Harnessing Real Estate Investment through Decision Process for Selecting Tenants in Nigeria

One of daunting challenges to harnessing real estate investment in Nigeria is selection of tenants. Many prospective tenants of completed development projects often appear good at the recruitment stage but later become belligerent with grave consequence and challenge to the Estate Surveyors. This paper examines the criteria set by practitioners in selecting tenants in Lagos Nigeria. A survey of Estate Surveyors and was carried out to obtain the criteria and relative importance index analysis carried to determine their rankings. The outcome showed the decision process to assist estate surveyors in recruiting reliable tenants such that investors in real estate will harness adequate and remunerative returns and have value for their investment

Tenant mix variety in regional shopping centres: some UK empirical analyses

The variety and quality of the tenant mix within a shopping centre is a key concern in shopping centre management. Tenant mix determines the extent of externalities between outlets in the centre, helps establish the image of the centre and, as a result, determines the attractiveness of the centre for consumers. This then translates into sales and rents. However, the management of tenant mix has largely been based on perceived “optimum” arrangements and industry rules of thumb. This paper attempts to model the impact of tenant mix on the rent paid by retailers in larger UK shopping centres and, hence, the returns made by shopping centre landlords. It extends work on shopping centre rent determination (see Working Paper 10/03) utilising a database of 148 regional shopping centres in the UK, with detailed data for over 1900 tenants. Econometric models test the relationship between rental levels and the levels of retail concentration and diversity, while controlling for a range of continuous and qualitative characteristics of each tenant, each retail product, and each shopping centre. Factor analysis is then used to extract the core retail and service categories from the tenant lists of the 148 shopping centres. The factor scores from these core retailer factors are then tested against rent payable. The results from the empirical analysis allow us to generate some clear analytical and empirical implications for optimal retail management

Proactive multi-tenant cache management for virtualized ISP networks

The content delivery market has mainly been dominated by large Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) such as Akamai and Limelight. However, CDN traffic exerts a lot of pressure on Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks. Recently, ISPs have begun deploying so-called Telco CDNs, which have many advantages, such as reduced ISP network bandwidth utilization and improved Quality of Service (QoS) by bringing content closer to the end-user. Virtualization of storage and networking resources can enable the ISP to simultaneously lease its Telco CDN infrastructure to multiple third parties, opening up new business models and revenue streams. In this paper, we propose a proactive cache management system for ISP-operated multi-tenant Telco CDNs. The associated algorithm optimizes content placement and server selection across tenants and users, based on predicted content popularity and the geographical distribution of requests. Based on a Video-on-Demand (VoD) request trace of a leading European telecom operator, the presented algorithm is shown to reduce bandwidth usage by 17% compared to the traditional Least Recently Used (LRU) caching strategy, both inside the network and on the ingress links, while at the same time offering enhanced load balancing capabilities. Increasing the prediction accuracy is shown to have the potential to further improve bandwidth efficiency by up to 79%

A Novel Approach to Incubator Evaluations: The PROMETHEE Outranking Procedures

Considerable public resources are devoted to the establishment and operation of business incubators (BIs), which are seen as catalysts for the promotion of entrepreneurship, innovation activities and regional development. Despite the vast amount of research that has focused on the outcomes or effectiveness of incubator initiatives and how to measure incubator performance, there is still little understanding of how to determine incubators that are more effective than others. Based on data from 410 graduate firms, this paper applies the multi-criteria outranking technique PROMETHEE (Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluation) and compares the long-term effectiveness of five technology-oriented BIs in Germany. This is the first time that outranking procedures are used in incubator evaluations. In particular, we investigate whether PROMETHEE is a well-suited methodological approach for the evaluation and comparisons in the specific context of business incubation.business incubators, evaluation, performance measures, PROMETHEE, Outranking

Tenant Mix Variety in Regional Shopping Centres: Some UK Empirical Analyses

The variety and quality of the tenant mix within a shopping centre is a key concern in shopping centre management. Tenant mix determines the extent of externalities between outlets in the centre, helps establish the image of the centre and, as a result, determines the attractiveness of the centre for consumers. This then translates into sales and rents. However, the management of tenant mix has largely been based on perceived “optimum” arrangements and industry rules of thumb. This paper attempts to model the impact of tenant mix on the rent paid by retailers in larger UK shopping centres and, hence, the returns made by shopping centre landlords. It extends work on shopping centre rent determination (see Working Paper 10/03) utilising a database of 148 regional shopping centres in the UK, with detailed data for over 1900 tenants. Econometric models test the relationship between rental levels and the levels of retail concentration and diversity, while controlling for a range of continuous and qualitative characteristics of each tenant, each retail product, and each shopping centre. Factor analysis is then used to extract the core retail and service categories from the tenant lists of the 148 shopping centres. The factor scores from these core retailer factors are then tested against rent payable. The results from the empirical analysis allow us to generate some clear analytical and empirical implications for optimal retail management.retail agglomeration, inter-store externalities, core-periphery model, shopping centre image

Re-thinking commercial real estate market segmentation

Investments in direct real estate are inherently difficult to segment compared to other asset classes due to the complex and heterogeneous nature of the asset. The most common segmentation in real estate investment analysis relies on property sector and geographical region. In this paper, we compare the predictive power of existing industry classifications with a new type of segmentation using cluster analysis on a number of relevant property attributes including the equivalent yield and size of the property as well as information on lease terms, number of tenants and tenant concentration. The new segments are shown to be distinct and relatively stable over time. In a second stage of the analysis, we test whether the newly generated segments are able to better predict the resulting financial performance of the assets than the old dichotomous segments. Applying both discriminant and neural network analysis we find mixed evidence for this hypothesis. Overall, we conclude from our analysis that each of the two approaches to segmenting the market has its strengths and weaknesses so that both might be applied gainfully in real estate investment analysis and fund management

Technology business incubators as engines of growth: towards a distinction between technology incubators and non-technology incubators

Business incubators are an increasingly popular tool for promoting job and wealth creation. Yet given the heterogeneity of incubation models, it is not always clear how incubators operate, what their main characteristics are and how can they best contribute to job and wealth creation. If technology is central in promoting economic growth and new firm creation the crucial mechanism in transferring new knowledge to markets, then technology incubators have the biggest potential to contribute to economic growth. We define technology incubators by their strategic choices in terms of mission, linkages to universities and geographical location. We investigate their nature by comparing the levels of business services provision, selection criteria, exit policy and tenants’ characteristics. Our sample includes 12 incubators located in six Northwestern European countries and a total of 101 incubated companies. Data were collected in both incubators and among their tenants. Results show that technology incubators provide more tenants with their services, select younger companies and practice stricter exit policies. Additionally, they tend to attract more experienced teams of entrepreneurs. Our main contribution is a better understanding of the technology incubators impact against the remainder population of business incubators. We speculate that incubators not focussed in incubating technology might not be contributing to company creation at all. Further, the low levels of service provision are both a product and a consequence of slack selection criteria and weak exit policies. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings to business incubator managers, policy makers and prospective tenants

Partnering Strategies for Fitness Evaluation in a Pyramidal Evolutionary Algorithm

This paper combines the idea of a hierarchical distributed genetic algorithm with different inter-agent partnering strategies. Cascading clusters of sub-populations are built from bottom up, with higher-level sub-populations optimising larger parts of the problem. Hence higher-level sub-populations search a larger search space with a lower resolution whilst lower-level sub-populations search a smaller search space with a higher resolution. The effects of different partner selection schemes for (sub-)fitness evaluation purposes are examined for two multiple-choice optimisation problems. It is shown that random partnering strategies perform best by providing better sampling and more diversity