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This real estate insight scrutinises the emerging role of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, in property valuation, advocating for establishing standardised reporting guidelines in AI-enabled property valuation.

Through a conceptual exploration, this piece examines the shift towards AI integration in property valuation and the critical role of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in this transition. It discusses the CANGARU framework for developing inclusive and universally applicable reporting guidelines and the importance of human oversight in validating AI-enabled valuations.

Integrating LLMs into property valuation signifies potential efficiency gains and task automation but also introduces risks related to accuracy, bias, and ethical dilemmas. Standardised reporting guidelines are identified as essential for responsibly harnessing AI’s benefits.

The article underscores the need for the real estate industry to adopt transparent reporting practices, with valuers acting as expert interpreters of AI outputs. Emphasising error reporting in XAI not only aids in understanding AI-generated insights but also builds trust among stakeholders, ensuring AI’s ethical and effective application in property valuation.

This commentary contributes to the discourse on AI’s role in property valuation by focusing on the need for standard reporting guidelines that align with professional standards and legal frameworks. It advocates for a balanced approach to AI integration, where technological advancements complement traditional valuation expertise, ensuring accurate, fair, and transparent property valuations.

The complexity of property valuation, coupled with valuers’ cognitive limitations, makes some degree of error inevitable in valuations. However, given the crucial role that valuations play in the efficient functioning of the economy, there is a need for continuous improvement in the reliability of reported values by enhancing the quality of the decision-making process. The purpose of this paper is to review previous research on valuation decision-making, with particular interest in examining the approaches to improving the quality of valuation decisions and identifying potential areas for further research.

The paper adopts a narrative approach to review 42 research articles that were obtained from Scopus and Web of Science databases and through author citation searches.

Our findings show that existing literature is skewed towards examining the use of technology in the form of decision support systems (DSS), with limited research attention on non-technological (i.e. behavioural) approaches to improving the quality of valuation decisions. We summarise the non-technological approaches and note that much of the discussions on these approaches often appear as recommendations arising from other studies rather than original investigations in their own rights.

We conclude that studies investigating the effectiveness of the non-technological approaches to improving valuation decision-making are lacking, providing various avenues for further research.

This paper presents the first attempt to provide a comprehensive overview of non-technological approaches to improving the quality of valuation decisions.

This viewpoint article explores the transformative capabilities of large language models (LLMs) like the Chat Generative Pre-training Transformer (ChatGPT) within the property valuation industry. It particularly accentuates the pivotal role of prompt engineering in facilitating valuation reporting and advocates for adopting the “Red Book” compliance Chain-of-thought (COT) prompt engineering as a gold standard for generating AI-facilitated valuation reports.

The article offers a high-level examination of the application of LLMs in real estate research, highlighting the essential role of prompt engineering for future advancements in generative AI. It explores the collaborative dynamic between valuers and AI advancements, emphasising the importance of precise instructions and contextual cues in directing LLMs to generate accurate and reproducible valuation outcomes.

Integrating LLMs into property valuation processes paves the way for efficiency improvements and task automation, such as generating reports and drafting contracts. AI-facilitated reports offer unprecedented transparency and elevate client experiences. The fusion of valuer expertise with prompt engineering ensures the reliability and interpretability of valuation reports.

Delineating the types and versions of LLMs used in AI-generated valuation reports encourage the adoption of transparency best practices within the industry. Valuers, as expert prompt engineers, can harness the potential of AI to enhance efficiency, accuracy and transparency in the valuation process, delivering significant benefits to a broad array of stakeholders.

The article elucidates the substantial impact of prompt engineering in leveraging LLMs within the property industry. It underscores the importance of valuers training their unique GPT models, enabling customisation and reproducibility of valuation outputs. The symbiotic relationship between valuers and LLMs is identified as a key driver shaping the future of property valuations.

This paper aims to examine the impact of metaverse experiences on customers’ offline behavioral intentions: How do customers’ visits to a hospitality business’s virtual property in the metaverse affect their intentions to visit the physical property in the real world?

Based on the general learning model and social cognitive theory, this research hypothesizes the positive impact of metaverse experiences on customers’ visit intentions and explores two boundary conditions for positive impact: user–avatar resemblance and servicescape similarity. Two experimental studies were conducted.

Metaverse experience has a significant impact on customers’ visit intentions, and this impact is moderated by user–avatar resemblance and servicescape similarity.

This research addresses the call for empirical studies regarding the effects of metaverse experience on people’s behavioral intentions.

As one of the earliest empirical studies on the marketing effects of the metaverse, this research provides a basis for future metaverse studies in the hospitality field.

With the increased demand for the application of technology in property activities, there is a growing need for property professionals adept in using digital technology. Hence, it is important to assess the competence of academia in equipping property professionals with digital technology skills. This study, therefore, assesses property academics in Australian universities to identify their level of knowledge and use of digital technology applicable to the property industry.

Online questionnaire surveys were administered to 22 out of 110 property academics contacted through the Australia Property Institute (API) database to achieve this aim. The collected data were analysed using mean score ranking and ANOVA.

The study found that apart from databases and analytics platforms such as Corelogic RP data, price finder and industry-based software such as the Microsoft Office suite and ARGUS software, the academics were not knowledgeable in most identified and sampled proptech tools. Similarly, most proptech tools were not used or taught to the students. It was also found that early career academics (below five years in academia) were the most knowledgeable group about the proptech tools.

