, transnational migrants, often from high-income countries in Northern Europe and North America.