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This paper aims to investigate the foreclosure discount for the German residential market in the years from 2008 to 2011.

The determinants of the foreclosure discount are estimated in a hedonic price model. The analysis is based on a unique data set compiled from three different data sources with 135,000 foreclosed properties.

The findings reveal that residential units in foreclosures are sold at a discount of 19 per cent compared to residential units with similar characteristics that are not in foreclosure. Second, a regional pattern can be observed, with discounts being negatively correlated to unemployment risk and liquidity. Third, the model with interaction terms shows that foreclosure discounts are linked to specific property characteristics. Fourth, these object-related risks are typically smaller than regional risks or locational risks.

Given the highly fragmented system of Gutachterausschüsse in Germany, who are responsible for collecting transaction data, we were not able to directly analyze transaction data, but only a proxy for this price information.

The results can be important for financial institutions that are trying to assess the risk of lending for a specific object in a specific location. So far, banks primarily try to assess the default risk of private lenders by analyzing the debtor’s financial position and the quality of the property. The analysis provides insights into which characteristics of a property might imply additional risk, and in which region these risks are biggest.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to analyze the foreclosure discount for the German housing market.

Successful developers need to manage a large number of cooperation partners and find innovative solutions for specific tasks, as each real estate project is somehow unique. Thus, the question arises as to whether intelligent group formation for real estate development calls for more or rather less diverse project groups.

This paper aims to test the impact of group diversity on overall group performance with a unique data set. The authors collected the results of 150 project assignments from real estate executive education students at the IREBS Real Estate Academy from 2010 until 2016.

The authors find that group results were impacted positively for groups with disparity in work experience and ability. Differences in sex and age did not yield any measurable impact, neither positive nor negative.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that the relationship between work group diversity and group performance was tested for real estate educational projects. The authors believe that the results are highly relevant for all university work, for which teams have to cooperate on complex rather than basic assignments and problems. Moreover, they are the first to develop a framework that combines diversity theories with a clear distinction between three diversity concepts.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether urban tourism attractiveness affects young adult migration within Germany. Currently, factors like urban attractiveness, environmental qualities or vicinity to amenities play a more important role for the migration of young adults than in the past. This has highly asymmetric implications for the housing (and commercial real estate) markets in cities with an abundance of urban attractiveness, compared to cities without such attractions.

This analysis focuses on the internal migration of young adults (18-30-year-olds). First, some stylized facts regarding migration patterns are presented by means of descriptive and cluster analyses (k-means methodology) with respect to the net immigration rate for the two years, 2004 and 2014. Second, ordinary least squares-regression analyses are used to estimate the connection between urban tourism attractiveness and migration.

Young adults in Germany predominantly migrate to cities. The authors find typical migration patterns, and the regression results indicate that young adult migration is highly correlated with the indicator measuring urban tourism attractiveness. This means that urban attractions matter for young adults. Finally, the authors also find that housing rents are correlated with urban tourism attractiveness.

Good city planning must not only be concerned with new industrial sites, but also about esthetic neighborhoods and, for example, attractive squares. Moreover, because city structures and urban amenities are both path dependent and expensive to change, it is likely that the winning cities of today will remain winners in the next decade, which is good news for risk-averse investors.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the paper provides the first empirical analysis of the connection between urban tourism attractiveness and the migration of young adults, in the context of German cities.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyse the news coverage and sentiment of real estate-related trends in Germany. Trends are considered as being stable and long-term. If the news coverage and sentiment of trends underlie cyclicity, this could impact investors’ behaviour. For instance, in the case of increased reporting on sustainability issues, investors may be inclined to invest more in sustainable buildings, assuming that this is of growing importance to their clients. Hence, investors could expect higher returns when a trend topic goes viral.

With the help of topic modelling, incorporating seed words partially generated via word embeddings, almost 170,000 newspaper articles published between 1999 and 2019 by a major German real estate news provider are analysed and assigned to real estate-related trends. Through applying a dictionary-based approach, this dataset is then analysed based on whether the tone of the news coverage of a specific trend is subject to change.

The articles concerning urbanisation and globalisation account for the largest shares of reporting. However, the shares are subject to change over time, both in terms of news coverage and sentiment. In particular, the topic of sustainability illustrates a clearly increasing trend with cyclical movements throughout the examined period. Overall, the digitalisation trend has a highly positive connotation within the analysed articles, while regulation displays the most negative sentiment.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first application to explore German real estate newspaper articles regarding the methodologies of word representation and seeded topic modelling. The integration of topic modelling into real estate analysis provides a means through which to extract information in a standardised and replicable way. The methodology can be applied to several further fields like analysing market reports, company statements or social media comments on real estate topics. Finally, this is also the first study to measure the cyclicity of real estate-related trends by means of textual analysis.

