Recent MPhil Real Estate Finance graduate Florian Unbehaun has been awarded the prestigious 2015 Dissertation Prize by the IPF Educational Strategy Group.
His dissertation, entitled ‘Spatial Variation in Capitalisation Rates of Commercial Real Estate Transactions in Germany’, assesses how locational characteristics shape risk and risk perception in property investments. Using a dataset comprising capitalisation rates, risk premia and a number of control variables based on individual property transactions in Germany's largest local real estate markets, his research demonstrates that investors require significantly lower risk premia and capitalisation rates in central urban locations compared to more suburban locations. This effect is robust to variations in model specification and controls for non-spatial factors that are correlated with particular locations.
Dr Franz Fuerst, Director of the Real Estate Finance Programme and Florian's dissertation supervisor, commented: 'Winning the competitive IPF prize is a great achievement for Florian after he has already won our Departmental Alastair Ross Goobey Award and Douglas Blausten Award for best overall performance on the Real Estate Finance MPhil and best dissertation. His ambitious analysis demonstrates empirically how micro-level factors can mitigate or even override powerful macroeconomic effects under certain conditions and thus contributes to a better understanding of the price and risk implications of commercial real estate investments.'