At a recent European Commission sponsored real estate conference in Luxemburg, statisticians demonstrated that there was a difference of about six months in the lead-lag timeframe when indices are constructed using the hedonic model, as compared to the commonly used “Repeat Sales Method”. The data
Real estate with its combination of the profound and the banal, the cerebral and the spurious, its autodynamic symmetries and nebulous structures, has obvious affinities with William Brinton. He famously wrote more than a 100 years ago about the last-mile problem: “Time after time it
In a cooling housing market, existing property owners as well as developers get nervous, impacting the level of future investment in the sector. Falling housing prices deter potential investors from making further investments as Keynes’ dark forces of “time and ignorance” cloud the future. The
Dubai is obsessed with real estate. Where every new gleaming locality and address comes along with a price tag, and where private sector developers sometimes operate as war profiteers with their endless bouquet of incentives to close the next sale. And we admire it, this
“A man is a teller of tales,” wrote Jean Paul Sartre. “He lives surrounded by his stories, and the stories of others; he sees everything that happens to him through them.” The tale of deflation in Dubai is a tale of the unexpected. We thought
Do price falls signal a glut of supply triggering reduced demand? Or could there be something else at play? Conventional economic theory suggests that price signals the imbalance between demand and supply. However, economists like Hyman Minsky have long argued that in the era of
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The dramatic rise of construction and real estate over the past two decades has been one of the stories of our time. Fuelled by cheap money and ambitious vision, developers raced against the clock to launch and build a dazzling array of projects to fill
These days, you cannot pick up a newspaper without seeing another story about the sluggishness of the real estate markets… and about the economy in general. The checks and balances that we are told exist in the marketplace have apparently been absent until recently, or
One of the problems with writing frequently on any topic — real estate, for example — is that the dynamics on the ground change far more slowly than the speed with which commentary is generated. Issues highlighted in 2014 — such as the rise of
