At an international level governments are increasingly seeking to ensure greater involvement of the private sector in the financing and delivery of regeneration and sustainable communities. Regeneration is currently at the forefront of the UK Governmentís priorities (Urban White Paper, 2003: Miliband, 2005). In order to attract more private finance the public sector is being encouraged to take on a more strategic role, which creates confidence for the private sector to invest. However the success of such an approach will depend on meaningful engagement between the public and private sectors and in particular with the financial institutions. Currently there is a substantial weight of institutional money that could be attracted into regeneration. The financial institutions are major players in the UK capital markets, controlling assets in excess of £1,500 billion. Research into the size and the structure of the UK commercial property market has estimated that at the end of 2003 the value of commercial property was of the order of £254 billion (Key, 2005). Just over half of this stock is of investment grade, the majority of which is owned by institutional investors. The aim of the paper is to understand the needs of investing institutions and to identify the likely constituents of a working model suitable for encouraging institutional investment and bank finance into regeneration schemes. A cross-asset perspective (property, bonds/fixed income, equities, private equity, hedge funds and alternatives) is adopted, enabling an understanding of both the asset allocation decision-making process and the criteria used in the investment selection procedure of respective asset classes. A survey of investment fund managers across each of the principal asset classes was conducted, taking the form of structured discussions, the interviews considered the investment decision-making process, risk/return criteria and potential sources of regeneration funding. By considering the views of decision makers, a profile is constructed of the factors and inputs necessary in designing a regeneration investment vehicle that would prove attractive to the financial institutions.

Vacant dwellings are perceived to be a waste of valuable housing resources, a magnet for crime and antisocial behaviour and a visual blight in a neighbourhood. Financially, they represent a loss of council tax revenue and can depress the general level of property values in a locality. A slow rate of house construction over the past two decades, rising disposable incomes and a shift in the demographic profile of home-owners in England has led to a very high rate of house price inflation over the past ten years and this has caused vacant dwellings to become a focus of political attention. This attention has culminated in provisions enacted in the Housing Act, 2004 which allows local authorities to force vacant dwellings into use as a way of addressing housing need. But how many vacant dwellings are there, where are they and how long have they been empty for? There is a lack of property-specific information about the vacant housing stock in England and this makes it difficult to make policy decisions and use legislative powers in relation to specific dwellings or neighbourhoods. This paper contends that the published estimate of the number of vacant dwellings in England is inadequately defined. A method of obtaining detailed information about vacant dwellings that makes use of existing data is presented, vacancy statistics for Leeds are calculated and it is demonstrated that these statistics are capable of being aggregated and mapped at postcode, ward and local authority levels.

Urban problems are becoming too serious to leave solely in the hand of government authorities but have necessitated drawing the wisdom and resources of all parties involved in contemporary urban predicaments. Under the state-ownership system of urban land in China, there are no forces to change the conventional model of urban renewal initiated only by the public sector, in which the individual property owners are almost out of the picture of decision making and renewal process. However, in some rare occasions, the developer may adopt a public-private partnership structure in the process by incorporating the individual property owners into their entity. This, in the context of rural land renewal in the urban fringe area where the property ownership structure is mixed up, has been known as the Land Readjustment model. The paper is to review the historical evolution of the Land Readjustment concept, explore the rationale behind which public authority chooses to adopt this model in the process of urban renewal and to highlight the generic promise and drawbacks of this publicñprivate partnership. The two cases in Shenzhen, the special economy zone in south China, are introduced to shed some lights on how this public-private partnership works in reality.

For Great Britain are empirical data since the late 1980s available, that show the differences between valuation results and sales prices. For Germany no statistics of these kinds exists. The paperës objective is to show, if and to what level there are deviations between the results in valuation reports and the following sales prices. Futher more it should be investigated, if there is are difference between the deviations in Great Britain and Germany. The discussion about the German Valuation methods and about the valuation result of German Open Ended funds is mainly based on the assumption, that the valuation results differ from market prices. The idea of the paper is to show, if this assumption is based on market data or just on market rumour. For the valuation report and sales prices in Germany the paper will be based on data available from German Open Ended funds and some databases. For Great Britain the research will base on data published nowadays by the RICS and formerly by Drivers Jonas. Compared to the results from Great Britain it is assumed, that the German deviation between the valuation results and the sales prices of German property is more or less on the same level. If this is true, the different method of valuation seems to have little influence in the quality of the valuation reports result and that the assumptions on differences between valuation results and market prices are more market rumour than market data driven. If this is not the case, and German deviation differ form the British, the reasons for that will be elaborated.