Relying on the API database to contact property academics potentially excludes the position of property academics who may not be affiliated or have contacts with API, hence, the findings of this study should be generalised with caution.

The study bears huge implications for the property education sector and industry in Australia; a low knowledge and use of nascent tools such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, drones, fintech, which have received intense interest, reveals some level of skill gap of students who pass through that system and may need to be upskilled by employers to meet the current day demand.

In response to the clamour for technology-inclined property professionals, this paper presents itself as the first to assess the knowledge levels and application of digital technology by property academics.

Homeownership for younger generations is exacerbated by the deterioration in affordability worldwide. As a result, the role of parental support in facilitating homeownership requires attention. This study aims to assess the influence of parental wealth and housing tenure as support mechanisms to facilitate homeownership for their children.

This study uses data from a representative survey of the New Zealand population.

Parents who are homeowners tend to offer more financial support to their children than those who rent. Additionally, the financial support increases when parents have investment housing as well. The results further reveal differences in financial support when considering one-child and multi-child families. The intergenerational transmission of wealth inequality appears to be more noticeable in multi-child families, where parental housing tenure plays a dominant role in determining the level of financial support provided to offspring.

The insights gained serve as a basis for refining housing policies to better account for these family transfers and promote equitable access to homeownership.

This paper addresses the growing fragmentation between traditional and digital service innovation (DSI) research and offers a unifying metatheoretical framework.

Grounded in service-dominant (S-D) logic's service ecosystems perspective, this study builds on an institutional and systemic, rather than product-centric and linear, conceptualization of value creation to offer a unifying framework for (digital) service innovation that applies to both physical and digital service provisions.

This paper questions the commonly perpetuated idea that DSI fundamentally changes the nature of innovation. Instead, it highlights resource liquification—the decoupling of information from the technologies that store, transmit, or process this information—as a distinguishing characteristic of DSI. Liquification, however, does not affect the relational and institutional nature of service innovation, which is always characterized by (1) the emergence of novel outcomes, (2) distributed governance and (3) symbiotic design. Instead, liquification makes these three characteristics more salient.

In presenting a cohesive service innovation framework, this study underscores that all innovation processes are rooted in combinatorial evolution. Here, service-providing actors (re)combine technologies (or more generally, institutions) to adapt their value cocreation practices. This research demonstrates that such (re)combinations exhibit emergence, distributed governance and symbiotic design. While these characteristics may initially seem novel and unique to DSI, it reveals that their fundamental mechanisms are not limited to digital service ecosystems. They are, in fact, integral to service innovation across virtual, physical and blended contexts. The study highlights the importance of exercising caution in assuming that the emergence of novel technologies, including digital technologies, necessitates a concurrent rethinking of the fundamental processes of service innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of beneficial externality generated by the World Heritage List (WHL) on residential property values in order to offer new insights into heritage discourses.

The study uses the hedonic price model to estimate empirically the difference in prices for residential properties located in the Old Rauma World Heritage. The study uses residential sales transaction data from the City of Rauma from January 2005 to September 2012 drawn from an online database called KVKL Hintaseurantapalvelu managed by the Central Federation of Finnish Real Estate Agencies.

The research results indicate a positive, but insignificant, relationship between the property sale prices (euros/sqm) and heritage designation. However, the total sale prices are higher in Old Rauma as the properties are significantly larger in Old Rauma compared to other properties in Rauma.

Studies in heritage economics have assessed the influence of the property market on heritage listing and designation at either the national level, the local level or a mix of national/local levels. This paper contributes to the literature by analysing the impact of a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) world heritage designation on residential property values. UNESCO is the leading global institution which deals with the protection of heritage sites that transcend national and local boundaries.

International entrepreneurship and marketing research reports the impact of effectual decision-making logic on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) international performance. How the effectual logic of decision-making enhances the overall performance of SMEs in international business-to-business markets remains a puzzle in the field. The purpose of this study is to investigate the concept of networking capability as an important SME capability translating effectual decision-making into international performance.

The authors examine the model presented in this study using quantitative data from 153 founders or managers in charge of international business at SMEs throughout New Zealand. The authors also used 142 open-ended responses to provide post hoc exploratory analysis.

The findings of this study suggest that networking capability is a mechanism through which the logic of decision-making enhances the international performance of SMEs.

This study bridges between international marketing and entrepreneurship by investigating how the networking capability of internationalizing SMEs translates their founders’/managers’ effectual logic into a successful performance in international business-to-business markets.

The purpose of this study is to examine the cost of the introduction of independent audit inspections in New Zealand.

The research is conducted using audit fee data from New Zealand and examines the overall impact of the reforms on the cost imposed on auditees.

The findings show that there was no general increase in audit fees but a significant increase in audit fees for small listed companies compared to audit fees for unlisted companies and large listed companies.

The practical implications of this study suggest that the introduction of independent inspections led to increased costs for some clients, particularly smaller listed companies, and that audit firms were able to pass on these costs to their clients. These results have important implications for policymakers and auditors alike.

This study provides new insights into the cost of the introduction of independent audit inspections, which have been the subject of ongoing criticisms and recommendations for improvement.