Residential property investment : assessing home ownership long term viability

Home purchase and ownership is seen by the majority of Australians as the basis for a sound investment strategy and to seciure their long term retirement goals. Although home ownership rates in Australia are in excess of 65% of the population, there have been doubts raised as to the effectiveness of purchasing a house as the main source of retirement income. The main issue with this approach is that the house has to be sold to gain access to these funds or the owners have to take out a reverse mortgage to access the capital tied up in their home, which can be more expensive than selling. This paper will carryout a detailed analysis of a number of investment options to determine the effectiveness of home purchase as a long term investment vehicle. This study has found that the long term investment in equities or managed superannuation funds can provide a greater retirement income than the purchase of a residential property for owner occupation

Threshold concepts in property education : a case study

First year Property Economics students enrolled in the Bachelor of Urban Development at QUT are required to undertake a number of compulsory subjects, alongside students undertaking studies in other disciplines. One such common unit is ‘Stewardship of Land’, an interdisciplinary unit that introduces students to the characteristics of land and land tenure with a focus on land use and property rights. It covers a range of issues including: native title, land contamination, heritage values, alternative uses, the property development process, impact of environmental and social factors, and the management of land, both urban and regional. Teaching such a diverse content to a diverse audience has in previous years proved difficult, from the perspectives of relevance, engagement and content overload. In 2011 a project was undertake to redevelop this unit to reflect ‘threshold concepts’, concepts that are “transformative, probably irreversible, integrative, often troublesome and probably bounded” (Meyer & Land, 2003) . This project involved the development of a new set of underlying concepts students should draw from the unit, application of these to the unit curriculum, and a survey of the student response to these changes. This paper reports on the threshold concepts developed for this unit, the changes this made to the unit curriculum, and a preliminary report on survey responses. Recommendations for other educators seeking to incorporate threshold concepts into their curricula are provided.

Space management in Malaysian government property: A case study

Cost implications related to the physical resources such as land and building in organisation is significant. Management entity of government or private sectors has often ignored the importance and the contribution gained from the physical resources towards their organisation. This source is a precious asset that can generate income if properly managed. This paper aims to explore the current trends in space management internationally, both from the government and private sector perspectives. A case study is conducted to study the level of effectiveness of space management in one of the government institutions in Malaysia. The findings from the case study will be compared with the current international trend of space management. The study will enrich the current understanding of space management in government properties, as well as to compare the level of space management effectiveness of government properties in Malaysia with the international trends and proposed suggestions to improve current practices of space management of Malaysian government’s properties. Keywords:

Long summer days : grounded learning of words for the uneven cycles of real world events

Time and space are fundamental to human language and embodied cognition. In our early work we investigated how Lingodroids, robots with the ability to build their own maps, could evolve their own geopersonal spatial language. In subsequent studies we extended the framework developed for learning spatial concepts and words to learning temporal intervals. This paper considers a new aspect of time, the naming of concepts like morning, afternoon, dawn, and dusk, which are events that are part of day-night cycles, but are not defined by specific time points on a clock. Grounding of such terms refers to events and features of the diurnal cycle, such as light levels. We studied event-based time in which robots experienced day-night cycles that varied with the seasons throughout a year. Then we used meet-at tasks to demonstrate that the words learned were grounded, where the times to meet were morning and afternoon, rather than specific clock times. The studies show how words and concepts for a novel aspect of cyclic time can be grounded through experience with events rather than by times as measured by clocks or calendars

Career-path analysis using optimal matching and self-organizing maps

This paper is devoted to the analysis of career paths and employability. The state-of-the-art on this topic is rather poor in methodologies. Some authors propose distances well adapted to the data, but are limiting their analysis to hierarchical clustering. Other authors apply sophisticated methods, but only after paying the price of transforming the categorical data into continuous, via a factorial analysis. The latter approach has an important drawback since it makes a linear assumption on the data. We propose a new methodology, inspired from biology and adapted to career paths, combining optimal matching and self-organizing maps. A complete study on real-life data will illustrate our proposal.

Property case competition : multi-stakeholder reflection

Pacific Rim Real Estate Society has conducted four property case competitions from 2009 to 2012. The competition provides opportunities for undergraduate students to present their proposal on a given case study. All students were locked down with their four team members for five hours without external help to ensure a level playing field across participants. Students prepared their presentation and defended their arguments in front of experts in property industry and academia. The aim of this paper is reflecting on the feedback received from stakeholders involved in the case competition. Besides exploring what students have gained from the competitions, this paper provides an insight on the opportunities and challenges for the new format of competition to be introduced in 2013. Over the last four competitions, there were three universities participated in all the four consecutive events, four universities partook in two events and another four universities only competed once. Some universities had a great advantage by having previous experiences by participating in similar international business competitions. Findings show that the students have benefited greatly from the event including improving their ability in problem solving and other non-technical skills. Despite the aforementioned benefits, the PRRES closed-book case competition is proven not viable thus future competition needs to minimise the travel and logistic cost.

