An International Perspective on the Importance of Real Estate Concepts and Topics

Executive Summary. As the real estate industry adopts a global perspective for local market activity, real estate academics and practitioners in the United States and Canada need to understand the views of their international colleagues on important real estate topics. This study focuses attention on real estate academics and practitioners outside the U.S. and Canada, and it uses a two-step Delphi process to identify important real estate topics. First, the full list of potential respondents was asked to identify important real estate topics in response to an open-ended question. Then, in the second phase, the full list of potential respondents was asked to state their agreement with a list of thirty-six important topics developed from the responses to the original open ended question. The study reveals a divergence of opinion on a list of important topics and the importance of each topic. This divergence is related to the respondents’ primary area of interest in real estate and their geographic area.