Managing Stakeholders in A Housing Renovation Project

Stakeholder management is an important task of project managers in housing renovation. Compared with new construction project, a great challenge that a housing renovation project manager faces, is managing the tenants that living before or during the renovation. This paper is a teaching case based on a real housing renovation project, which confronted difficult stakeholder management problems, of a Swedish real estate company between 2009 to 2016. It provides teaching materials that can be used by instructors for helping students to analyse and summarise the lessons learned from a troublesome stakeholder management process and to come up with suggestions that will ensure a smooth implementation of the housing renovation project. The case contains two main parts, namely the case description and teaching notes. It can be used by teachers and trainers, as well as university bachelor students and industrial practitioners in courses and training programs about housing renovation project management.

Rental legislation and the changing Icelandic rental market

Rental markets hold an important role for a functioning housing market as a whole. Households with shorter time horizons, as well as households with little private equity and difficulties acquiring capital can see their housing needs met on the rental market. A functioning rental market does however require some sort of legislation. In this paper we argue that legislation must adapt to changing rental markets. We do so from the specific case of Iceland. The Icelandic rental market has, since the financial crisis, undergone noticeable structural change, evident from a number of perspectives. By applying a framework based in the role of rental market legislation, we provide a comparison between legislation in the Nordic countries. We conclude, based both in the presented structural change of the Icelandic rental market, and in aspects of Nordic rent legislation, that there is a case to be made for changes to the Icelandic legislation.

Impacts of shopping malls on apartment prices: the case of Stockholm

Shopping malls, as an important type of commercial facilities, are growing dramatically. They have gradually become one of the most dominant factors that can influence people's daily life as well as a city's economic development. People's willingness to pay for dwellings is also primarily associated with the surrounding commercial layout. Hence, it is of interest to find out more from a quantitative perspective on the relationship between shopping malls and housing prices. This study aims to analyze how the prices of condominiums will be affected by the proximity of shopping malls. Two aspects are considered and examined in the empirical study, namely a proximity to the shopping mall, and the number of shopping malls within 3 kilometers radius. We try to examine if there is any price premium for those apartments near the shopping mall or with more shopping malls in the neighborhood. In this empirical study, 36 shopping malls in different locations in the county of Stockholm, Sweden, is utilized. The sample of transactions consists of 336,914 apartments. By using regression analysis, based on the traditional hedonic model, the results show that there is an inverse relationship between the apartment prices and its distance from the shopping mall while the number of shopping malls is positively correlated with apartment prices. However, the impact has declined over time.

Social innovation in housing development:

Homelessness has increased substantially in Sweden in the last decade with an emphasis on structural homelessness. Further, municipalities have the responsibility to house a certain number of newly-arrived immigrants under the Settlement Act. Many municipalities have had difficulties in meeting the acute housing need, as well as its costs, and have started to look at new types of housing solutions. Socially innovative initiatives of the civil society and private developers have been encouraged. This paper investigates three civil society and private housing developments and how they might contribute to socially and economically sustainable housing solutions for households in or on the verge to homelessness. In order to operationalize the sustainability concept related to these local projects, an analytical set of questions have been developed based on the literature and project data. It is concluded that all three projects are socially and economically sustainable at the outset, but that certain traits of the project set-ups make them more uncertain in the longer run. The sustainability lens was fruitful in analyzing the projects, but non-physical factors will in many cases be person dependent and therefore difficult to generalize. As it is expected that this new type of housing in the Swedish setting will increase in numbers, the analytical set of questions should be tested in relation to further projects and be developed further.

Road Management in Denmark and Sweden

Management of roads and the institutional solution chosen is dependent on a number of factors – regulatory tradition, road network scale etc. It is likely that some solutions are more efficient than others, and in this article the Danish and Swedish institutional solutions regarding road management are compared an analysed. The aim is to explore and briefly evaluate the systems in terms of economic efficiency. It is observed that the chosen solutions on national and municipal level are much alike and appears efficient. However, for common private roads, the institutional designs are very different and seem to be based on two diametrically contrasting views on how to govern this kind of roads.

Effects of land consolidation

It is important to note that in Norway land consolidation remains the exclusive domain of the court system. There are three cumulative requirements that must be fulfilled before land consolidation can proceed in Norway. (1) The Land Consolidation Court may effectuate land consolidation if at least one property or easement in the land consolidation area is difficult to use gainfully at the current time and under the current circumstances. (2) The Land Consolidation Court may only proceed in this way in order to make the property arrangements in the land consolidation area more advantageous. (3) For any given property or easement, the land consolidation settlement shall not result in costs and other disbenefits that are greater than the benefits. All three criteria must be fulfilled. In this article, we present and analyse cases taken before the Norwegian Land Consolidation Court using case studies, surveys and qualitative interviews with property owners and judges at the land consolidation courts. The observed effects of land consolidation are separated into economic and spatial, legal, environmental and social effects. Our analysis shows that the effects of land consolidation are difficult to estimate or to calculate. There is a need to develop better methods both for valuations and impact studies.

