Thesis: S.M. in Real Estate Development, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Real Estate Development in conjunction with the Center for Real Estate, 2016. / Title as it appears in the Degrees awarded booklet, Feb. 17, 2016: A N lease for housing rental: transferring the property taxes to renters. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 140-141). / Ownership rates have been decreasing since 2004, and the rental market is becoming less affordable each day. A rent-to-own agreement would reduce barriers to purchase a property for future buyers. However, to promote this type of contract it is necessary to demonstrate that investors will be exposed to lower risk, or higher returns, than in a traditional lease. Since taxes are an important part of a real estate investment, this thesis analyzed if this risk can be mitigated by passing the taxes to the tenants. While rents and prices respond to market conditions, property taxes do not show a clear trend of how they change, leaving investors exposed to a high risk. In addition, property taxes significantly differ among states since they vary with the financial needs of each local government. Moreover, the effective tax rate can also differ from town to town, and even within the city because of the different tax districts in which the property is located and the No Ad Valorem taxes. The evolution of taxes, prices and rent in Massachusetts, and within the cities of Arlington, Newton and Wellesley is explored in this thesis to understand how property taxes evolve over the years and see if changes in rent and/or prices upset variations in taxes. In addition, this thesis also considers the evolution of these variables in Larimer County, Colorado, and in Oak Park, Illinois. Moreover, this thesis analyzed the potential return of a residential property in each of the cities studied to establish if there is any financial advantage for signing in a RTO agreement instead of a traditional lease, and if capping the taxes would reduce the financial risk. The data shows that in cities that saw a high appreciation or rental growth singing a rent-to-own contract was not the best alternative for investors since their return would have been lower. In addition, passing the taxes is not attractive enough to investors since the additional points that this procedure offers are not significant, and in some case, when taxes decrease, they actually decrease the investor's return. / by Lina M. Jimenez Mejia. / S.M. in Real Estate Development

Thesis (S.M. in Real Estate Development)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Real Estate Development in Conjunction with the Center for Real Estate, 2012. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 111-112). / Real estate development (RED) has traditionally been a very dynamic business, where real estate developers strive to turn an idea into a real asset, by delivering a quality project on time and on budget. In recent years, Modular Construction Methods (MCM) has arisen as an innovative solution to commercial RED projects that require higher levels of the three aforementioned factors, with a special emphasis placed on time. The purpose of our thesis is to explain MCM and its impact on RED by analyzing the interdependent relationships between the different tasks performed during the course of a development. We have accomplished this by using the Design Structure Matrix (DSM), a systems engineering tool, to map out the dependencies between development tasks in a graphical manner. To develop our DSM model for an RED process that uses MCM we conducted interviews with the senior management at RJ Finlay, a New Hampshire based full service real estate firm and Keiser Industries, a modular manufacturing company that operates in Maine and is owned by RJ Finlay. To fully understand the real application of the MCM process to RED, we met with the general contractor, lead architect and project management team for 30 Haven, a commercial RED that uses MCM. 30 Haven is located in Reading, Massachusetts and has been co-developed through an integrated project delivery (IPD) process by RJ Finlay and Oaktree development, using an in-house general contractor and Keiser Industries as its modular manufacturer. Our interviews occurred weeks before the project was completed in the summer of 2012. This allowed us to interview the involved parties about the whole process from inception to construction completion. This helped us further understand the actual problems a RED process using MCM can face throughout the preconstruction and construction processes. We then developed a DSM that showcases the different stages that a RED process using MCM have to go through and the planned and unplanned iterative processes for each stage. Planned iterations are feedback loops between tasks that are meant to rework tasks that forcibly need it, while unplanned iterations reflect feedback loops that occur because of unexpected events. Our thesis has focused on proposing proactive solutions to the unexpected events (referred to as "failure modes") a RED process using MCM can face, by either eliminating them or minimizing their likelihood and impact. The DSM helped facilitate the development of both a normative model and an optimal one, where our solutions for the unplanned iterations were applied. We complemented our findings with a hypothetical financial model that uses the normative and optimal DSM models to show the difference between both in terms of the returns, time and cost for a generic multifamily RED that uses MCM. / by Steven V. Bonelli and Adrián M. González Guerra. / S.M.in Real Estate Development

