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The real estate industry has rapidly changed due to technological advances across residential and commercial real estate from the perspective of occupiers, investors, and service providers. Owners and buyers of properties have access to increasing information in the marketplace, including access to residential real estate platforms such as Zillow. Automated appraisals and artificial intelligence (AI) in the mortgage application process speed up home buying. Commercial real estate uses fintech to source deals, perform due diligence, and execute property management requests. This chapter includes a practitioner's view of the current and future information data needs, processes, and point solutions in the evolving technology landscape, including how tools such as ChatGPT apply. It concludes that the real estate fintech revolution has only begun, as data gaps in the real estate market require resolution before yielding better process automation and as the business model of real estate service providers shifts to strategic advisory roles.

Local governments use taxes on future increases in property values to pay for current economic development through tax incremental financing (TIF). TIF is a powerful tax tool used to spur improvements to a designated area. Proponents of TIF argue that it allows local governments to make investments without affecting previously established government and school district programs. Detractors argue that because the TIF designation denies existing overlapping districts (e.g., schools) the benefits of increases in property values, TIF can have a negative impact on a community. Empirical evidence on the economic and fiscal effects of TIF is mixed. This paper describes the potential costs and benefits associated with the use of TIF and then summarizes prior research on outcomes associated with this widely used property tax program.

Every day, our society becomes more complicated, acquiring new features. There are currently several trends in its development, one of which is digitalization. Digitalization of state and municipal administration plays a huge role in the Russian Federation. It contributes to the transformation of state and municipal services into a digital format, increases the quantity and quality of these services for the transition to digital communication of citizens, entrepreneurship, and the state, accelerates the service of citizens, and creates comfortable conditions, which can play a decisive role in developing the Russian Federation. It becomes more functional, convenient, and practical every day. Apparently, there are problems associated with the transformation of the state's activities into a digital format. However, these problems are promptly addressed. One thing is for sure – the development course is set correctly. Digitalization of state and municipal administration is a fairly new regulation sector, which is rapidly developing and requires significant changes in regulatory legal acts to ensure proper security and legal regulation of relations because the value and significance of information increases annually. Digital transformation in the activities of state and municipal bodies makes it possible to establish more trusting communication links with society and increase digital transparency.

Informal settlements are frequently located in hazardous areas with a high risk of natural disasters. Upgrading informal settlements can be difficult due to the time and expense needed to complete the process. This chapter advocates using a management framework of public services in informal settlements. In doing so, it addresses 17 of the 17 UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). The study reviewed the literature to investigate current ways of managing environmental enterprises in informal settlements in South Africa. Thereafter, the challenges of managing public services were explored, and a conceptual framework for managing public services by social enterprises in such communities was developed. The chapter found that environmental enterprises are classified as ‘green spaces’ and infrastructure, water and sanitation services, energy systems, and recycling initiatives. Essential aspects of sustainable community-based facilities management (SCbFM) for managing public services are maintenance, governance, community project management, environment service delivery, service performance, governance, community project management, environment service delivery, service performance, well-being and health and safety, disaster management, and finance. Some of the problems of managing public services in informal settlements include the limited skills of managers, the focus of government on new projects rather than managing existing projects, not choosing the right indicators to measure service performance, and limited guidelines for the health and safety of managers and disaster management. Thus, a new conceptual framework was needed and developed based on the principles of social capital and capability for managing services in informal settlements in South Africa.

Scholars, activists, and policymakers have paid increasing attention to housing instability, especially where eviction is a cause. Housing instability is a dynamic process rather than a discrete catastrophic event, and eviction imposes vulnerability on consumers. Even the threat of it can trigger the onset of a crisis. In this project, we deepen the understanding of eviction by exploring its use in property management practice. We begin by summarizing its definition and causes from a cross-disciplinary and still-evolving literature. We then provide an extended example of how eviction can be used to pursue strategic and financial goals using rental markets in Arkansas as an example. Arkansas is characterized by a quintessentially laissez-faire regulatory environment that imposes few restrictions on property owners. We conclude by posing questions that should be at the forefront of a vulnerability-focused, policy-oriented research agenda on eviction.

The manoeuvring of everyday spaces to nudge the population towards a physically active lifestyle or active living has been the hallmark of the policy modes of instrumental thinking for combating physical inactivity, particularly in urban spaces across the world. Thus, the active promotion of fitness activities by the postcolonial state signifies the centrality of the body in disciplining docile and inactive individuals to produce fit and active citizens. Such a population-based approach has often raised concerns about social and spatial justice and expressions of identity, liberty, and surveillance, even as everyday spaces in cities continue to exhibit elements of colonial governmentality. In the midst of this, the body continues to be central to the ways in which such a population makes sense of being physically active and ‘being healthy’ in their everyday lives. By employing a multi-sited ethnography conducted over a period of 10 months in different public parks in Delhi, the present chapter aims to understand the ways in which fitness activities are performed, produced, and practised in the city. While public parks themselves are a product of colonial urban governmentalities in Delhi, this chapter argues that active bodies engaged in everyday sports in the parks also emerge as the critical site for the bodily inscription of global standards of physical activity. Driven by Western fitness regimes, individuals tend to understand themselves as entrepreneurial selves that can bring to life this imagination of the body ideal even while being engaged in various fitness and leisure activities aimed at being ‘healthy’.

Racism occurs in many ways and varies across countries, evolving and adapting to sociocultural history, as well as contemporary economic, political and technological changes. This chapter discusses the multilevel dimensions of racism and its diverse manifestations across multiracial societies. It examines how different aspects of racism are mediated interpersonally, and embedded in institutions, social structures and processes, that produce and sustain racial inequities in power, resources and lived experiences. Furthermore, this chapter explores the direct and indirect ways racism is expressed in online and offline platforms and details its impacts on various groups based on their intersecting social and cultural identities. Targets of racism are those who primarily bear the adverse effects. However, racism also affects its perpetrators in many ways, including by limiting their social relations and attachments, and by imposing social and economic costs. This chapter thus analyses the many aspects of racism both from targets and perpetrators' perspectives.