96 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Household attributes and the future demand for retirement housing
Ageing populations provoke the question of how much bespoke housing should be provided for the elderly. Older people are generally reluctant to move but as they age health circumstances may encourage moves into specialised accommodation. This paper reports an exercise in estimating the future demand for specialised independent living housing and the extent to which that demand will be for owner occupied accommodation or renting, using data for England. The approach is based on a behavioral model related to health and housing issues. The forecasts indicate a substantial increase in demand, growing at a faster rate than the population as a whole. If supply does not rise to meet these demands, serious problems arise in the quality of life of, and cost of caring for, older people; with implications for health care and social services
Recommended from our members
Is ESG commitment linked to investment performance in the real estate sector?
The linkage between corporate commitment to environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues and investment performance has generated a substantial body of research outside the real estate sector. Nevertheless, the relationship between the environmental performance and financial performance of companies is still not well understood as studies have found mixed and contradicting results. Drawing upon the KLD database which contains ratings on seven ESG dimensions from 2003-2009, this paper investigates the relationship between the ESG rating and the financial performance of a sample of US real estate firms. Since the primary transmission channel from ESG activities to financial performance may be better reflected by a firm's intangible assets, we model both Tobin's q and the total annual return in a panel framework with time and sector specific fixed effects. Our results are largely consistent with the existing literature finding a positive relationship between CFP and CSP. Further, the time scale of the lagged effects seems plausible
Recommended from our members
Measuring sentiment in real estate - a comparison study
Purpose
In mainstream economics and finance literature, market sentiment is considered ‘irrational’. This leads to significant challenges in capturing the effect of sentiment on economic relationships. Real estate is even more complex due to the fact that the sector exhibits several market inefficiencies. In this paper, we explore the literature and present a simple test for the potential of using three different sentiment indicators to improve a basic cap rate model. We establish the case using commercial real estate data for London West End.
Design/methodology/approach
The three indicators differ in their underlying source and method. We used orthogonalization and principal component analysis for a macroeconomic sentiment indicator. Further, online search volume data has been used to mirror the market sentiment for the London West End market. Finally, textual analysis based on wordlists has been applied to corpus of market reports.
Findings
Our results indicate considerable improvement in our ability to capture the effect of sentiment. Further, has the consideration of a human factor lead to improvement in our basic yield model.
Practical implications
The methods suggest that sentiment extracted from more forward-looking sources, such as online searches, could be a significant information gain for investors, lenders or other market participants. The additional information could be used to adjust their behavior within the market.
Originality/value
To our knowledge, this is the first study, which applies textual analysis to market reports for the commercial real estate market in the UK
Recommended from our members
What could work for future workplaces, beyond working?
Workplace is changing. It is no longer just about working; it is about living. Bold initiatives by visionary business leaders have shown us the power of transformation that the workplace has over otherwise staid businesses drifting along with the status quo. At the same time, their competitors act to overtake them. The fact that over 40% of the Fortune 100 companies from fifteen years ago no longer exist is testament to this adapt or die reality. In this paper, we analyse the changing dynamics and identify drivers, needs, challenges and indicate approaches towards solutions. Our collective goal is to kickstart fresh thinking within organizations as to how their workplace programs can offer high value to the businesses they serve.
We raise a call for a new generation of thought leaders: one who are able to identify new roads to success through integration of a creative mix of new and expanded disciplines, far beyond the current scope normally associated with physical workplace solutions. To do this successfully businesses need a laser-like focus on their challenges to be solved, and new leaders need to break traditional barriers to reach the most valuable solutions. In a sense the nature of change to which we aspire moves this work well beyond a Workplace context…… but to ignore the obvious catalytic qualities of the workplace to engender creativity, create a common sense of purpose and develop specific deliverables through a project-derived momentum would be to miss a great opportunity. We are therefore enthusiastic about continuing our search for a new generation of business improvement hosted under a workplace banner
Recommended from our members
Doing well by talking good? A topic modelling-assisted discourse study of corporate social responsibility
Using the novel technique of topic modelling, this paper examines thematic patterns and their changes over time in a large corpus of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports produced in the oil sector. Whereas previous research on corporate communications has been small-scale or interested in selected lexical aspects and thematic categories identified ex ante, our approach allows for thematic patterns to emerge from the data. The analysis reveals a number of major trends and topic shifts pointing to changing practices of CSR. Nowadays ‘people’, ‘communities’ and ‘rights’ seem to be given more prominence, whereas ‘environmental protection’ appears to be less relevant. Using more established corpus-based methods, we subsequently explore two top phrases - ‘human rights’ and ‘climate change’ that were identified as representative of the shifting thematic patterns. Our approach strikes a balance between the purely quantitative and qualitative methodologies and offers applied linguists new ways of exploring discourse in large collections of texts