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Real Estate Development in Conjunction with the Center for Real Estate , 2009. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 85). / The mission of our thesis is to assist residential real estate investors and developers in making more systematic investment decisions when selecting Chinese cities. In particular, our thesis has three major objectives, (1) to understand the residential price appreciation with respect to economic growth among 35 core Chinese cities, (2) to understand the dynamics of the residential market fluctuation, and (3) to predict the residential market movement. Our models have suggested that the residential markets of Tier II Chinese cities shall outperform those of the other tiers in terms of capital appreciation under a sustainable economic growth condition, with Tier I Chinese cities experiencing the least collective growth. Interestingly, our models have suggested that historical performance is a relatively good indicator of medium-term performance, in terms of capital appreciation potentials, under an up-market cycle. Our results have indicated that the capital appreciation performance ranking of our 5-year prediction period to 2012 are relatively consistent with the capital appreciation performance ranking of the historical 9-year trend between 1999 and 2007. In particular, our top five cities with the highest capital appreciation for the 5-year period to 2012 are Xiamen, Ningbo, Nanchang, Taiyuan, and Fuzhou, respectively; in comparison, the top five cities with highest capital appreciation for the 9-year period to 2007 are Ningbo, Xiamen, Qingdao, Nanchang, and Xian, respectively. / (cont.) In terms of residential market dynamics, our models have revealed that the increase in sales transaction volume, the decline in real prime rate, and the loose mortgage policy have all contributed to the overheating of the Chinese residential market in 2007. But as the monetary policy and lending standards tighten, the sales volume was curbed and prices lost its steam. We observed that the policy change was not the only cause to the slowdown in sales transaction volume, but also the continued sales price growth; in fact, the policy change was a cause of the over-heated market. If the current pattern continues and supported by favorable policy, we expect the market shall show signs of relief in 2010; however, if prices over-shoot in the coming months, the market performance may actually reverse. / by Philip Gin Shun Wang and Jia Qian. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M. in Real Estate Development, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Real Estate Development in conjunction with the Center for Real Estate, 2014. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 75-81). / Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico's current president, voiced strong support for extending the social mission of INFONAVIT -- the largest mortgage lender in Mexico -- to embrace quality of life metrics. He also indicated a strong interest in expanding housing opportunities to segments of the population who are currently not being served by the housing funds and banks to the extent that the right to a dignified home is enshrined in Mexico's Constitution. In order to continue giving greater importance to quality of life metrics and not just lending volumes, INFONAVIT strategy will focus on the creation of cities that are more efficiently organized and less segregated in an unprecedented effort to move towards an inclusive, prosperous Mexico on the basis of orderly and sustainable urban development. INFONAVITs 2013-2022 financial plan projected cash flow growth of 8.82 % CAGR and its strategic agenda focused on four dimensions: i) Housing needs: providing funding and housing solutions that enhance the welfare of workers; ii) Social balance: ensuring housing quality and sustainability and promoting urban planning with a focus on employment growth; iii) Scope of policies: expanding connections with other housing institutions and aligning programs and policies with strategic sector guidelines; and iv) Risk & Return: sustaining strong financial and operational performance. The process of urban development is incremental for low-income households in Mexico since a significant percentage of the population has no possibility of living in dwellings constructed by the formal sector. Mexico is currently facing significant challenges in its future housing requirements. Specifically, this thesis will focus on three different proposals that complement the vision of President Enrique Peña Nieto and that could enhance the affordable housing sector in Mexico in order to create a better future for local residents. The proposals are: i) the creation of affordable Mexican edge cities, ii) the exploration of the Section 8 tenant-based housing voucher program practiced in the United States, and iii) the use of housing development as a regional development tool coupled with an industrial policy to rescue the Mexican southern region from deep-rooted stagnation and to potentiate the multiplier effect on the economy. Housing is a strategic sector for the economic growth and social development of Mexico since it triggers investment, creates jobs, strengthens the local market, and improves the quality of life of Mexican families. In order to analyze these proposals, this thesis reviews multiple reports from the Mexican government, industry, and academia. This is an exploratory document that will aim to provide useful information to policy makers in Mexico. / by Alba Medina Flores. / S.M. in Real Estate Development

