As symbolized by vacant office buildings, empty shopping malls and abandoned flats in metropolitan areas, the new coronavirus disease 2019 has severely impacted real estate markets. This paper provides a comprehensive literature review of the latest academic insights into how this pandemic has affected the housing, commercial real estate and the mortgage market. Moreover, these findings are linked to comprehensive statistics of each real estate sector’s performance during the crisis. Finally, the paper includes an outlook and discusses possible future developments in each real estate segment.

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The value of land is determined by the locations’ attractiveness and the degree of direct land use regulation. When regulations are binding, e.g., when a restriction on the maximum floor area ratio exists, the land price can be directly expressed as a function of the maximum floor area ratio and local amenities. We show theoretically and empirically how this approach can be used to determine land values from rental prices of residential structures built upon that land. From our empirical results, we derive two main sources for a monocentric structure of land prices. First, the location attractiveness of centrally located dwellings makes land prices more expensive. Second, as the maximum floor area ratio is high in central areas, the regulation works as a multiplier for land prices and inflates prices accordingly. Our model gives insights into the determinants of urban land prices and provides a useful approach for land appraisal in regions where land transactions are scarce.