The objective of the paper is an analysis of the service life of dwellings in Germany. The service life of dwellings is important for different reasons: It is necessary for an estimation of the future development of the building stock and quality as well as for projections on new constructions. In addition, asset durability is one of the most important features of the housing market. An analysis of this feature may provide further insight into the market. Furthermore, the service life of the investment good is an important characteristic of the decision to invest in dwellings. Hence the service life is also important in the context of housing valuation: Since the initial rent in the housing market is usually less than in other real estate markets (e.g. office or retail), the payback period of the investment is quite long. The aim of the paper is the comparison of actual service life times with projections of how the service life of buildings will develop assuming economically rational investors. Since many, formerly publicly owned, housing companies in Germany are subject to increased economic pressure as a result of their sale to private investors, future predictions on the development and composition of the housing stock may be improved under this assumption for owner behaviour. The service life times of buildings have internationally been analysed (among others) by Johnstone (2001), Meikle&Connaughton (1994) Gleeson (1985) and Needleman (1965). In Germany, the service life of the building stock has been analysed by Bradley et al. (2005), Bradley (2004) and estimated by Voss (2001) and Eekhoff (2002). Among these, two different approaches can be identified: The analytic approach is based on macro data and estimates building loss rates over the whole stock and the micro/life table analysis identifies loss rates in certain subsets of the total stock within regional, age or other boundaries. The estimation of service life and loss rates of buildings by using the Kaplan-Meier-Estimator conducted is one standard method among the authors of the second (life table) approach: It was already conducted by Johnstone and Bradley, both using data on a different stock. However, the idea of the calculus of the investor as the most important determinant of service life has not been articulated among these assessments. The work is based on observations of houses of a big dwelling company in the Ruhr region of Germany with approx. 15,000 buildings. The buildings date from all over the 20th century. They are of lower quality. Data on loss and cash-flows is available from 1991-2004, over 14 years. The normal service of a building is defined as the time that elapses before 50% of the objects under observation are knocked down. Using the Kaplan-Meier-estimator for estimating the survival function and extrapolating these estimations with the Weibull-function yields an estimated service life. This is remarkably longer than expected using conventional data on service life. This result for service life will be compared to the service life that is obtained under the assumption of an economically acting investor. To obtain this, more information about the development of rent and running costs of the buildings is necessary. This is done by analysing the patterns of the cash-flows of the dwellings using data from 1991 to 2004 (14 years). The results are obtained by towns as boxplot diagrams (cash-flow over time) and mean values over time. Using the results from this analysis a replacement time may be identified. Down to the present day the analysis has not been finished yet. However, preliminary results are available: Even when extrapolating the extraordinarily high demolition rates (in relation to the one for the whole stock of Germany) from the last decade the estimation for the service life of the dwellings included in the analysis is approx. 140 years. This means that the German society will live in these low-quality buildings for a longer time than perceived at present. Another preliminary result is concerning rent: It is decreasing as the building is ageing. There does not seem to be a strong correlation of rent and age, though. These findings are only partly in line with considerations of Sotelo (2001) for the German dwelling market, the results of Baum (1991) for the London office market and the Filtering Theory. No dwelling included in the analysis is older than 107 years though, hence validity over the total German stock is limited. On the other hand, there seems to be a similar correlation of running, especially maintenance costs, with age. In opposition to other investment goods, the maintenance costs of dwellings seem not to follow the bathtub curve. This curve with initially falling, in the second phase constant and then rising maintenance costs is presumed to be typically for investment goods. However, this seems not to be the case for housing. After a short period of low maintenance costs the costs are rising quite rapidly. After 10 years approximately the annual increase is starting to slow down. The pattern can be described with a initially slowly growing logarithmic function. Further analysis needs to be conducted. These two observations of slowly decreasing rents and increasing running costs need to be further assessed for their stability. If the findings should hold it may be possible to calculate an optimal time for replacement of dwellings. Comparing this calculated economic replacement age with the observed replacement age will yield results that allow for the estimation of future development of the necessary construction rate, demolition rate and of the size, state and age of the building stock.

