Market Efficiency, Uncertainty And Risk Management in Real Estate Valuation – How Hedonics May Help

Abstract

The 2007-2008 subprime mortgage crisis has profoundly modified the way investment and management risks are perceived by economic agents. In particular, both private and institutional players in the property sector are now being compelled to follow more stringent rules and to display greater transparency in their management of risk issues and of lending practices. In that context, analytical tools based on statistics and econometric modelling are increasingly resorted to as risk-containment devices. The purpose of the paper is to look at how real estate appraisal practitioners and related professionals may benefit from a greater recourse to statistics and, more precisely, to econometric modelling, in their search for market value. As brought out in the real estate literature, the very definition of market value lends itself to a statistical approach, the latter reaching its full meaning with the hedonic price (HP) method which is shown to be an extension of the traditional sales comparison approach.