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In financial markets, speculation is justified by its contribution to liquidity, hedging, and, if rationally done, for adjusting price to value. Derivatives are essential to turn speculation into an element that contributes an efficient market. Property assets have the distinctive feature of being, residential and productive assets, and, investment assets. This paper studies how speculation may have a positive contribution to the real estate market by regarding it from the triple perspective of property, primitive financial assets, and derivatives. We approach an answer by trying to identify which assets are needed to this end and how they can contribute to guide speculation to efficiency. On this basis, we examine the development of the derivatives on real estate indexes and the perspectives of their future evolution, including their impact on the real market.

The ‘Celtic Tiger’ years (1995-2007) saw prosperous economic growth in the Republic of Ireland and an intense period of housing construction and urban development. In 2008 Ireland entered into recession, which resulted in a collapse of the property market and the construction industry. This collapse left just over 2,000 housing developments unfinished across the country. Since 2008, the Irish Government, in conjunction with local authorities, has been developing strategies and plans to finalise these unfinished estates. This paper reports on the current practices for resolving issues in unfinished housing estates in the Republic of Ireland, with a particular focus on the plans to utilise empty housing for social housing purposes. The paper critiques the ways in which this imposed tenure mix can potentially threaten housing policy objectives for sustainable and balanced communities. It is the contention of this paper that this housing practice needs urgent review.

This short paper revisits and revises the over-used State-Market-Household triangle as a theoretical analytical tool, proposing its repositioning at the centre of Housing and Welfare Studies, and reopening the debate. It is shown that this tool does not remain useful for researchers alone but also as a means to a more effective communication of results to a wider non-specialist audience. Towards this goal two conceptual adaptations are proposed. Firstly, the addition of the time parameter in assessing the triangle’s transformations from one era to another, or comparing systems with similarities but on different evolutionary phases. Secondly, the – by default – understanding of the triangle as a dynamic configuration, due to inter and intra-polar shifts.

Econometric models have produced contradictory results and have failed to provide warning of housing market crashes. The article should illustrate the inability of econometrics to reliably predict the last house price bubble and detect the disequilibrium in the housing markets. The authors will demonstrate on particular situation that two distinct but well specified econometric models can lead to different outcomes. The authors argue that the demand for housing is influenced by social constructs, social norms, ideologies, unrealistic expectations, symbolic patterns, and the actual choice of housing is the outcome of complex social interactions with reference groups. Consequently, it is necessary to analyse the potential instability of social constructs, norms, expectations and the changing character of social interactions to better understand purchasing behaviour and, then, house price volatility.

Sustainable urban development requires education of professionals dealing with the built environment. Property valuers constitute one such important albeit neglected actor group. When the aim is to comprehend value and valuation, the questions to ask include the following argumentation: What is the ideal definition of sustainable development in a valuation context? Is it about the diversity of value systems? Or about long-term thinking in terms of reinvesting the profits harvested? And what is the role of generating data on these factors? The paper reports some suggestions for answering these questions in a residential context.

The Dutch Cabinet published its Housing Market Reform Agenda on 17 September 2013. This paper describes the main features of the Agenda and presents an ex-ante evaluation of this policy document. The introduction of a landlord levy is one of the biggest inconsistencies in this Agenda. The Housing Market Reform Agenda is particularly critical of housing associations. There are good reasons to throw away the bath water, but the baby (= the housing association) should be nurtured.

In the midst of rapid urbanisation and economic growth, the developing world faces challenges in the relationships between land, poverty, and security. Rising social and economic exclusion and insufficient land regulations have spawned an informal housing sector. Given the risk to the broad base of middle- and low-income households in developing countries and the growing demands in urbanising land markets, it is imperative that governments develop a more fine-grained understanding of their land and housing policies.  Local authorities must also begin to consider innovative ways to preserve affordability in a market-responsive way. Community land trusts (CLTs) provide one means of resolving the paradox between formalising land ownership and mitigating exclusion from an increasingly unaffordable land market. CLTs seek to balance private property rights, which are the cornerstone of modern land markets and individual wealth, with the affordability and accessibility needs of the community.

This paper studies the roles of the new-style PRH (public rental housing) programme in Shanghai’s socio-spatial dynamics. It shows that the development of PRH in Shanghai is mainly a result of a deliberate urban development policy in line with other strategies such as city marketing and gentrification. The analysis is augmented with data from a questionnaire survey of PRH tenants in Shanghai. Finally, this paper identifies challenges for the future development of the public rental housing sector in China.

The aim of the paper is to discuss selected methodological problems of quantitative comparative housing research. The analysis is based on EU-SILC data and the concept of overcrowding is considered. We used two alternative definitions of overcrowding rate, both based on normative assumptions and each giving slightly different results. We tried to answer the question, which definition is better. The basic idea was that the closer the ‘objective’ rate of overcrowding is to its ‘subjective’ assessment, the better the selected method (definition) is. Moreover, it was shown that while in more advanced countries the share of households that consider dwelling space to be a problem is significantly higher than the share of households living in overcrowded dwellings based on ‘objective’ criteria, in post-socialist countries the opposite is true.