This paper provides a systematic review and synthesis of two converging financial literatures: mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and decentralized finance (DeFi). I trace the evolution of MBS research from the 1970s through the 2008 financial crisis to present day, while examining how blockchain innovations create new possibilities for real estate finance. The methodology combines traditional literature review techniques with bibliometric analysis, utilizing Google Scholar and Google Trends data to document the shifting research landscape and public interest in these topics over time. The findings reveal that while MBS research peaked following the 2008 financial crisis, DeFi and real estate tokenization research show more recent growth trajectories since 2016. The synthesis highlights how blockchain technology offers potential improvements in transparency, transaction costs, and liquidity for real estate markets, while acknowledging significant regulatory and governance challenges. This review contributes to understanding the current state of research at the intersection of traditional real estate finance and emerging blockchain applications, providing a foundation for future empirical investigations.

The Real Estate Academic Leadership rankings for 2020–2024 highlight the foremost real estate authors and institutions published in the top three real estate journals (The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, The Journal of Real Estate Research, and Real Estate Economics) over the past five years. The simplicity of the methodology highlights the general stability of the rankings. For this year’s rankings especially, there was no significant author movement from institutions compared to previous years. Finally, the decline in publications for some academic institutions this year may be attributed to two factors: a post-doctoral researcher completing their time or a Ph.D. student graduating and moving on to academia or industry.

This paper examines the drivers of prime office yields in Europe. Specifically, the paper uses 16 European cities across 8 European countries including United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, and Ireland from Q1 2007 to Q2 2024. The premier cities include Berlin, Paris, Central London, Frankfurt, and Munich while the primary cities are Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Madrid, Milan, Amsterdam and Dublin. Lastly, the secondary cities comprised of Barcelona, Rome, Brussels, Cologne, and Lyon. For the estimation technique, we use quantile regression and OLS while accounting for country, city and time fixed effects. From the baseline results, we find that take-up, prime rent, vacancy rate and foreign investment have a negative and statistically significant effect on office prime yields. In the case of the results obtained from the quantile regression, vacancy rate is seen as the most significant determinant of office yields. Prime rent emerged as a significant determinant of office yields. The result of this work is particularly useful for investors, policy makers and analysts as it provides an in-depth understanding of how office yield varies over time in different European Cities as well as the factors which influence office yields.

Although a potential to improve revenue mobilisation of local authorities, it is claimed Ghana’s local real estate tax provision on capital improvement is a penalty on land development. This work evaluates the claim in the context of equity and economic efficiency. Findings from the work support the claim. Compared with undeveloped lands particularly in cities, the tax is discriminatory to capital improvements, which situation could incentivise investment in undeveloped lands and be a potential cause for a lot of undeveloped lands, uncompleted and leap-frog developments in cities. It is also not neutral and diminishes the return on capital and the capacity of landlords to keep their buildings in constant repair thereby discouraging capital improvement on land. Coupled with factors like the current poor tax collection, this could affect the revenue mobilisation and socio-economic development efforts of local and central governments. Thus, the tax policy stands a plea for a reform.

Extant studies on Self-Help Housing (SHH) have centered on the types, processes, value, and challenges, but rare on the criteria for assessing its affordability. This paper presents a comprehensive review on the criteria based on published literature in 32 peer-reviewed journals. 81 relevant peer-reviewed papers were used for the study. A total of 8 criteria set, including 31 associated determinants were identified to have influence on SHH affordability. The criteria were; financing, access to land, building quality, development controls and planning regulations, building cost, location, infrastructure and services, and social issues. A framework method was adopted to select the papers. Authors from both developed and developing countries were noted to have made various pioneering contributions to SHH studies. The mean SCImago Journal Rank indicator obtained was above1.00, which showed that the journals used for the review were quality within the time frame of 1997 to 2020. Limitations were mainly seen in our dependence on Scopus, the few search engines, and the selected papers used. This study's outcome will broaden understanding of SHH affordability in developing countries on; policy formulation, housing market conditions, and research This review provides the opportunity for further empirical studies on SHH affordability metric development.

