Property Finance: An International Approach
| Published date | 04 April 2016 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JPIF-01-2016-0007 |
| Pages | 293-294 |
| Date | 04 April 2016 |
| Author | Nick French |
| Subject Matter | Property management & built environment |
Book review
Property Finance: An International Approach
By Giacomo Morri and Antonio Mazza
The Wiley Finance Series
2014
ISBN 1118764404
Keywords Leverage, Basel accord, Financial vehicles, Loans,
Property finance, Property value
Review DOI 10.1108/JPIF-01-2016-0007
As I get older, I am definitely getting more intransigent and less charitable to the
plethora of the new books that are being published for the real estate shelves. I am not
sure if it is a case of knowing more myself or that textbooks are becoming less rigorous
but, generally, I find that most texts published in the last few years are quite poor. The
pressure on publishers to fill quotas means that I have personally pre-reviewed five or
six texts that I have referred back to the publishers as “publish at your peril”and a year
later they have all appeared to a spurious fanfare of “a new textbook for practitioners
and academics alike”. And, in each case, they have been far away from that accolade.
I have a simple philosophy in my world which is a new book must be better than the
books already available. Most times, this is not true.
However, I mention this to place this new text Property Finance: An International
Approach in context. This is a book that I like and that adds to the literature. The last
good book on this topic was Real Estate Finance edited by Stephen Barter back in 1989.
All subsequent texts have been poor relations and some of them, I will not mention by
name, have been an embarrassment to the real estate profession. I learnt very early on
in my career that to really understand real estate, you need to understand Finance.
I was one of a select group of Chartered Surveyors who was teaching corporate finance
back in the 1990s and I clearly remember being told, by a prominent academic, that
students did not need to know that sort of thing.
Well, they do. And the introduction of Property Finance degrees at the
undergraduate and postgraduate level from the late 1990s onwards, both in the UK
and abroad, is testimony to the synergy that exists between real estate markets and the
capital markets.
And, in this regard, Property Finance: An International Approach is a welcome
addition to the libraries of students, faculty and practitioners alike. The book is well
structured and split into two sections. Part 1 is the standard textbook that go es through
the fundamentals of property financing and the nature of loans and leverage.
This could be a standalone text without Part 2. Part 2 is country specific looking at the
selected jurisdictions of China, England and Wales, France, Germany, India, Italy and
Spain. I am not quite sure why these countries were chosen but I do feel that, given the
failings of the markets in America that the USA should have been part of this list as
well. But that is a comment on an omission not on the content as presented. Overall,
this is a good text and it covers the topics in sufficient depth to provide insight and,
yet, sufficiently well written to provide an overview too.
Journal of Property Investment &
Finance
Vol. 34 No. 3, 2016
pp. 293-294
©Emerald Group Publis hing Limited
1463-578X
293
Book review
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