Defining the real estate body of knowledge: A survey approach

Journal of Real Estate Practice and Education, 2003 by Black, Roy T, Rabianski, Joseph S

Executive Summary. This article analyzes the results of a survey sent to real estate academics and professionals around the world, attempting to define a body of knowledge for real estate. A list of thirty-six topics developed from a preliminary survey was submitted to potential respondents. The topics from the responses are ranked overall and compared for differences by the geographic location of the respondents and the professional area of the respondents.

Introduction

Academic relationships in real estate in the not so distant past were generally confined within national boundaries. Today, these relationships exist across national boundaries and continents. Two pieces of evidence supporting this view are the existence of international academic meetings and faculty visitation programs in the academic arena, and the increasing volume of international real estate transactions in the business arena. Real estate education and practice is international, it is global.

In this new era, real estate knowledge must encompass this global perspective. This study is one attempt to identify what the real estate body of knowledge is in this global context. The objective was to gain information about the importance of various real estate topics around the globe by asking real estate educators and practitioners worldwide what they thought and taught.

Literature Review

Defining a body of knowledge in real estate is extremely difficult, since there appears to be no clear cut consensus on the boundary lines of the discipline, either academic or professional. Academic real estate programs in the United States are often housed in business schools and most often have a finance and investments focus, while programs in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand may be housed outside the business school and focus on the built environment, a broader program that encompasses physical as well as financial concepts. Further, programs in parts of Europe are centered on the physical aspects of real estate, such as construction technology and engineering. Real estate professions in the U.S. include brokerage, asset management, property management, construction, planning, law, investments, finance, government regulation, forestry and natural resources, architecture, housing policy, and numerous other jobs related to the consumption of space over time.

The lack of a consensus about the boundaries of the field leads to an easy conclusion that real estate is not a discipline, but rather an ill-defined mutation that steals its identity from other disciplines such as finance and management that have well-defined paradigms focusing research efforts and creating the desirable boundaries that give an academic/professional field its shape and substance. However, Diaz (1993) has argued that real estate is analogous to engineering. Real estate is not defined by paradigms, but by activities (consuming, lending, governing, etc.). As Diaz proposes, "What joins the engineers-the goal of improvement-separates them from scientists, who seek to reveal. But what melds the scientist and the engineer into the confederation of an applied discipline is a shared territory complete with a constituency hungry to use the fruits of research."1 Following this logic, an attempt can be made to identify a body of knowledge by surveying the participants in the activity nodes of real estate. Identifying nodes for inclusion presents the next problem. Defining the body of knowledge in real estate has produced many attempts, with different focuses and no claims of being comprehensive.

Attempts to define a common body of knowledge for real estate education have focused primarily on college level curricula.2 Epley (1996) chronicled a two-year commitment made by the Board of Directors of the American Real Estate Society (ARES) to study the current state of a body of knowledge for real estate. After surveying the ARES academic membership and available publications, the ARES Body of Knowledge Committee concluded that the study of real estate has not evolved through the detailed debate necessary to achieve consensus among educators about a common body of knowledge.

As Epley (1996) notes, many attempts to define a body of knowledge are based on opinions of the authors rather than survey research, since academic journals have been reluctant to publish such articles and most articles appear in professional journals. Articles by Brown (1981), Lahey and Webb (1987) and Black, Cam, Rabianski and Diaz (1996) reflect the views of the authors on real estate curricula. Rabianski and Black (1998) chronicle the efforts of others to establish a body of knowledge and call for the creation of a body of knowledge in real estate brokerage.

Roulac (1994) examined the foundation of knowledge structure by reviewing the content of twelve real estate principles texts. He found that law and transaction topics dominated the coverage of real estate texts, more description than analysis, and an emphasis on practice over generalizable decision-oriented theory. Here there may be a gap between the topics and content needed for basis professional education and the need for colleges to produce higher level professionals capable of making decisions in ill-structured environments outside a legal or transactional framework.