Review of Property Valuation on Analysis (1995)

Citation

French, N. (1999), "Review of Property Valuation on Analysis (1995)", Journal of Property Investment & Finance, Vol. 17 No. 1, pp. 108-109. https://doi.org/10.1108/jpif.1999.17.1.108.1

Whilst is might appear a little odd reviewing a book which has now been in print for over three years, there are genuine reasons for so doing.

The tardiness of this reviewer is certainly a contributory factor. The internal changes to the journal have also affected the process. But the most telling factor leading to the delay in publishing the review has been the prolonged and continuing inability of this reviewer to track down additional copies of this book.

Supposedly this book is “readily” available via the reciprocal arrangements made between the Australian publishers, The Law Book Company, and the UK‐based Sweet and Maxwell. I know this because I have got so tired of relaying this fact to book dealers throughout the land, only to be told repeatedly that the book is not available.

This administrative impasse is a great shame, because, as the rest of my review will bear witness, this is an excellent text which I wish I could recommend to my students. I would make it a core text, I would base a significant amount of my course around it, but such aspirations will remain unfulfilled as, no matter how much I recommend it, my students can’t get it!

So for all those of you reading this in Australia, you are probably already using this book and my review is therefore out of date and irrelevant. For those of you reading this in the rest of the world outside the UK, you may have experienced similar problems in your home country, or you may be totally unaware of this book’s existence. Alternatively, you may be lucky and find that the Law Book Company’s reciprocal marketing agreements actually work outside these shores. Either way this review is either too late or too remote to be of interest. Lastly, for all you UK readers (and in percentage terms you do form the vast majority of this journal’s readership), this review might make you seek out this book. And if enough of us do so perhaps, just perhaps, the unbridled tide of customer demand might force somebody somewhere to let some of us Brits get copies of this book.

OK, half way through the review and I haven’t actually yet said why I rate this book so highly. The answer is simple. It is intelligently written, extremely well argued and has an academic rigour which is sorely lacking from other recent valuation texts.

Whipple clearly draws a lot of his insights into the valuation process from the American literature and in particular the work of Ratcliff and Graaskamp. Yet the Australian tradition in academic literature has, as far as I can understand, stemmed from UK origins and influences from its RICS. Thus the merging of these two views of real estate, the US finance‐driven socio‐economic framework and the UK legal and professional influences has meant that, in my opinion, this book has the perfect blend.

When I first started my annual sorties to the USA, I quickly realised that we Brits had a lot to learn from our US colleagues and that in return they could benefit from our more interdisciplinarian view of property. As with many things I thought if you took the best from each culture, you would end up with a better solution. In short the answer would be “mid‐Atlantic”.

I was obviously wrong in this view. The answer is clearly Australian!

Whipple’s book divides into three principal areas; economic theory and its application within the valuation process, maths of finance and, finally, practical applications. As a rule these themes flow into each other in order through the text but occasionally, and probably rightly, these areas of exposition blend into one view or one solution. In short it is a book which debates how things should be done, how they are done and why differences do occur. It challenges the reader to think and I find this refreshing in a text of this nature.

My criticisms of the text are minor. The individualism of BASIC programs is, even at the date of publication, erroneous in a world of spreadsheets and macros; similarly in the days of computers and financial calculators, I personally find it odd that selected valuation tables should be included. But in a book of nearly 600 pages such complaints are minor.

The biggest criticism is not of the text, but of the inability to get copies of it. Wake up, publishers. The world is much smaller these days.