Predicting invasion in grassland ecosystems: is exotic dominance the real embarrassment of richness?

Invasions have increased the size of regional species pools, but are typically assumed to reduce native diversity. However, global-scale tests of this assumption have been elusive because of the focus on exotic species richness, rather than relative abundance. This is problematic because low invader richness can indicate invasion resistance by the native community or, alternatively, dominance by a single exotic species. Here, we used a globally replicated study to quantify relationships between exotic richness and abundance in grass-dominated ecosystems in 13 countries on six continents, ranging from salt marshes to alpine tundra. We tested effects of human land use, native community diversity, herbivore pressure, and nutrient limitation on exotic plant dominance. Despite its widespread use, exotic richness was a poor proxy for exotic dominance at low exotic richness, because sites that contained few exotic species ranged from relatively pristine (low exotic richness and cover) to almost completely exotic-dominated ones (low exotic richness but high exotic cover). Both exotic cover and richness were predicted by native plant diversity (native grass richness) and land use (distance to cultivation). Although climate was important for predicting both exotic cover and richness, climatic factors predicting cover (precipitation variability) differed from those predicting richness (maximum temperature and mean temperature in the wettest quarter). Herbivory and nutrient limitation did not predict exotic richness or cover. Exotic dominance was greatest in areas with low native grass richness at the site- or regional-scale. Although this could reflect native grass displacement, a lack of biotic resistance is a more likely explanation, given that grasses comprise the most aggressive invaders. These findings underscore the need to move beyond richness as a surrogate for the extent of invasion, because this metric confounds monodominance with invasion resistance. Monitoring species' relative abundance will more rapidly advance our understanding of invasions.

Brand value of property in Bangkok Metropolitan Region (BMR), Thailand

This paper aims to evaluate the brand value of property in subdivision developments in the Bangkok Metropolitan Region (BMR), Thailand. The result has been determined by the application of a hedonic price model. The development of the model is developed based on a sample of 1,755 property sales during the period of 1992-2010 in eight zones of the BMR. The results indicate that the use of a semi-logarithmic model has stronger explanatory power and is more reliable. Property price increases 12.90% from the branding. Meanwhile, the price annually increases 2.96%; lot size and dwelling area have positive impacts on the price. In contrast, duplexes and townhouses have a negative impact on the price compared to single detached houses. Moreover, the price of properties which are located outside the Bangkok inner city area is reduced by 21.26% to 43.19%. These findings also contribute towards a new understanding of the positive impact of branding on the property price in the BMR. The result is useful for setting selling prices for branded and unbranded properties, and the model could provide a reference for setting property prices in subdivision developments in the BMR.

Residential real estate education and globalisation in Australian real estate markets and practices

The purpose of this scoping paper is to offer an overview of the literature to determine the development to date in the area of residential real estate agency academic and career education in respect to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) transactions and implications in Australia. This paper will review studies on the issue of foreign real estate ownership and FDI in Australian real estate markets to develop an understanding of the current state of knowledge on residential real estate agency practice, career education and real estate licensing requirements in Australia. The distinction between the real estate profession education, compared to other professions such as accounting, legal and finance is based on the intensity of the professional career training prior or post formal academic training. Real estate education could be carried out with relatively higher standards in terms of licensing requirement, career and academic education. As FDI in the Australian real estate market is a complex globalisation and economic phenomenon, a simple content of residential real estate training and education may not promote proper management or capacity in dealing with relevant foreign residential property market transaction. The preliminary summarising from the literature of residential real estate agency education, with its current relevant or emerging licensing requirement are focused on its role and effectiveness and impact in residential real estate market. Particular focus will be directed to the FDI relevant residential real estate agency transactions and practices, which have been strongly influenced by the current residential real estate market and agency practices. Taken together, there are many opportunities for future research to extend our understanding and improving the residential real estate agency education and training of Foreign Direct Investment in the Australian residential real estate sector.

Assessing the immediate and short-term impact of flooding on residential property participant behaviour

The past decade has seen an increase in the number of significant natural disasters that have caused considerable loss of life as well as damage to all property markets in the affected areas. In many cases, these natural disasters have not only caused significant property damage, but in numerous cases, have resulted in the total destruction of the property in the location. With these disasters attracting considerable media attention, the public are more aware of where these affected property markets are, as well as the overall damage to properties that have been damaged or destroyed. This heightened level of awareness has to have an impact on the participants in the property market, whether a developer, vendor seller or investor. To assess this issue, a residential property market that has been affected by a significant natural disaster over the past 2 years has been analysed to determine the overall impact of the disaster on buyer, renter and vendor behaviour, as well as prices in these residential markets. This paper is based on data from the Brisbane flood in January 2011. This natural disaster resulted in loss of life and partial and total devastation of considerable residential property sectors. Data for the research have been based on the residential sales and rental listings for each week of the study period to determine the level of activity in the specific property sectors, and these are also compared to the median house prices for the various suburbs for the same period based on suburbs being either flood affected or flood free. As there are 48 suburbs included in the study, it has been possible to group these suburbs on a socio-economic basis to determine possible differences due to location and value. Data were accessed from realestate.com.au, a free real estate site that provides details of current rental and sales listings on a suburb basis, RP Data a commercial property sales database and the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The paper found that sales listings fell immediately after the flood in the affected areas, but there was no corresponding fall or increase in sales listings in the flood-free suburbs. There was a significant decrease in the number of rental listings follow the flood as affected parties sought alternate accommodation. The greatest fall in rental listings was in areas close to the flood-affected suburbs indicating the desire to be close to the flooded property during the repair period.

