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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the pandemic affects tenants’ response to their lease obligations. This paper commences with examining the adopted tenant selection criteria during the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, this paper statistically tests if there is a relationship between selection criteria and response on whether the pandemic has effects or not. Then, this paper investigates the specific areas of impact on tenants’ ability to adequately keep to lease agreements in the Nigerian rental market. Finally, this paper proceeds to confirm if there is a relationship between selection criteria and the aspects of tenants’ deficiencies in rental obligations because of COVID-19.

Survey data, backed with interviews, is elicited from practicing estate surveyors and valuers and licensed property managers in Lagos, the largest property market in Nigeria and sub-Sahara Africa. Policy solutions and implications were solicited from personnel at the ministry of housing and senior professionals in the property sector. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, factor analysis and computer-aided qualitative data analysis, Atlas.ti.

Tenant’s health status is now accorded a priority together with others. Numbers of tenants are challenged with keeping to the prompt-rent-payment rule. Other areas of slight breaches included livestock rearing, subletting, alteration and repair covenants. Except for tenant reputation and tenant family size, there was no significant relationship between tenant’s health status consideration and the COVID-19 effect on tenant non-compliance with lease obligation. Tenants’ non-compliance with tenancy obligations has a connection with the tenants’ affordability, reputation, ability to sign an undertaking and health conditions during the pandemic. This paper recommends rental housing policy review.

It is recommended that the rental policy should be reviewed to give room for rental allowance or palliatives, private rental market regulation, exploration of the national housing fund and, if possible, social housing adoption policy in Nigeria.

This paper draws policymakers’ attention to the need to prepare for the future safety net that caters to citizenry welfare in challenging times.

This paper aims to investigate the role of relational governance in innovation platform development, specifically investigating the context of living labs.

Two longitudinal case studies are presented, derived from auto-ethnographic narratives, qualitative interviews and secondary documents, which cover the critical stages in the development of each living lab.

Empirical insights demonstrate the relevance of coordination activities based on joint planning and activities to support innovation platform development across different stages. The governance role of research actors as platform activators is also identified.

The paper offers a useful perspective for identifying collective goals between living lab actors and aligning joint activities across different stages of living lab development.

The case provides insights into the challenges and opportunities for collaboration between academia, industry and users to support sustainable construction innovation.

A relational governance mode is identified, going beyond top down or bottom up approaches, which contributes a new understanding of how collective goals align within a relational space.

The authors investigate how prices of condominiums are affected by the size of the tenant-owner associations that they belong to.

The authors use data of sold apartments in the Swedish municipality Malmö 2013–2018 and estimate hedonic price regressions. The authors also perform semi-structured interviews with three senior professionals in real estate companies.

The authors find significantly negative relationships between the prices of condominiums and the size of tenant-owner associations. Also, regression results indicate that associations should be no smaller than 6–10 apartments. The interviews support that associations should not be too small or too big. The lower and upper limit was suggested by the respondents to 40–50 and 80–150 apartments, respectively. In these ranges, economies of scale can be achieved, and residents will not lose the sense of community and responsibility.

The authors do not prove causality. Smaller associations may have relatively exclusive common amenities, about which we lack data. The same relationships may not exist in different market conditions.

The authors are not aware of previous studies with the same research question. The size of tenant-owner associations may affect the price through different channels. First, several of the banks in Sweden do not always grant mortgages for condominiums that belong to small associations. Second, larger associations may have better economies of scale and more efficient property management. Third, homeowners may prefer smaller tenant-owned associations, because they may feel less anonymous and provide more influence on common amenities.

The aim of this paper is to introduce a framework that helps to identify strategic themes on which real estate investors form their strategies. A holistic approach to strategic management in real estate management has enjoyed popularity in corporate real estate research, while similar research has been lacking from the investor-based real estate management.

The research design consists of two main parts: 1) formulating propositions based on existing literature and 2) attempting to validate the propositions through a qualitative interview study with major real estate owners in Finland.