Recommended from our members
Analysis of the intermediate housing market mechanism in the UK
Government policies have backed intermediate housing market mechanisms like shared equity, intermediate rented and shared ownership (SO) as potential routes for some households, who are otherwise squeezed between the social housing and the private market. The rhetoric deployed around such housing has regularly contained claims about its social progressiveness and role in facilitating socio-economic mobility, centring on a claim that SO schemes can encourage people to move from rented accommodation through a shared equity phase and into full owner-occupation. SO has been justified on the grounds of it being transitional state, rather than a permanent tenure. However SO buyers may be laden with economic cost-benefit structures that do not stack up evenly and as a consequence there may be little realistic prospect of ever reaching a preferred outcome. Such behaviours have received little empirical attention as yet despite, the SO model arguably offers a sub-optimal solution towards homeownership, or in terms of wider quality of life. Given the paucity of rigorous empirical work on this issue, this paper delineates the evidence so far and sets out a research agenda. Our analysis is based on a large dataset of new shared owners, observing an information base that spans the past decade. We then set out an agenda to further examine the behaviours of the SO occupants and to examine the implications for future public policy based on existing literature and our outline findings. This paper is particularly opportune at a time of economic uncertainty and an overriding ‘austerity’ drive in public funding in the UK, through which SO schemes have enjoyed support uninterruptedly thus far
Recommended from our members
Can sentiment surveys pre-empt real estate market activities?
We evaluate a number of real estate sentiment indices to ascertain current and forward-looking information content that may be useful for forecasting the demand and supply activities. Our focus lies on sector-specific surveys targeting the players from the supply-side of both residential and non-residential real estate markets. Analyzing the dynamic relationships within a Vector Auto-Regression (VAR) framework, we test the efficacy of these indices by comparing them with other coincident indicators in predicting real estate returns. Overall, our analysis suggests that sentiment indicators convey important information which should be embedded in the modeling exercise to predict real estate market returns. Generally, sentiment indices show better information content than broad economic indicators. The goodness of fit of our models is higher for the residential market than for the non-residential real estate sector. The impulse responses, in general, conform to our theoretical expectations. Variance decompositions and out-of-sample predictions generally show desired contribution and reasonable improvement respectively, thus upholding our hypothesis. Quite remarkably, consistent with the theory, the predictability swings when we look through different phases of the cycle. This perhaps suggests that, e.g. during recessions, market players’ expectations may be more accurate predictor of the future performances, conceivably indicating a ‘negative’ information processing bias and thus conforming to the precautionary motive of consumer behaviour
Recommended from our members
How Does Location Matter in Regions of Significant Spatial Heterogeneity?
To be comThis paper examines the impact of a number of location attributes on residential prices to dispersed and heterogeneous territorial units, the Greek Islands. While using a well-researched and widely applied method, the uniqueness of this study lies with the challenging geo-spatial identification of the properties’ location since the islands are not entirely mapped. Hedonic models were applied on: a) clustered-islands in administrative/geographical groups and b) individual-island-level regressions. The results reveal that due to the presence of unobserved heterogeneity, the optimum and robust results come with the individual island regressions which identify location attributes very significant, although varying substantially across islands
Recommended from our members
Does regional infrastructure investment stimulate extra housing and commercial building supply? Long-run evidence across the English regions
This paper uses long-term regional construction data to investigate whether increases infrastructure investment in the English regions leads to subsequent rises in housebuilding and new commercial property, using time series modeling. Both physical (roads and harbours) and social infrastructure (education and health) impacts are investigated across nine regions in England. Significant effects for physical infrastructure are found across most regions and, also, some evidence of a social infrastructure effect. The results are not consistent across regions, which may be due to geographical differences and to network and diversionary effects. However, the results do suggest that infrastructure does have some impact but follows differential lag structures. These results provide a test of the hypothesis of the economic benefits of infrastructure investment in an approach that has not been used before
Is ESG Commitment Linked to Investment Performance in the Real Estate Sector?
The linkage between corporate commitment to environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues and investment performance has generated a substantial body of research outside the real estate sector. Nevertheless, the relationship between the environmental performance and financial performance of companies is still not well understood as studies have found mixed and contradicting results. Drawing upon the KLD database which contains ratings on seven ESG dimensions from 2003-2009, this paper investigates the relationship between the ESG rating and the financial performance of a sample of US real estate firms. Since the primary transmission channel from ESG activities to financial performance may be better reflected by a firm's intangible assets, we model both Tobin's q and the total annual return in a panel framework with time and sector specific fixed effects. Our results are largely consistent with the existing literature finding a positive relationship between CFP and CSP. Further, the time scale of the lagged effects seems plausible.Corporate Social Responsibility, Green Buildings, Financial Performance
- …