This paper formally analyzes the role of yearly snowfall in explaining the changes in home valuations near ski resorts in the western United States. Using data on housing values for selected U.S. Census tracts, combined with detailed weather data, passenger arrival data from 10% of all commercial air traffic, and characteristics of nearby ski resorts, I find precise and consistent estimates of days of snowfall and number of available destinations by airport on housing values.

In this thesis, I analyze the effect that a professional sports team has on its local real estate values. Using data from 2005-2016, I use an OLS regression to analyze two aspects of professional sports that could affect home values; presence of a team, and success of a team. I find that there is no significant correlation between presence of a team and increase in home values. However, statistically significant at the 1% level, I find that a 1 unit increase in winning percentage leads to a .0216 unit increase in percent change of home value. These results indicate that professional sports have a significant effect on home values, but it is more important for the team to be successful than to merely have a team.

The deregulation of the financial markets that started over two decades ago in the developed countries has led to increased house prices and loan to value ratios. Home owners in western countries have over the last two decades steadily decreased their savings and at the same time increased the size of their mortgages and the amount of leverage used to purchase their homes. This development has increased the financial risk for homeowners which recently became clear in the United States when prices on homes started to fall rapidly in 2007. Due to this development Finansinspektionen in Sweden has enforced new regulation on mortgage lending making it more expensive for home owners to use high leverage ratios. Finansinspektionen is responsible for consumer protection in terms of financial products and the new regulation aims to protect mortgage borrowers. Finansinspektionen suggests that an insurance that protects the borrower from loss could be used as an alternative to the regulation restricting the amount of leverage. Finansinspektionen also mentions the Canadian mortgage market as an example where compulsory mortgage insurances are enforced today. In Canada the borrower must take out a mortgage insurance when the mortgage exceeds 80 percent of the house value. However, we find that the Canadian mortgage insurance system would not fulfil the aim of Finansinspektionen’s regulation. The Canadian mortgage insurances are constructed to protect the lender against default and there purpose was initially to increase lending. When examining the basic structure of mortgage and home value insurance products we find that such products and systems are complicated to construct to match the Finansinspektionen requirements and purpose due to issues such as moral hazard, adverse selection, price, willingness to pay and systemic risk.

