International Real Estate

Real estate activity across national boundaries (investment, development and asset management) is firmly established as a major component of global economic activity. International Real Estate provides the understanding of real estate strategies and transactions that cross national boundaries. The needs of today's international business community is placing increasing pressure on its advisors to take a global approach. Traditional training of property professionals is strongly based on a single sovereignty and practitioners themselves prefer to focus their advice on markets with which they are familiar. However, as the demand from international clients increases, this narrow, single-country approach is no longer adequate. By focussing on understanding transactions and how they form the basis of specific real estate projects in any sovereignty, International Real Estate: an institutional approach presents a way of looking at real estate investment and development which is more relevant to the challenges of international practice. The book is structured in three parts: Part 1 introduces the transaction-based approach; Part 2 addresses contextual issues relating to city planning and large-scale project analysis; and Part 3 presents individual perspectives from six authors from real estate markets in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan and China. The book shows how the institutional features of real estate determine the manner in which it is integrated into market economies that vary in form from sovereignty to sovereignty by: focusing on transactions as the primary building block of real estate investment, development and management identifying institutional complexity as the key factor in achieving commercial success in international real estate introducing a new decision-making template for mapping and navigating institutional complexity.giving practical examples that illustrate how this template can be used to unravel different aspects of international real estate including real estate markets. Real estate activity across national boundaries (investment, development and asset management) is firmly established as a major component of global economic activity. International Real Estate provides the understanding of real estate strategies and transactions that cross national boundaries. International organizations lament the narrow perspective of professionals in the real estate field, which stems from training that takes a parochial rather than international view of the practices and processes of real estate markets. This book takes an explicitly international perspective to the decision-making process leading to final 'accept' or 'reject' investment decisions. It will be the first to adopt an institutional approach that directly addresses the problems of how to identify and avoid the main pitfalls of cross-border investment in real estate. The key to understanding international real estate comes from understanding the impact on investment and management decisions of differences in the formal and informal 'rules of the game'. The authors define the key feature of international real estate as the institutions that frame, facilitate or impede investment in land and buildings across national boundaries.