JEL classification: L85 R31 R21 M2 A11 Keywords: Services brokerage FSBO Residential property market Intermediation Market expertise Time pressure a b s t r a c tThis paper aims to explain the determinants of using an estate agent vs. conducting a private sale on the French housing market. A survey that collected 3992 responses relating to completed transactions showed that the decision of whether or not to use an estate agent is not explained by the physical or spatial features of the property or socio-demographic variables, but rather by buyers' and sellers' perceptions, i.e. perceived advantages of brokerage services in terms of expected relevant outcome, efficient process, psychological security and social facilitation. These results may help brokers to differentiate from FSBO in a context of freely-available information.

Profiling of the antibody responses to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) proteins in African populations is scarce. Here, we performed a detailed IgM and IgG epitope mapping study against 487 peptides covering SARS-CoV-2 wild-type structural proteins. A panel of 41 pre-pandemic and 82 COVID-19 RT-PCR confirmed sera from Madagascar and Senegal were used. We found that the main 36 immunodominant linear epitopes identified were (i) similar in both countries, (ii) distributed mainly in the Spike and the Nucleocapsid proteins, (iii) located outside the RBD and NTD regions where most of the reported SARS-CoV-2 variant mutations occur, and (iv) identical to those reported in European, North American, and Asian studies. Within the severe group, antibody levels were inversely correlated with the viral load. This first antibody epitope mapping study performed in patients from two African countries may be helpful to guide rational peptide-based diagnostic assays or vaccine development.

The main purpose of this study is to deeply investigate the determinants of the risk premium for the Central London office market between Q2-2002 and Q3-2015 using a vector autoregression model. We shed new light on the role of central banks in the commercial real estate risk premium. Indeed, since the global financial crisis (GFC), central banks have used unconventional monetary policies, increasing the quantity of money available in the economy and creating structural changes. To pick up the relation between real estate and the money supply, we have constructed a monetary index adapted to the office market. We find that throughout the whole period [2002 to 2015], the vacancy rate, the employment in services, the FTSE 100, the new monetary index and the autoregressive parameter are the main determinants of the historical risk premium. However, this result hides the complex realities of different sub-periods. Finally, we study the structural changes introduced by the monetary policy using a structural VAR modeling and impulse-response functions.

In this paper we examine the applicability of arbitrage theory to real estate. Arbitrage theory has been applied to the valuation of mortgages using partial differential equations, however the implicit assumptions made are problematic when applied to real estate. The latter is a very complex financial asset, and for instance, for the case of default options, one could produce very large errors (even up to 100%) by applying-unwisely-conventional arbitrage theory techniques. The consequences of real estate appraisal are in this paper studied in particular. Because one has encountered similar problems in real options theory as in real estate, the tools developed in that field could probably well adapt to real estate; we provide here an example. Finally the possibility of pricing contingent claims written on properties is discussed.