Volume 21 (2013): Issue 3 (September 2013)

Gentrification is a term first used by Ruth Glass in 1964 in reference to the process of taking over and revitalizing the degraded housing resources in the London Borough of Islington by their middle class owners. Ruth Glass discerned the impact of the improved living conditions in the gentrified area on ownership conditions, the appreciation of prices of land and houses, and changes in the social class structure. Nowadays, we can observe three types of changes taking place in gentrified parts of cities: economic, social and cultural ones.

The author of this article presents the evolution of gentrification and points out the advantages and threats brought about by this process, including its effect on urban space and real property prices. She identifies the gentrification processes in Poland and their social impact, and verifies the hypothesis that contemporary gentrification, apart from being a physical process, is above all, a social and cultural one. On the example of some parts of the Szczecin urban agglomeration, she shows that gentrification, extending into the suburbs and rural areas, results in irreversible changes in land use and social structure.

Although the arrangement of urban space use functions is the outcome of the activity of many different entities, it is not a random activity, as there are general principles guiding the creation process of such a structure. The correct selection and arrangement of areas in a city for different types of use is of significant importance for the fulfillment of economic, functional and planning needs of the city. The concept of land division therefore has a decisive effect on the spatial structure of every city.

The growing shortage of free urban space causes, or even forces, its optimal use. The optimization of land use functions in a city aims to verify mismatched land functions and replace them with functions best matched to the present natural and anthropogenic features. Adaptation of problem areas generating “spatial conflicts” should be based on the opinion of the city’s residents to reflect their current needs as well as on economic calculations. This paper presents a procedure for determining optimal states of land use as a tool in the urban space management process. The developed algorithm is designed to form the basis for conducting spatial monitoring, serving to analyze and verify individual land management forms in order to minimize the costs of transformation and maximize income.

The following article contributes to the discussion on the issue of the interference of legal regulations on the procedure of real estate appraisal, which is as an economic activity. A special dose of attention is drawn to the selection of the research area of the real estate market. Legal regulations referring to this selection as well as, economic factors based on the preferences of buyers have been described.

The application of quality-based methods of marketing has been indicated as a possible means of diagnosing the real estate market, bringing satisfactory results even in the case of limited as well as complex markets, such as suburban areas. On the basis of the Bydgoszcz agglomeration, it was proven that real estate market interference areas do not correlate with the administrative borders of cities or districts.

Furthermore, an appraisal of land located in a suburban area of Bydgoszcz was performed twice by varying means, accepting data from different market areas: local (the territory of the commune) and supralocal (the territory of the commune and partially, the city), thus indicating the considerable influence of research area selection on the estimated value.

The acquired research results may serve as a starting point for further analyses of other local markets.

In this paper, the systems of real estate mass appraisal in some selected European countries will be discussed, in comparison with those of individual countries on other continents, in terms of similarities and differences in law, institutional scope and subjects responsible for its execution. With selected countries serving as an example, the practical aspects of operating the real estate owners’ taxation system will be discussed as well the data acquiring process, considered price-making factors, proceeding methodology and circumstances taken into account in real estate cadastral valuation, giving consideration to national specificity.

Municipal real property, including commune real estate usually managed through a model of a direct or indirect commissioning system, is becoming increasingly popular, especially in the context of the public management paradigm. The aim of the article is to present the essence of the commissioning system of commune real estate management and indicate the supervisory consequences which rest on the commune as a result of choosing this system. In order to fulfill the assumed research objectives, the article analyzes the commissioning system of commune real estate management in Poland with the use of the agency theory, a dominant theoretical concept of corporate governance.

The real estate market is an open system, which implies that it is able to exchange signals with other open systems and dynamic systems. The evolution of a market system over time can be described mathematically. If the system's sensitivity threshold to external stimuli is exceeded, it becomes destabilized and moves from a near-balanced state to a state that is far from equilibrium. Those dynamic processes often induce key changes in the system's trajectory of evolution. In search of equilibrium, the system becomes transformed in a process of discontinuous and discrete changes in state variables. The above statement constitutes the research hypothesis in this article.

In this study, an attempt was made to develop a mathematical model for visualizing the evolutionary path of the real estate market in the form of continuous changes interrupted by discontinuous changes. The qualitative transformation of the system will be evaluated with the use of the catastrophe theory.

Traditionally, it is believed that real estate can be an important component of an investment portfolio as it reduces risk due to the diversification potential coming from its low/negative correlation with stocks and bonds. However, contemporary development in the form of the invention and introduction of more sophisticated financial instruments is blurring the boundaries between the existing asset classes. The appearance of these new forms of investments is the result of competition for global capital inflows. Investors concentrate on those forms of investments that are attractive in terms of the variety of offered instruments and the results achieved by them. The aim of the article is to evaluate the variety of instruments enabling investments on the Polish property market and their competitiveness in relation to classical forms of investment.

Suburbanization is one of the processes of urban expansion which is inseparably linked with the real estate market. It takes place when residents of cities gradually leave their administrative limits in order to live in satellite communities. The article presents studies dealing with the demographic and market-related aspects of this phenomenon. The authors analyzed the dynamics of prices of undeveloped plots of land chosen due to their location in municipalities (gminas) located in the proximity of Szczecin. The analysis was supplemented with a survey of average plot sizes and the number of transactions concluded in subsequent years. The dynamics of population flow from the West Pomeranian capital to the urban-rural fringe were also investigated. The analyses resulted in the proposal of a synthetic measure illustrating the suburbanization dynamics which combines the market dimension (prices and the number of transactions) with the demographic dimension (population flow). The study covered the period of 2006-2011.

Some authors suggest that the use of standard deviation as a measure of total risk for returns on real estate leads to risk overestimation, as the classical Markowitz model does not account for the skewness of financial data, thus making the results unreliable. According to the available literature, risk calculated on the basis of standard semideviation may actually better reflect the nature of property investment. However, in this context, the question of whether or not this measure will lead to risk underestimation at a time of a downturn in the real estate market, resulting in inadequate investment decisions aggravating investor losses arises. Therefore, the present paper presents portfolios constructed using either classical risk measures or measures based on “downside deviations” of rates of return. The results of investment in these portfolios are analyzed.

In recent years, there has been a strong interest in land intended for single-family housing in the suburban zones of big cities. This is strongly related to the suburbanization process. In the present study, the author endeavored to present the differentiation of local markets of undeveloped real estate intended for single-family housing in the suburban zones of Poznań. Notary deeds related to sales transactions in the segment of undeveloped land plots were the basic source of information used in the article. The article shortly discusses the specifics of the land market in the suburban zone, presents the research method (the nature of the real estate prices index) and then, creates a regression function of plot prices and indicates hedonic prices for undeveloped plots intended for single-family housing in particular communes. Finally, it seeks to define the similarities and differences within the local undeveloped property market in the Poznań agglomeration.