Towards automation of the Swedish property formation process

The ongoing digitalization of public administration and increased automation of legal decision-making bears promise to benefit citizens, businesses and other stakeholders through simpler and more efficient civil processes, and thus has great impact on the urban planning and building process. However, automation of decision-making that is directed or constrained by normative systems such as laws, regulations and policies, requires a detailed and accurate representation of these concepts and their constituent parts, and the domain to which they are applied. In this paper, we combine two perspectives on formalisation and classification of legal relations within the urban planning and building domain. In a cross-disciplinary fashion, we analyse and describe a small part of this domain at a higher level of abstraction and formalization using two different analysis instruments. Using these tools, we perform structural and conceptual as well as logical analyses of two specific snapshots of a fictitious property subdivision case in Sweden, focusing on the legal relations between different entities and parties involved in the specific situations. The structural analysis uses the Land Administration Domain Model ISO 19152:2012 standard formalism, and the logical analysis is based on the notion of atomic types of legal relations. We discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of the two tools regarding the formal representation of rights, restrictions and responsibilities of different parties in the land administration domain, as well as how the tools relate to each other and how they can be aligned. We thus take one step towards a deeper understanding of the domain, and identify areas for future research that may provide better conditions for efficient and transparent use of geospatial information, and automation of the property subdivision process and other related civil processes.

Inclusionary housing policies in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Stuttgart, Germany

Affordable housing shortage and concerns about social and income segregation have become a focal point of housing policy debate in many Western countries, and inclusionary housing policies (IH) have become widespread. IH is a term that summarizes municipal ambitions to spur the inclusion of affordable housing in otherwise market-rate projects through development restrictions. This article investigates IH policy objectives and outcomes of policies applied by the German city of Stuttgart and a Swedish pilot project in the city of Gothenburg. Although IH policies in the two countries generally have very similar objectives and incentive structures, underlying slow-moving institutions decide fundamental traits of the fast-moving institution of IH. In the Swedish case, allocation methods of low-rent apartments under the unitary housing system might prevent targeted polices such as IH from functioning as intended. In the German case, IH is integrated into the existing social and affordable housing system. Therefore its social objectives are not contested, although the limitation of private property rights and the incentive structures of developers are bound to be discussed. Irrespective of the housing system, the extent of public land ownership might also be a decisive factor in whether to implement IH policies or not. In Stuttgart, where public land ownership is limited, IH policies might be an effective way to produce affordable housing, as alternatives, including finding inexpensive land for public production, are limited. As Gothenburg municipality owns most of the land available for housing development, has a planning monopoly and public housing companies with good financial standing, it might find other, quicker and possibly less costly, ways to develop affordable housing than applying IH, especially if it is implemented mainly through public investors.

Browser based 3D for the built environment

Digital 3D geometric models have become a central tool for geo-information. For many participatory and collaborative applications, distributing these models easily is essential. Several technical solutions exist for creating online systems that facilitate the study of 3D models in the context of the built environment. To provide an overview on browser based interactive 3D visualizations, we present a set of existing systems applied in Finland, and discuss their common properties and differences. To obtain first-hand experience, we experiment with an online 3D application development platform. The systems studied show a high potential for browser based 3D applications: interactive visualizations with multi-user characteristics and dynamic elements can be built by leveraging the 3D web technologies. Finally, we suggest a framework for discussing browser based 3D systems, covering the spectrum of possibilities available in modern web-based 3D for built environment applications.

Commercial Real Estate at the ZLB

This paper analyses the implications of a low interest rate environment (the zero lower bound – ZLB) for the demand of commercial real estate. The main intention of the paper is to track any asymmetry between evaluation models at ZLB relative to more “normal” interest rate levels. First we apply a conventional net-present value (NPV) approach, where the weighted average cost of capital (WACC) and the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) are used for evaluation. Considering the invariance level of systemic risk we find WACC to be an alternative to CAPM for offensive and defensive investments when interest rates are “normal”. However, at the ZLB, WACC is an alternative for investments that carry the same risk as the market and beta-values are close to one. Second, we simulate our models using US data to see how the WACC shortcut performs across different interest rate levels, and especially at ZLB, in this economy. We see differences between the period preceding the financial crisis and the period after 2010, even though the Federal Funds rate is close to zero in both periods. We relate this to the difference in systemic risk between the two periods, and show how the result in the latter period is quite equal across evaluation models.