The main finding is that the current real estate investors reflect the transient nature of competitive advantages and assess their strategies accordingly. The companies consider the traditional profitability and revenue growth aspects of their business but also a more long-term future growth dimension. As an outcome, the investors base their strategies on eight strategic themes which are “Innovation”, “ESG”, “Marketing and sales”, “Financial management”, “Leasing management and tenant satisfaction”, “Competitive environment and portfolio management”, “Outsourcing and strategic partnerships” and “Cost and operation optimization”.

This paper opens opportunities for future research concerning different strategies in real estate investment business and their impacts.

The presented framework provides support for real estate investors to create real estate management strategy or to evaluate their current strategy and to recognize operational actions and decisions that are relevant for their strategy.

This paper provides an extension to corporate real estate (CRE) literature by showing that the CRE theories are adaptable to real estate investment and provide value for their strategic management. This paper also contributes to real estate investment literature by providing a well-founded and empirically contested strategic management framework, the IREM framework, for identifying strategic themes on which real estate investors form their strategies.

Technology parks (TPs) are used as a tool to improve economic outlook of the region through innovation generation. This study aims to evaluate the perception of tenants of TPs to determine the gap in the expectation and identify types of firms preferring to locate in a TP.

This is the first study in Pakistan to collect data about perceived benefits of TPs in Pakistan from the decision-makers of 110 tenant firms. The cluster analysis and lift ratios are used to draw statistical inferences.

The firms can be classified into three clusters – commercial-orientation firms, science and technology-oriented firms and young tech firms – with distinct needs for survival and growth in a TP. Moreover, TPs should not just be treated as property projects for providing support services, also knowledge sharing, training and development opportunities and proximity to hubs of knowledge and markets is vital to attract a variety of industry.

Academia and policymakers have been equally interested in the potential impacts of these innovation hubs. However, there have been lack of empirical evidence on how and what to offer the incumbents of these TPs. The government of Pakistan is trying to build more TPs for promoting business activities under CPEC. Therefore, it is extremely important to determine the needs of tenants of TPs for successful utilization of huge amount of public money to be invested in TPs.

In the Global North, affordable housing has evolved and thrived, and it is now gaining traction in the Global South, where governments have been vocal supporters of the concept. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the important criteria for selecting affordable housing units in Ghana.

A quantitative research approach was used, and a survey was administered to the residents. The data was analysed using both descriptive and inferential statistics. The relative importance index technique was used to rank the important criteria, and the EFA technique was used to create a taxonomy system for the criteria.

The hierarchical ranking of the most significant criteria for selecting affordable housing includes community safety, waste management and access to good-quality education. Furthermore, the important criteria for selecting affordable housing are classified into two groups, namely, “sustainability criteria” and “housing demand and supply and social service provision”.

This study has implications for the real estate industry and construction stakeholders, as this will inform decision-making in terms of the design of affordable housing and the suitability of the location for the development.

These findings provide a baseline to support potential homeowners and tenants in their quest to select affordable housing. Furthermore, these findings will aid future longitudinal research into the indicators or criteria for selecting suitable locations for the development of low- and middle-income housing.

Branched situational judgment tests (BSJTs) are an increasingly common employee selection method, yet there is no theory and very little empirical work explaining the designs and impacts of branching. To encourage additional research on BSJTs, and to provide practitioners with a common language to describe their current and future practices, we sought to develop a theory of BSTJs.

Given the absence of theory on branching, we utilized a ground theory qualitative research design, conducting interviews with 25 BSJT practitioner subject matter experts.

Our final theory consists of three components: (1) a taxonomy of BSJT branching features (contingency, parallelism, convergence, and looping) and options within those features (which vary), (2) a causal theoretical model describing impacts of branching in general on applicant reactions via proximal effects on face validity, and (3) a causal theoretical model describing impacts on applicant reactions among branching designs via proximal effects on consistency of administration and opportunity to perform.

Our work provides the first theoretical foundation on which future confirmatory research in the BSJT domain can be built. It also gives both researchers and practitioners a common language for describing branching features and their options. Finally, it reveals BSJTs as the results of a complex set of interrelated design features, discouraging the oversimplified contrasting of “branching” vs “not branching.”