New regime for property agents and residential property sales in Queensland : Property Occupations Act 2014

This article examines the new Property Occupations Act 2014 (POA) and relevant provisions of the Agents Financial Administration Act 2014 (AFAA) and the impacts for property practitioners. The Acts are due to commence later in 2014 once regulations and relevant forms are drafted. Coinciding with the commencement of the Acts further versions of the REIQ Houses and Land Contract and REIQ Community Title Contract will also be released. The POA introduces changes for licencing of real estate agents, property developers and resident letting agents as well as significant changes for the contract formation process. The AFAA includes the trust account and claim fund provisions of PAMDA, which avoids duplication of these provisions across each of the industry-specific Bills. The most significant change is to the process for making a claim against the fund for the conduct of property agents.

Can playing Monopoly™ enhance learning for property students

This paper outlines the initial results from a pilot study into the educational use of the board game Monopoly City™ in a first year property economics unit. This game play was introduced as a fun and interactive way of achieving a number of desired outcomes including: enhanced engagement of first year students; introduction of foundational threshold concepts in property education; introduction of problem solving and critical analysis skills; early acculturation of property students to enhance student retention; and early team building within the Property Economics cohort, all in an engaging and entertaining way. Preliminary results in this research project are encouraging. The students participating in this initial cycle have demonstrated explicit linkages between their Monopoly City™ experiences and foundation urban economic and valuation theories. Students are also recognising the role strategy and chance play in the property sector. However, linking Monopoly City™ activities to assessment has proved important in student attendance and hence engagement.

Financing the project : economic incentives promoting sustainable property development

This chapter is focussed on the various financial instruments and incentives that have been implemented in a range of countries to encourage sustainable developments in all property sectors. It is an area that has undergone substantial change globally since 2008. Sustainable property development has been impacted by the Global Financial Crisis, particularly with regards to the availability of private sector funding and the requirements of funders who now have a more cautious approach to risk. Sustainability, and sometimes a lack of it, is increasingly viewed as a risk in some markets; it is also seen as an area in which governments, through creation of markets and through the use of fiscal instruments can seek to speed up the pace at which the economics of sustainable development makes good business sense. However, it is not just governments that provide the incentive for sustainability- or the dis-incentive for non-sustainable behaviours.

How long does stigma impact property values

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to determine the impact stigma has on property values and how long the stigma remains after the Not in My Back Yard (NIMBY) structure has been removed. Design/methodology/approach - A quantitative analysis was undertaken, using a high voltage overhead transmission line (HVOTL) case study, to determine the effect on property values prior and post removal of the NIMBY structure. A repeat sales index in conjunction with the regression analysis determined the length of time, the stigma remained after removal of the NIMBY structure. Findings - The results show that while the NIMBY is in place the impact on value is confined to those properties in close proximity. This is in contradiction to the findings, where on removal of the NIMBY the property values of the whole neighbourhood improve with the stigma remaining for 3 to 4 years. Research Implications - The implication of this research is that property Valuers need to change the way they take into account the presence of NIMBYs when valuing property with more emphasis, being placed on the neighbourhood rather than just the properties in close proximity. While the HVOTL was in place, only properties in close proximity were negatively affected, but on removal of the HVOTL the whole neighbourhood increased in value. Originality/value - Results expand on current knowledge by demonstrating the length of time the market takes to adjust to the removal of a NIMBY structure.

Assessing the impact of crime on residential property markets

The aim of this research is to determine if a range of crimes in a suburb have an impact on the residential property sectors in that particular suburb. With the increasing media coverage of crime in specific locations, this knowledge of crime in Brisbane Australia is more available to potential residential property buyers This research is based on the analysis of the crime statistics for 30 suburbs in Brisbane across a range of major crime activities and compares the level of crime to property median prices, sales volume and in a range of suburbs the volume of sale and lease listings. The results of the research show a significant variation in the response of buyers in residential property markets based on the type of crime and the socio-economic status of the suburb. In a range of suburbs, value factors other than crime are the major drivers of the market. The study provides an insight into consumer behaviour in a major city and the response of residential property buyers to an increasing level and awareness of crime statistics in the suburbs they are considering to buy. Implications of this research are that with a greater level of awareness of factors that could be a disadvantage to some potential buyers are not always reflected across a full residential property market. Valuers, property financiers and the public need to be aware of the type of crime and locations that have a direct impact on property prices and saleability These results expand on the current knowledge of value drivers in major residential property markets.