To investigate whether additional information of the permanent news flow, especially reporting intensity, can help to increase transparency in housing markets, this study aims to examine the relationship between news coverage or news sentiment and residential real estate prices in Germany at a regional level.

Using methods in the field of natural language processing, in particular word embeddings and dictionary-based sentiment analyses, the authors derive five different sentiment measures from almost 320,000 news articles of two professional German real estate news providers. These sentiment indicators are used as covariates in a first difference fixed effects regression to investigate the relationship between news coverage or news sentiment and residential real estate prices.

The empirical results suggest that the ascertained news-based indicators have a significant positive relationship with residential real estate prices. It appears that the combination of news coverage and news sentiment proves to be a reliable indicator. Furthermore, the extracted sentiment measures lead residential real estate prices up to two quarters. Finally, the explanatory power increases when regressing on prices for condominiums compared with houses, implying that the indicators may rather reflect investor sentiment.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to extract both the news coverage and news sentiment from real estate-related news for regional German housing markets. The approach presented in this study to quantify additional qualitative data from texts is replicable and can be applied to many further research areas on real estate topics.

Germany has a polycentric city structure. This paper aims to reduce complexity of this structure and to find a reliable classification scheme of German housing markets at city level based on 17 relevant market parameters.

This paper uses a two-step clustering algorithm combining k-means with Ward’s method to develop the classification scheme. The clustering process is preceded by a principal component analysis to merely retain the most important dimensions of the market parameters. The robustness of the results is investigated with a bootstrapping method.

It is found that German residential markets can best be segmented into four groups. Geographic contiguity plays a specific role, but is not a main factor. Our bootstrapping analysis identifies the majority of pairwise city relations (88.5%) to be non-random.

A deeper discussion concerning the most relevant market parameters is required. The stability of the clusters is to be re-investigated in the future, as the bootstrapping analysis indicates that some clusters are more homogeneous than others.

The developed classification scheme provides insights into opportunities and risks associated with specific city groups. The findings of this study can be used in portfolio management to reduce unsystematic investment risks and to formulate investment strategies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to offer insights into the German housing markets which applies principal component, cluster and bootstrapping analyses in a sole integrated approach.

The article examines situations of unease during ethnographic fieldwork with migration control agents in Sweden, Denmark and Germany. It shows how these “tests” are both methodologically challenging and analytically valuable, and how they need to be addressed properly. The article concludes a special issue on “passing the test in organisational ethnography”.

The article is based on ethnographic research with migration control agents, carried out by both authors in Denmark and Sweden (Annika) and Germany (Tobias). However, rather than presenting the main results from this research, the article focuses on the tests encountered during the research.

The article has two main findings. First, it provides an open typology of tests. Second, it proposes four ways in which ethnographers could address these tests: acknowledging them methodologically, working through them personally and collectively, unpacking them analytically and preparing others in teaching and peer-feedback.

The article encourages ethnographers to engage reflexively with fieldwork challenges, and provides a framework for doing so.

The article presents contributes to the current debate on organisational ethnography with recommendations of how to engage with tests in ethnographic fieldwork.

In the 1988 film The Accused, a young woman named Sarah Tobias is gang raped on a pinball machine by three men while a crowded bar watches. The rapists cut a deal with the prosecutor. Sarah's outrage at the deal convinces the assistant district attorney to prosecute members of the crowd that cheered on and encouraged the rape. This film shows how Sarah Tobias, a woman with little means and less experience, intuits that according to the law rape victims are incredible witnesses to their own victimization. The film goes on to critique what the “right” kind of witness would be. The Accused, therefore, is also about the relationship between witnessing and testimony, between seeing and the representation of that which was seen. It is about the power and responsibility of being a witness in law – one who sees and credibly attests to the truth of their vision – as it is also about what it means to bear witness to film – what can we know from watching movies.

An overview of the current use of handwritten text recognition (HTR) on archival manuscript material, as provided by the EU H2020 funded Transkribus platform. It explains HTR, demonstrates Transkribus, gives examples of use cases, highlights the affect HTR may have on scholarship, and evidences this turning point of the advanced use of digitised heritage content. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper adopts a case study approach, using the development and delivery of the one openly available HTR platform for manuscript material.

Transkribus has demonstrated that HTR is now a useable technology that can be employed in conjunction with mass digitisation to generate accurate transcripts of archival material. Use cases are demonstrated, and a cooperative model is suggested as a way to ensure sustainability and scaling of the platform. However, funding and resourcing issues are identified.

The paper presents results from projects: further user studies could be undertaken involving interviews, surveys, etc.

Only HTR provided via Transkribus is covered: however, this is the only publicly available platform for HTR on individual collections of historical documents at time of writing and it represents the current state-of-the-art in this field.

The increased access to information contained within historical texts has the potential to be transformational for both institutions and individuals.

This is the first published overview of how HTR is used by a wide archival studies community, reporting and showcasing current application of handwriting technology in the cultural heritage sector.