Buildings and their use is a complex process from design to occupation. Buildings produce huge volumes of data such as building information modelling (BIM), sensor (e.g. from building management systems), occupant and building maintenance data. These data can be spread across multiple disconnected systems in numerous formats, making their combined analysis difficult. The purpose of this paper is to bring these sources of data together, to provide a more complete account of a building and, consequently, a more comprehensive basis for understanding and managing its performance.

Building data from a sample of newly constructed housing units were analysed, several properties were identified for the study and sensors deployed. A sensor agnostic platform for visualising real-time building performance data was developed.

Data sources from both sensor data and qualitative questionnaire were analysed and a matrix of elements affecting building performance in areas such as energy use, comfort use, integration with technology was presented. In addition, a prototype sensor visualisation platform was designed to connect in-use performance data to BIM.

This work presents initial findings from a post occupancy evaluation utilising sensor data. The work attempts to address the issues of BIM in-use scenarios for housing sector. A prototype was developed which can be fully developed and replicated to wider housing projects. The findings can better address how indoor thermal comfort parameters can be used to improve housing stock and even address elements such as machine learning for better buildings.

The purpose of this paper is to increase the knowledge of real estate firms’ capabilities to innovate and, consequently, their capacity to absorb new innovations and benefit from digital technologies in an ecosystem context.

The results are based on 32 interviews with representatives of Swedish real estate owners, real estate owner industry associations and suppliers of digital technology to real estate owners. The data are interpreted using theories on absorptive capacity (i.e. the capacity to absorb new innovations), innovation capabilities and innovation ecosystems.

The real estate owners, technology suppliers and real estate owner industry associations have expanded their innovation capabilities and reshaped their innovation ecosystem by initiating a number of different digitalization activities; for example, the development of new IT systems, digital platforms, services and business models. The absorptive capacity has been improved as the organizations have changed routines and structures related to innovation, and they have taken on new roles related to digitalization and innovation, making them better able to absorb new innovations. Also, this paper identifies several drivers and obstacles to digitalization in the real estate sector.

The increased capabilities related to digitalization can lead to better absorptive capacity on an individual firm level, which can contribute to the overall development of these firms in a longer-term. Also, new capabilities may lead to better absorptive capacity in the real estate sector at large, as firms may benefit from each other’s capabilities through collaboration. The limitations are that this study does not interview tenants or facility management firms and that the findings represent the context of the Swedish real estate market.

This paper investigates innovation capabilities, absorptive capacity and innovation ecosystems of real estate owners, their technology suppliers and real estate owner industry associations on the organizational level and on the sector level, into which there is little previous research. Also, this paper highlights the novelty of digitalization as a phenomenon in the sector.

In order to address the gender divide in technology entrepreneurship, we explore how different national contexts impact policies and policy implementation. We investigate how transnational concerns (macro level) about women’s low participation in (technology) entrepreneurship are translated and implemented amongst actors at the meso level (technology incubators) and understood at the micro level (women tech entrepreneurs).

We adopt gender institutionalism as a theoretical lens to understand what happens in the implementation of gender equality goals in technology entrepreneurship policy. We apply Gains and Lowndes’ (2014) conceptual framework to investigate the gendered character and effects of institutional formation. Four countries represent different levels of gender equality: high (Norway and Sweden), medium (Ireland) and low (Israel). An initial policy document analysis provides the macro level understanding (Heilbrunn et al., 2020). At the meso level, managers of technology business incubators (n = 3–5) in each country were interviewed. At the micro level, 10 female technology entrepreneurs in each country were interviewed. We use an inductive research approach, combined with thematic analysis.

Policies differ across the four countries, ranging from women-centred approaches to gender mainstreaming. Macro level policies are interpreted and implemented in different ways amongst actors at the meso level, who tend to act in line with given national policies. Actors at the micro level often understand gender equality in ways that reflect their national policies. However, women in all four countries share similar struggles with work-life balance and gendered expectations in relation to family responsibilities.

The contribution of our paper is to (1) entrepreneurship theory by applying gendered institutionalism theory to (tech) entrepreneurship, and (2) our findings clearly show that the gendered context matters for policy implementation.