Thesis: S.M. in Real Estate Development, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Real Estate Development in conjunction with the Center for Real Estate, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (page 47). / This paper examines the spatial structures of commercial real estate buildings (Offices, Retails) in four Chinese cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. In contrast to previous studies, this paper focused on the changes of the spatial pattern by involving the time variables to categorize the buildings into 3 time periods (Before 1995, 1996-2005, and 2006-2015). The research questions are: How strong and general is the tendency of offices and retails to cluster? At which spatial scale these clustering occurs? How does the clusters change with time? To test the localization in those cities, I applied distance-based agglomeration measures developed by Gilles Duranton and Henry G. Overman (2004) in this largely new context - to measure spatial structure in different time period at the metropolitan scale, which avoid problems relating to scale and borders. I find that: (1) Agglomeration forces cause offices to cluster in all of the four cities, but the clustering is much weaker in retails than offices. All four cities exhibit some localization in both types of real estate products. (2) With the development of cities, the clustering scales for all of the four cities are expanding. (3) There are some differences in the spatial structures among the four cities, the reasons might relate to the functions and the development stages of each city. Overall, the more mature a city's real estate market is, more dispersal spatial pattern is observed. (4) With the expansion of cities, the sizes of shopping centers and offices are increasing, too, especially between year 2006 and 2015. / by Meng Xu. / S.M. in Real Estate Development

Thesis: S.M. in Real Estate Development, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Real Estate Development in conjunction with the Center for Real Estate, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 79-80). / The affordable housing crisis in the United States is real and persistent. In the face of growing economic inequality and the failure of public housing programs, American cities need the development industry to deliver more affordable housing units than ever before. Instead, the affordable housing development process is regarded as a fragmented nexus involving multiple public and private sector parties. Raising capital for affordable housing projects is notoriously complex; it is common to see individual apartment buildings funded by a mix of any of the following: public grants, federal tax credits syndicated through private lenders, interest-free debt from community lenders and municipalities, mortgage debt from commercial lenders and private equity. A good affordable housing developer must be adept at understanding the covenants and eligibility requirements of every source of funds as part of the development process, and work with the myriad parties to compete or apply for funds. This long and convoluted process raises high barriers to entry into the industry and slows down the production of a public good. This thesis investigates the possibility of an alternative funding model for affordable housing development and proposes that developers go public to raise capital, adopting the same tried-and-tested method of financing real estate development that commercial developers have relied on for nearly 30 years. This thesis will argue that a REIT can function as an organizing mechanism to simplify the process of raising capital across different pools of institutional equity, private wealth and public funding. By being able to turn to the widest capital markets for fundraising, affordable housing developers can be nimble in choosing when to raise capital and flexible in deploying it to build experimental mixed-income and workforce housing, two typologies of housing that have been identified as helping to make urban areas more inclusive. Through this thesis, I posit that the affordable housing development REIT can serve as the central platform to consolidate the various pools of triple-bottom- line investors and to create for the first time a public market for an asset class that exhibits all the features of a stable, long term core investment. / by Xiang Ying Estelle Chan / S.M. in Real Estate Development

Thesis: S.M. in Real Estate Development, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Real Estate Development in conjunction with the Center for Real Estate, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 61-65). / One might argue real estate is entering a period where technological innovations have greater impact on investment returns than conventional metrics related to the overall economy. While this has already been demonstrated by e-commerce disrupting the retail and logistics landscape, industry leaders are now starting to become more and more attentive to mobility related implications, resulting from the recent advent of ride-hailing providers like Uber, Lyft, and Didi. Broad literature, generated over the past decades and applying widely recognized econometric concepts, emphasizes the significance of public transport access for residential real estate values. More recently, claims arose that the value of proximity to public transport is being challenged by ride-hailing, serving as a substitute for rail and bus services. While the existence of a certain substitution effect is supported and documented by academic studies, research about its impact on real estate is rare. This thesis analyzes the value change of public transport access over time, by applying a hedonic regression model to a sample of 257,100 residential real estate transactions which have taken place in New York City between January 2005 and June 2018. The distance between each individual home and the closest of 550 heavy rail transit stops is used to determine the value of proximity to public transport in these transactions. Contrary to anecdotal claims and economic theory, the results of this analysis suggest that the value of proximity, i.e. rent gradients towards heavy rail transit stops, increases over the observed time period, especially since the emergence of Uber and within walking distance (0.5 miles) from transit access points. Since mobility innovation's long-term effects might not be in line with short-term implications and notable regional variances might exist, the thesis recommends ongoing analysis of the subject matter and expanding the research from New York City to various markets with different urban shapes, transportation modes, and demographics. / by Dietmar E.A. Weissmann. / S.M. in Real Estate Development

