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The real estate industry is an e‐commerce anomaly. Although the overall growth of ecommerce is driven by the business‐to‐business sector, the majority of real estate e‐commerce is derived from its retail‐oriented residential sector. This study examines the structure of residential and commercial real estate websites, with the goal of determining whether some patterns of content might increase the quality and quantity of information available to buyers and sellers thereby contributing to the disparity between residential and commercial real estate e‐commerce growth. The results of the research show residential real estate websites offer richer informational content than commercial real estate websites. No significant differences are found for the user friendliness and functionality (ie ancillary services) provided by residential and commercial real estate websites.

Commercial real estate is a highly specific asset: heterogeneous, indivisible and with less information transparency than most other commonly held investment assets. These attributes encourage the use of intermediaries during asset acquisition and disposal. However, there are few attempts to explain the use of different brokerage models (with differing costs) in different markets. This study aims to address this gap.

The study analyses 9,338 real estate transactions in London and New York City from 2001 to 2011. Data are provided by Real Capital Analytics and cover over $450 billion of investments in this period. Brokerage trends in the two cities are compared and probit regressions are used to test whether the decision to transact with broker representation varies with investor or asset characteristics.

Results indicate greater use of brokerage in London, especially by purchasers. This persists when data are disaggregated by sector, time or investor type, pointing to the role of local market culture and institutions in shaping brokerage models and transaction costs. Within each city, the nature of the investors involved seems to be a more significant influence on broker use than the characteristics of the assets being traded.

Brokerage costs are the single largest non-tax charge to an investor when trading commercial real estate, yet there is little research in this area. This study examines the role of brokers and provides empirical evidence on factors that influence the use and mode of brokerage in two major investment destinations.

The aim of this study is to investigate the factors influencing the financial performance of the real estate brokerage (REB) industry in Iran.

The authors use two surveys concerning REB firms from provinces of Iran which were collected by the Statistical Centre of Iran in 2003 and 2011. The authors apply the pooled ordinary least squares and panel fixed-effects regressions to estimate the relationships between the explanatory variables and performance of REB industry.

The results indicate that in provinces where REB firms invest more in residential properties, vehicles, computers and business software, REB firms are more active in residential and non-residential property sales, and rent transactions have higher levels of financial performance. In addition, the results show that in provinces where REB firms invest more in non-residential properties and office furniture, REB industry has lower levels of financial performance. The authors also find that Iranian REB industry has significantly benefited from international economic and financial sanctions.

In terms of managerial implications, the authors findings potentially serve as guidance for Iranian REB firms to allocate resources and adjust their strategy to enhance their financial performance.

Previous studies have typically been conducted in countries where REB firms mainly operate as intermediaries in transactions between property buyers and sellers, whereas in Iran, REB firms not only provide services to their clients but also are very active speculators in the property market. Furthermore, while there have been many studies that have investigated the various determinants of performance and efficiency of REB industry in developed economies, there is scant literature around this topic for Middle Eastern countries.

Franchising has been present in the residential real estate brokerage market for many years. Today, nearly one of every five firms in this sector is organized as a franchise and one of every three agents works for an affiliated organization. Despite this high incidence of franchising, no current study has addressed how the decision to franchise impacts productive efficiency levels for these firms. The current paper measures the productive efficiency levels of real estate brokerage firms by employing data envelopment analysis (DEA). DEA was used to estimate overall, allocative, technical, pure technical, and scale efficiency levels for a set of franchised and non‐franchised firms gathered by the National Association of Realtors. The results suggest that firms in general are productively inefficient. Franchised firms were found to be more efficient in allocating resources, while non‐franchised firms were shown to be more scale and technically efficient.

The purpose of this article is to describe and analyze the occupational life cycle of Swedish real estate brokers.

Voluntary turnover among real estate brokers could lead to occupational turnover and/or employee turnover and has been described as problematic by both practitioners and researchers alike. Most previous studies focusing on this issue have explored connections between real estate brokers' personality, economic and market conditions and turnover. Employee turnover involves shifting jobs within the profession (real estate brokerage), whereas occupational turnover concerns movement to a job not related to the real estate brokerage profession. Both perspectives on turnover are however lacking data about the average time spent as a broker. This study fills this gap by exploring real estate brokers' life cycle through data analysis using a cohort study consisting of a sample of 5,304 real estate brokers registered and/or deregistered over a ten-year period from 2010 to 2019.

The analysis show that the decline is almost linear, resulting in 50% of the newly registered real estate brokers remain in the occupation eight years after registration. These findings are not in line with previous assumptions as the real estate brokers' life cycle is substantially longer. The results also reveal that there are differences in life cycles due to gender and year of registration.

The analysis of longitudinal, aggregated data on the life cycle of real estate brokers is highly relevant as it serves as a point of reference for future longitudinal studies analyzing the motives for leaving the occupation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether real estate companies manipulate their earnings through the brokerage fee across ownership expropriation or not.

This study considers Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange listed real estate firms to investigate how the brokerage fee in the real estate industry might affect the earnings management of firms across its ownership expropriation. Using annual report data, the authors investigate the associations over a panel for the period 2008−2012. Robust panel regression is used to divulge the probability values with reference by probit regression.