A clear statement of the paperís objectives and subject matter: The objective is to solve the five problems that a German and US bilateral working group concluded need to be solved for successful brownfield redevelopment. An assessment of the originality of the paperís contribution to the specific field involved: The contribution of these solutions to the field of brownfield redevelopment are based on the authorís doctoral thesis, the first effort found to integrate the scientific process into the appraisal process to solve the problems of redeveloping contaminated land. An outline of the methods used and proposed application or theoretical contribution: The method used was to search literature from a variety of disciplines that were said to be essential (by those actively involved in brownfield redevelopment) in providing the analysis requisite for brownfield redevelopment to be successful. The theoretical contribution is the application of scientific methods from these disciplines in conjunction with methodologies use in the U.S. Triad process within a valuation model in order to quantify the previously unquantified uncertainty that has precluded brownfield redevelopment. Empirical data is also included that reveals the errors that result can from the use of conventional valuation methods. An overview of key conclusions or proposed conclusions: The current valuation methodology for brownfields is seriously flawed. A panel of 30 practitioners actively involved in brownfield remediation have agreed that it is absurd to use one contaminated site to infer remedial time and cost (for all but the simplest soil contamination) for another contaminated site-especially without understanding conceptual site models for all of the sites. This conclusion is a result of the heterogeneneity of subsurface soils. A combination of discrete choice modelling and Bayesian econometrics should be used in conjunction with Monte Carlo methods to quantify the uncertainty of the reversionary value and sustainability of the redeveloped property. GeoBayesian methods should be used when soil contamination is found in order to statistically quantify the amount and spatial extent of contamination and stochastic inverse methods should be used to probabilistically quantify remedial time and cost when an aquifer has been contaminated.

"The construct ""Mortgage Lending Value"" (MLV) is used almost exclusively within the German-speaking countries. In contrast, until today most other countries haven't paid much attention to this value.1 When funding real estate investments, it is in most cases sufficient to calculate the market value (MV) as the basis for lending decisions. Germany is one of the countries with the longest tradition in the mortgage lending business. With the new German law for mortgage lending, the Pfandbriefgesetz (PfandBG), as well as the draft for the additional ordinance for mortgage lending valuations, the Beleihungswertermittlungsverordnung (Bel- Wert),3 the legislation and framework for the preparation of valuations in accordance with the German MLV are presently being amended. In light of the advancing international harmonization4 one might ask which valuation method could be used as a ""best practise"",5 or in other words: Is the German MLV a potential ìexport hitî and, if so, in which way must the idea of a global standard for mortgage lending valuations be adapted to secure a broader acceptance of this practise? It must be stressed that the excellent rating of the German Pfandbrief ñ one of the biggest issuers of long term bonds within the European Union ñ is partly due to the lending proceduresin Germany, where one major aspect is the obligation to calculate an MLV instead of just using the MV for lending purposes. Because of the high security standards and the funding only on the basis of the MLV, some other European countries have already partially adopted the German systems, coming up with comparable laws for mortgage lending and issuing bonds.6 In addition, the approaches for Mortgage Lending Valuations have already been integrated into the European Valuation Standards (EVS) and are mentioned in the International Valuation Standards (IVS). Nevertheless the MLV is not used at all or fully understood in valuator circles, which are mainly under American or British influence. In this paper the authors first of all explain the MLV in consideration of the latest changes in the German legislation. From there the authors move on to compare the German MLV to the system and experiences made in the UK ñ a country which is known to have a long and very professional valuation history ñ and analyse the various sections in the EVS as well as the IVS in terms of valuations for lending purposes. Taking into account the findings, the authors point out that an MLV, which must be independent of an MV, is essential for banks that finance real estate investments by granting loans and thereby using the property for secured lending. On the other hand, findings indicate that instead of the current practise and methods used in Germany to do the calculations and report on the MLV, other approaches could be taken to come up with an information package which will be valuable for the different stakeholders in the mortgage lending business. In this paper the researchers indicate a number of aspects regarding the current German system for MLV which, from their point of view, should be looked at critically. Then the authors develop some first steps towards an MLV which could serve as the basis for an internationally accepted standard for valuations for lending purposes. Therefore they take into account helpful developments in the area of risk management tools, modern valuation techniques as well as the results of the consultation for Basel II.7 On this foundation the most innovative aspect of the paper is the development of a Valueat-Risk approach for the MLV application. Starting with a very theoretical method this approach is also transformed into a method which should be easier used in every-day business. The tremendous significance of this topic can be stressed by looking at the latest initiative of the European Commission (Commission) about the further integration of the European mortgage markets within the Union. In this regard the Commission has until now not been sure whether there should be one new pan-European standard for real estate valuations for mortgage lending.8 Looking at the current situation in the UK and Spain (both residential lending business of the banks),9 where lenders once again do fund just about 100% of the whole investment sum in anticipation of ""eternally rising prices"",10 the concerns of the Commission are certainly not completely unfounded. In addition, in their latest strategic plan for the next couple of years, the International Valuation Standards Committee (IVSC) has also diagnosed a need for action in the field of valuations for lending purposes.11"