Thies Lindenthal
Title of research: Unique Assets, Quality Uncertainty and Noisy Prices
This projects estimates real estate asset uniqueness along previously not quantifiable dimensions, including shape, size, architecture, perceived beauty, maintenance or shape similarity. This richer picture of individual buildings and their comparability to other properties will improve any estimates of fundamental value. More interestingly, though, it will reveal distributions of transaction values in relation to fundamental value. Since uniqueness of the assets co-determines the availability of information from comparable sales, I hypothesise that uniqueness is also linked to the absolute deviations of sales prices from fundamental values: If little is know about fundamental value, then sales prices will contain more noise.