Thesis (S.M. in Real Estate Development)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Real Estate Development in Conjunction with the Center for Real Estate, 2012. / Cataloged from department-submitted PDF version of thesis. This electronic version was submitted and approved by the author's academic department as part of an electronic thesis pilot project. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-102). / Recently, we have observed significant changes in which corporate offices and residential buildings have been relocated from the suburbs back into the city. Does the observation mean that there is a real economic movement back into the cities by firms or households? If there is any movement, how does this trend drive any changes in the commercial real estate properties? Does it significantly affect the performance of properties in the cities as opposed to the other areas? Does the performance of the properties in the city exert any influence on the investors who prefer commercial real estates in the US metropolitan areas? This thesis aims to provide answers to the major question on the "back to the city" movement and its influence on real estate markets. The answers are summarized as five major conclusions. First, the result of this study clearly points out that there is the "back to the city" movement although the change has happened only in the Urban Cores (UC) not the entire Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). Second, the economic performances between UC and MSA maintain a close link with each other. However, the volatility of the office net rental rate is much less in UC while the change in gross rental growth is almost same between UC and MSA. The UC rental growth of the multifamily is a little less volatile than the MSA growth. Third, the investment performances in MSA closely relates with the capitalization rate of UC. While the level of cap rates of UC offices is more volatile, the UC cap rate of apartments is more stable than the MSA rate. Fourth, the effects of population and employment on the real estate market enable the research to understand the current pricing behaviors. The difference in population and employment between UC and MSA explains the disparity in investment performances of the two areas. However, while the MSA rental growth explains the movements in the cap rate of MSA in accordance with the "rational" pricing, the effect of UC rental growth rates on the cap rate doesn't match with the pricing model, indicating that the rental growth rate of UC empirically leads to increases in the cap rate of the area. The nature of these outcomes offers that the UC market is not explicable by the "rational" pricing model. The result also indicates that the difference in rental growth rates reveals the positive relation with the gap in cap rates, which is complete opposite to the "rational" investors' behavior. Lastly, finding the differences in economic and investment performances between UC and MSA motivates to explore the determinants of the relationship. Although the study experiments the effects of manifold market characteristics, the explanatory variables used in the model do not fully explain the inequality between two specific markets. Thus, it is required to study further the determinants. / by Inae Hwang. / S.M.in Real Estate Development

Thesis (S.M. in Real Estate Development)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Real Estate Development in Conjunction with the Center for Real Estate, 2011. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-94). / This thesis explores the likely impacts the proposed changes to lease accounting would have on corporate real estate decisions. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (SFASB) and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) plan to establish a unified set of principle-based accounting systems into a unified set of principle-based standards in an effort to improve financial transparency and comparability across world markets. One component of this plan, centered on reform of current lease accounting standards, would eliminate the distinction between capital and operating leases and require almost all leases to be recognized as an asset and liability on the balance sheet. This represents a significant departure from the current accounting guidance under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), which requires American companies are only required to disclose only limited information about future operating lease requirements in the footnotes of financial statements. What's more, empirical evidence suggests that many companies structure leases to obtain this type of offbalance- sheet financing that operating leases afford. For companies with relatively large operating lease portfolios, the new accounting standards would have a significant impact on their balance sheets. If these companies consider accounting treatment in their real estate decisions, they may be inclined to pursue alternative real estate strategies to mitigate this impact. That being said, the corporate real estate decision-making process is complex; therefore any strategy aimed at achieving a specific accounting treatment must consider other relevant and potentially more important factors. This study analyzes the proposed changes to lease accounting and explores how corporate real estate managers consider the effects of accounting in their real estate decisions. Specific hypotheses are tested through targeted interviews with a diverse group of public and private tenants and landlords to identify the variables that would determine a particular company's incentive to change its real estate strategy in response to new accounting guidelines. Results of interviews are discussed and predictions are made regarding the future of real estate leasing strategies. / by Timothy R. Canon and Christina A. Fenbert. / S.M.in Real Estate Development

Thesis (S.M. in Real Estate Development)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Real Estate Development in Conjunction with the Center for Real Estate, 2011. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Pages 93 and 94 blank. Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 90-92). / Prevalent methodologies utilized by resort second home development professionals to quantify demand for future projects are identified and critiqued. The strengths of each model are synthesized in order to formulate an original, composite methodology for demand quantification with industry-wide applicability. This "best practices" synthesized model is then applied to a real world case study and back tested in an effort to gauge its accuracy. After analysis of its performance, modifications are made and an innovative method for forecasting absorption is added to its framework. The resulting product of this effort is the creation of the Comprehensive Resort Second Home Demand Forecasting Model. / by Christopher J. Wholey. / S.M.in Real Estate Development