Luxury and premium brand affiliation have been and likely always will be about quality and status. Extant studies in marketing consumer behavior aim to explain the effects of hedonic drivers and how these shape consumer behavioral choices when choosing a brand. A consumer's subconscious hedonic motivations are thought to result in buying decisions. Their purchase decision may thus satisfy their emotional needs as explained in hedonic theory. With respect to the distinction between tangible products as “goods” and intangible products as “services,” it appears that luxury branding has always been seen as one characteristic of goods. Many consumers will purchase a luxury brand good for the pleasure of holding that good and the social status that it represents. But luxury branding in the service industry is a bit harder to grasp. Little research exists dealing with luxury branding in the service industry and, especially, in the real estate industry. Using this contradistinction once again, a luxury consumer will purchase either a good or service. A good is tangible and may be held by the consumer indefinitely, but a service is generally time restricted and might only be a one-time purchase transaction. To probe this issue in greater depth, luxury retail marketing research and consumer behavior will inform this study. Luxury branding, that is, perceived value versus actual value in real estate sales, will be analyzed. In that the real estate industry is specifically characterized by brokers at many brand levels, this study uses this characterization of brand level to determine if luxury branding of real estate brokers impact homes sale price (and/or other components of value) by returning a premium to one or more stakeholders in the value chain. With little extant literature in the luxury branding service sector and residential real estate brokerage activities, this research, in particular, considers empirical results from previous real estate and luxury branding research in other markets to set forth a framework for brokerage branding level in real estate. The resulting framework categorizes this as real estate brokerage firm “level,” typing brand into three levels based on service and price (for the purposes of the current work, the delineation will be binary, that is to say, either luxury brand representation or not). These brokerage brand levels are: (1) low, i.e., flat fee or discount firms; (2) middle, i.e., traditional, commission-based firms; and (3) high, i.e., luxury brokerage firms. Each category appeals to a different social class of consumers in that purchasing power is highly related to home listing and final sales pricing. Given that all firms have the same resources available for listing, marketing, and syndicating a home on the market, consumer perception, which is a key component in the branding research, also becomes central in the current study when considering residential real estate brokerage and brand levels, when studying the luxury home market and the high-end brokerage firms targeting the luxury class, an interesting question arises: Do these brokers add value? Or is it an inaccurate, but common perception? These questions are addressed in the research by analyzing the marketing characteristic of luxury real estate brokerage branding in one particular market in the Dallas-Fort Worth region of the US. Specifically it asks whether branding impacts a home's value. The study follows prior scholarly suggestions to derive quality and comparable data and to focus on geographically targeted luxury real estate markets. The research builds on prior research frameworks exploring the hedonic pricing model, an established research stream that has looked into the effect of home hedonic characteristics on its ultimate valuing. To date, little research has been conducted analyzing the impact of market branding on the final sales price of a home and other features of perceived value. In the empirical results of Study 1 and Study 2 of stable, affluent communities in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of the US, we analyze the outcome of the two studies indicate that buyers may not perceive a high value related to the brand of the listing and/or selling broker. This may appear to counter the general marketing branding literature, but the strength of brand in goods could be quite different than the strength of brand in services such as real estate and we formulate null hypotheses to test this possibility. Brand loyalty to a class of brokers, for example, could be less likely given that most buyers only engage in home buying on an infrequent basis. Indeed, in the two studies conducted, the hedonic factors are overwhelmingly powerful predictors of value and these hedonic and tangible physical characteristics of a home could well be responsible for allaying or undermining any real effect of brand. This research consists of two studies conducted separately in different locations of a single county within the Dallas-Fort Worth Texas area. By studying two separate but similar communities in the same geographical area, external validity was thus enhanced, assuring that the results here were not a one-off empirical finding in only one setting. The two studies were coded for brand and hedonics and used as predictors of buyer perceptions of value, as represented in the final, agreed-to sales price and other forms of valuing. Based on the research findings, these two independent studies overall strengthen statistical power and allow for possible generalization to other unstudied populations, which, presumably, would be other real estate markets. Utilizing the current methodological approach, for example, would permit future researchers to see if the findings generalize to communities in other metropolitan areas in the US and beyond. In all such studies, it might be possible that the effect of brand becomes statistically significant, for instance, but this could be, strictly speaking, merely a function of the larger N. In this thesis, however, branding was not statistically significant and, moreover, the branding effect was minimal in terms of explained variance of the DVs such as final sales price. If these finding should hold across settings, the predictive power of brand would continue to have a very small value component and hedonic characteristics would likely dominate, rendering branding to be a far distant, minor effect. The implications of this study can be seen with respect to both academic thinking and practice. There is a theoretical contribution in showing that a brand in real estate may not impact buyer value, admitting the limitation of the dataset having been gathered from one North Texas market. These results run counter to some marketing research to date and certainly contend the thinking of many brokers and home buyers and sellers. Based on the results of this study, branding might be considered in future studies as a control variable that is not expected to affect outcomes to any marked degree. Alternatively, scholars might continue to introduce branding as a direct effect on value and compare their findings to this thesis. Challenges to the hedonic pricing model might also emerge from future empirical results, but, given the persuasiveness of prior studies of the hedonic model in real estate, we expect that such hedonic factors will continue to reign supreme. For practitioners, non-luxury brokers have some evidence that luxury branding of a home might not result in value for the buyer and this could be an effective marketing tool for them (with the caveat that scientific findings thus far are limited to a study drawn only from the Dallas-Fort Worth region). Claims that sellers should choose a luxury brokerage to list their homes may not stand the empirical test of real-world data and analysis and luxury brokers can be cautioned not to overstep in arguing that they can definitely produce economic premiums for sellers. Hedonic characteristics continue to be the most important predictor of home sales prices, as is likely, all brand levels will likely be even better informed of the relative importance of hedonic factors in the presence of branding effects in future studies. By holding brand constant, variance associated with brand can be patriated out and the resultant weights of hedonic factors can be more clearly seen and understood. / Business Administration/Finance

No description available.