This paper reviews the literature on price determination in the private and public real estate markets. In particular, it discusses the processes of appraisal smoothing in the private market and of price discovery between the public and the private markets. In real estate markets, the absence of good quality information on price, whether because of lack of trades or confidentiality, has led to the widespread use of appraisals for market tracking and as the basis for performance measurement. Appraisers have to make an optimum assessment of value, based on fundamental variables and market information, including transactions and a market-wide appraisal index. However, transaction prices are a noisy signal and it is the appraiser's role to extract the signal from the noise in an efficient manner. This involves a process of optimal combination of past and current information and leads to appraisal smoothing. Price discovery is the process by which the opinions of market participants about the value of an asset are combined together into a single statistic—its market price. A development of this basic concept is where two markets have a common component of value and the relevant price information is discovered first in one market and then transmitted to the second market. The process of price discovery is considered between the public and private real estate markets.

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In this article we test the urban asset pricing model of Capozza and Sick (1988) and focus on the empirical dimensions of the effects of risk on urban land prices. The effects of systematic and unsystematic risk are distinguished in the model which incorporates the value of the option to convert land to urban uses into the pricing of urban real estate. We find the value of systematic risk in our Canadian urban areas to he negative and highly statistically significant. We find that approximately 2.5 percent of the value of houses in our sample arises from systematic risk. In our sample, unsystematic risk is a larger proportion of total risk than systematic risk. Therefore, most of the effect of total risk may be ascribed to unsystematic risk. The effect of total risk on land prices is illustrated through the irreversibility premia estimates. These premia vary greatly in size and statistical significance. Thus, the effect of unsystematic risk is highly city specific. In the two regions where the irreversibility premia are statistically significant, it accounts for 22 percent and 53 percent of the average housing price; thus, unsystematic risk can be a very important determinant of housing prices. These results highlight the importance of risk in determining urban land prices. The value of the option to convert land to urban uses imparts considerable value to developed land and must be considered when evaluating interurban area price differences.

Many papers have attempted to explain Intelmetropolitan variations in the price of housing using multi-equation models of the metropolitan housing market. This paper uses a long-run equilibrium urban asset model to explain such variations. The model builds upon previous models that introduce uncertainty into the dynamic urban model of land conversion. The empirical results strongly support the asset approach to valuing land in urban areas. Copyright American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.