Overall, the results show that high brokerage fees would drive more events of earnings management and that, generally, the ownership concentration among Malaysian real estate firms significantly affects the earnings management of the firms.

This study shows that firm profitability and brokerage fees enhance the probability of firm’s earnings management. A low brokerage fee would reflect low revenue to the company. Therefore, management would opt to manipulate earnings in order to overstate earnings, which garners more interest from investors.

Real estate values in Malaysia have climbed steadily over the years due to a combination of reasons giving companies a higher brokerage fee. Earnings management has become a big issue for property investors. The study demonstrates the relationship between earnings management and brokerage fee across ownership expropriation which can be considered by shareholders in their own strategic planning and investors in their own investing.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how scale and scope of operations, firm age, and the choice to join a franchise formula influences brokerage firms' efficiency.

Four‐year data of 1,282 Dutch real estate brokerage firms is used to compute a relative efficiency measure for all firms. Consecutively, variation in this efficiency measure is explained from the firm and market characteristics.

The results show that scale and scope have a non‐linear, U‐shaped, relationship with efficiency. A reversed U‐shaped relationship is found between age and efficiency. Finally, being a member of a franchise does not necessarily lead to improved efficiency, but it depends on the franchise formula terms used.

Based on these results, managers of real estate brokerage firms are able to reconsider their own organizational design choices.

Compared to prior studies, this study uses data from multiple years. Further, the analysis also incorporates non‐linear effects of scale, scope and age on efficiency. Finally, prior research has only compared efficiency of franchise versus independent firms. This study shows that benefits of a franchise depend on the contract terms.

This paper aims to discuss unethical behaviors that small real estate agencies encounter in real estate brokerage practices, the factors that give rise to a trust issue and the potential of legal arrangements for offering a solution. Small real estate agencies, almost the only actor in the real estate brokerage industry until the late twentieth century, still strive to survive despite the globalized market, large corporations increasingly dominating the market, the increasing informality and the real estate portals offering certain brokerage services online. While all these developments put pressure on small real estate agencies, the industry’s unethical behaviors diminish their reliability. Despite the efforts to overcome this issue through legal arrangements, the extent to which these regulations will be successful is still a matter of intense debate.

In total, 85 small real estate agencies operating in Istanbul, Turkey, were posed semi-structured open-ended questions and asked to provide an opinion about the unethical behaviors they face and the potential of a legal arrangement to solve those problems. In the second stage, three focus group interviews were held with representatives from large real estate brokerage companies to make a comparison and they were also posed similar questions. The answers were evaluated using content analysis.

It was found that the unethical behaviors in the real estate industry could mainly be evaluated in two categories, i.e. those stemming from structural problems of the industry and those stemming from problems related to service delivery and that a legal arrangement could only solve the first category.

The research is limited to small real estate agencies that operate in Istanbul, the heart of the Turkish economy and the biggest city of the country where intensive efforts are spent to integrate into the global order.

It is considered that categorization of the causes of problems encountered by the numerous small real estate agencies that struggle to survive in the market and an analysis of the root causes of unethical behaviors in the industry and a discussion on potential solutions that may be brought bylaws will contribute to the literature.

This paper aims at examining the emergence of the current structure of the real estate agency businesses in Beijing in the age of information technology.

The study utilises the analytical framework developed under the Grounded Theory model by coding the interview results with six major real estate agencies in Beijing.

The model explains the metamorphosis development of a new sector of service agents in the society which itself is undergoing colossal changes in the socio‐economic system. The analysis shows that the impact of information technology does not pose a threat to these agents in Beijing in various circles, but works to increase the competitive advantages inducing more collaboration and market innovations.

The research is limited to the city of Beijing only and generalisation of the conclusion from the analysis needs to be qualified carefully for other cities in China, or even other countries.

The advent of information technology, especially in the last decade has set the momentum for changes in various sectors of our society. However, the impact is not felt evenly on each of these sectors in the society. The service industry is a typical example where a wide spectrum of sub‐sectors exists, ranging from close personal services such as hairdressing to information selling. The degree of impact from the new era of information revolution varies with the nature of each sub‐sector.

The purpose of this paper is to examine internet search query data provided by “Google Trends”, with respect to its ability to serve as a sentiment indicator and improve commercial real estate forecasting models for transactions and price indices.

This paper examines internet search query data provided by “Google Trends”, with respect to its ability to serve as a sentiment indicator and improve commercial real estate forecasting models for transactions and price indices.

The empirical results show that all models augmented with Google data, combining both macro and search data, significantly outperform baseline models which abandon internet search data. Models based on Google data alone, outperform the baseline models in all cases. The models achieve a reduction over the baseline models of the mean squared forecasting error for transactions and prices of up to 35 and 54 per cent, respectively.

The results suggest that Google data can serve as an early market indicator. The findings of this study suggest that the inclusion of Google search data in forecasting models can improve forecast accuracy significantly. This implies that commercial real estate forecasters should consider incorporating this free and timely data set into their market forecasts or when performing plausibility checks for future investment decisions.

This is the first paper applying Google search query data to the commercial real estate sector.