Editorial

Citation

Akintoye, A., Davis, P. and Holt, G. (2012), "Editorial", Journal of Financial Management of Property and Construction, Vol. 17 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jfmpc.2012.37617aaa.002

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Financial Management of Property and Construction, Volume 17, Issue 1

We could not begin this Editorial – the inaugural from the new Editorial team – without first acknowledging the journal’s founder and retiring Editor, Dr Jim Birnie. We are privileged to have worked with Jim over the years to have co-edited this journal together. Jim’s knowledge of cost involved in construction project and property development is unprecedented. His passion for construction cost profession is evidenced throughout his working life as a teacher, researcher and practitioner. This cumulated into a need by Jim to start a new journal 16 years ago to address the gap in the existing research and practice of financial management of property and construction. Jim’s overriding interest has always been to bring together, through research and dissemination of research to practitioners, the missing gap between construction cost and property cost considering that the tasks involved are undertaken by different practitioners and the research involved by academics with different specialisms. It was a wonderful experience to have worked with Jim, through establishment and nourishing of this journal, to address some of these issues. We wish Jim all the best as he finally retires; he will be long cherished for his boldness in founding and nourishing the journal.

We look forward to continuing in the journal’s tradition of providing an international forum for theoretical and practical new thinking in the field of financial management of property and construction. We also look to the future with enthusiasm and energy and to making Journal of Financial Management of Property and Construction (JFMPC) the journal of choice, for practitioners and researchers wishing to disseminate their work in this increasingly important subject area. Later this year, contributors will be able to submit and check the progress of their manuscripts online through a new JFMPC submission portal and we shall be placing even greater emphasis on robust review, constructive feedback to authors and earliest online publication through Emerald EarlyCite (www.emeraldinsight.com/authors/writing/earlycite.htm). We particularly welcome papers on subjects related to the property theme of the journal, as well as papers demonstrating active involvement of industry in research and, those reporting studies that have utilised qualitative methodologies. All of which are under-represented at present. Other developments will be announced in due course, but in the interim if you have any views on the journal, we are always pleased to hear from you.

This issue contains five papers, one of which relates to property and the remainder to financial aspects of construction. As with JFMPC tradition, editorial is of a general nature – we are sure that the authors’ respective abstracts provide the best source of technical and research detail concerning their work.

The first paper by Christian Henjewele, Ming Sun and Peter Fewings deals with two important subject areas: value-for-money (VFM) and private finance initiative (PFI) projects. Particularly since the construction industry’s period of “introspection” (circa Latham and Egan) has the VFM objective replaced its “more simple” counterpart: lowest capital cost (Holt, 2010). And though this ideal is constantly acknowledged in contemporary literature, the present economic environment is certainly testing it in practice. PFI projects meanwhile are a topical subject, most recently attracting the attention of mainstream British television who questioned whether they really do achieve VFM (BBC, 2011). Henjewele et al. found, among other things that: lack of sufficient planning data was the main barrier to VFM consistency; time taken between inter-milestone stages could adversely affect cost; and complexity of the PFI process contributes to variations in client requirements, costs and planned schedules.

In the second paper, Matthias Ehrlich, David Woodward and Robert Tiong focus on how business operations might be affected by changes in international exchange rates and, how such exposure might best be managed. This too is a timely and important subject, especially given the present issues surrounding international markets/exchange rates generally and concern relating to the euro more specifically. The study concludes that special purpose companies engaged in project financing; large-scale international construction companies; and export oriented small- and medium-sized enterprises in Singapore, are all exposed to this particular risk. Perhaps of greater note, that such exposure is not necessarily as well mitigated or managed as it could be.

Paper three is by M. McCord, P.T. Davis, M. Haran, S. McGreal and D. McIlhatton. Their research deals with the issue of accurately estimating property value, for purposes such as secured lending, property taxation and wider financial management of the residential housing stock. It focuses on the utilization of geographically weighted regression to more accurately account for the locational aspect of housing value and demonstrates in a Northern Ireland urban setting that such approaches can improve performance over more traditional, global models, by dealing with the issue of spatial non-stationarity of key value influencing variables.

Paper four by Gerard Hampton, Andrew N. Baldwin and Gary Holt is the second paper in this issue that topically, deals with integration of the public and private sectors (public-private-partnerships (PPP)) in delivering constructed facilities. PPP has attracted its share of academic research (Cheung et al., 2011), but not in this specific financial or geographical (Scottish) context. Hampton et al.’s research focused on stakeholders’ perceived impacts upon delay that can lead to increases in cost, for both PPP and traditional procurement variants. One of their conclusions is that PPP projects fare better than traditionally procured ones during the construction phase and although delays still occur under PPP, these tend to be minor and have less potential to impact project cost and completion outturn.

This issue concludes with a paper by Adnan Enshassi, Faisal Arain and Bassam Tayeh who address the well recognized – but unresolved – problem of construction stakeholder conflict. Their contribution is especially welcome in that it includes the role of subcontractors. Much former research in this field has evolved around the dyadic client/main contractor relationship, so it is interesting to consider the contribution that subcontractors can play in achieving financial aspirations of projects. Enshassi et al., contend amongst other conclusions, that the most significant issues affecting subcontractors’ relationships are related to: assigning work to others; main contractor financial problems; non-adherence to contract terms; and delay in progress payments.

Akin Akintoye, Peadar Davis, Gary Holt