Private Real Estate Investment: Data Analysis and Decision Making (Academic Press Advanced Finance Series) 
asked by lauren on November 18, 2006 2:08 PM
Fiduciary responsibilities and related court-imposed liabilities have forced investors to assess market conditions beyond gut level, resulting in the development of sophisticated decision-making tools. Roger Brown's use of historical real estate data enables him to develop tools for gauging the impact of circumstances on relative risk. His application of higher level statistical modeling to various aspects of real estate makes this book an essential partner in real estate research. Offering tools to enhance decision-making for consumers and researchers in market economies of any country interested in land use and real estate investment, his book will improve real estate market efficiency. With property the world's biggest asset class, timely data on housing prices just got easier to find and use.
*Excellent mixture of theory and application
*Data and database analysis techniques are the first of their kind
*CDROM contains pre-written code for data analysis tailored specifically to real estate settings
*Excellent mixture of theory and application
*Data and database analysis techniques are the first of their kind
*CDROM contains pre-written code for data analysis tailored specifically to real estate settings
Reviews
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I work as an analyst at a small real estate development and finance firm, and I am always on the lookout for good texts. As a person with a mathematics background, I hate how most real estate books go to great lengths to avoid "hard math". In the end, many of these so-called "advanced" texts leave out important parts, or end up trying to reduce mathematical relationships to mere words. In so doing, they make what should be simple ideas into an impenetrable mess.
Roger Brown's book nicely sidesteps this problem, and immediately gets into non-trivial ideas that one would be hard-pressed to find in a standard textbook. Typical of this is his Chapter 3, "The Rules of Thumb". Instead of simply defining terms such as "cap rate," and maybe discussing some of the limitations of this tool, Brown brings up the real world: cap rates can easily be distorted, and it is your job as an analyst to determine if the cap rate you are using is an "honest one". Brown shows just how one can systematically do this using a corpus of transaction data, which can be found on sites such as costar.com.
There are numerous other innovative ideas in the book. My feeling is that if you have good access to data, and are smart and diligent, you could make a lot of money using some of these ideas .
Roger Brown's book nicely sidesteps this problem, and immediately gets into non-trivial ideas that one would be hard-pressed to find in a standard textbook. Typical of this is his Chapter 3, "The Rules of Thumb". Instead of simply defining terms such as "cap rate," and maybe discussing some of the limitations of this tool, Brown brings up the real world: cap rates can easily be distorted, and it is your job as an analyst to determine if the cap rate you are using is an "honest one". Brown shows just how one can systematically do this using a corpus of transaction data, which can be found on sites such as costar.com.
There are numerous other innovative ideas in the book. My feeling is that if you have good access to data, and are smart and diligent, you could make a lot of money using some of these ideas .
reviewed by oden on November 29, 2006 6:10 PM