The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) was created in 1968 and allows homeowners, renters, and businesses to purchase flood insurance from the federal government. During the summer of 2019, without compromising privacy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) released two datasets containing roughly 50 million flood insurance policy observations (beginning in 2009) and 2.5 million flood insurance claims (beginning in 1970). Researchers can now download and evaluate the entire policies and claims datasets in machine-readable format, bypassing the complex request procedures of the past. We explore what is included in this policy and claims data and how they might be used to examine flood insurance related topics. We provide real estate academics and industry professionals with the details of the 44 usable policy data variables and the 37 usable claims data variables, which we group into seven categories: Locational, Structural, Occupancy, Policy Terms, Zone/Elevation/Rating, Premiums, and Claims. In an effort to aid researchers with the initial complexities of working with the data, we provide sample R-code that can be altered to analyze NFIP data. Finally, for illustration, we demonstrate how the NFIP data can be merged with data from both the American Community Survey and Zillow to study the determinants of flood insurance take-up.

Despite its existence in the property market scene for over a century, little is known about the property auction market in Malaysia. We analyze the types, size, occurrence, and performance of property auctions in Malaysia. In comparison to mature markets such as Australia and New Zealand, the auction market in Malaysia is relatively small (0.03% of total property sales) and dominated by distress or foreclosure sales. Outdated laws coupled with an unregulated auction environment have generated myriad challenges among which are the presence of syndicates (dummy bidders) and negative stigma associated with auctions. We highlight initiatives that could be taken by policymakers to revitalize the property auction market in Malaysia.

The real estate and valuation discipline has embraced the recent developments in spatial data analysis as a way of remediating obvious limitations of the ordinary least squares (OLS) approach in handling spatial effects. However, despite the development, the South African property market has yet to embrace spatial analysis when estimating property prices. The objective of this study is to understand the rationale behind the use of spatial hedonic modeling on the Cape Town property market by first testing the data against the existence of spatial effects and using the appropriate techniques to correct the glitches. A spatial error autocorrelation model and geographically weighted regression (GWR) were employed to correct spatial dependence (autocorrelation) and spatial heterogeneity on 3,232 observations. The relative performance of the two spatial modeling techniques as revealed by their goodness-of-fit are quite impressive but the spatial error model marginally outperforms the GWR. Thus, it is recommended that any of these techniques can be used in modeling property prices in the Cape Town market.

The preferences of location for corporate headquarters (CHQs) vary across different contexts. We reviewed the location preference levels among the South African CHQs located in different metropolitan municipalities (metros). The study was conducted using an online survey across the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE)-listed companies in South Africa. The self-explicated conjoint model was used to analyze the trade-offs that CHQs make amongst the competing attributes of location. The findings reveal that access, developed infrastructure, proximity to supporting industries and service providers, access to a skilled labor force, frequent and efficient flights, favorable property taxes, tax incentives, and a favorable legal and regulatory framework are the most preferred attributes of location. The location preference levels explain the concentration of CHQs in particular metros, thereby challenging policy makers, property developers, and investors to facilitate improvements in other metros so as to attract CHQs.

Corporate governance can have an effect on the organizational behavior of real estate investment trusts (REITs). We examine the moderating effects of corporate governance on Asia REITs' performance. We find significant corporate governance moderating effects on the performance of Asian REITs. Corporate governance could either act as a positive or a negative moderator that could enhance and accelerate performance, return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE), and REIT return, and reduce agency costs in Asian REITs. The findings imply that there is a need for transformation and reform in REIT corporate governance. The findings contribute towards Asian REITs' public policy development as REIT corporate governance is found to complement the institutional legal setting and externally managed REITs in Asia. Regulatory bodies of Asian REITs should enforce mandatory and absolute stringent corporate governance regulations on REITs.