Despite its rapid development in the last decade, facilities management (FM) stills suffers from an identity crisis as the definition and scope of FM remains a contentious issue. To this end, three fundamental issues are re‐examined in this paper: what FM constitutes; what a facility manager is; and how the FM profession can be enhanced. These issues remain critical as they represent the building blocks of the FM discipline. Without a common platform, the development of FM is likely to be fragmented. An evaluation of the definitions of FM provided in the past suggests that the focus of FM is clearly on the workplace. The key issues confronting FM are the location, type, quantity, quality, content and allocation of the workspace. A professional facilities manager is one who is formally trained and whose main responsibility is the strategic management of the workplace. Three factors are suggested to be important for the development of FM as a professional discipline. They include a clear role and scope of FM in the industry and firm, contribution to the bottom‐line of the firm, and development of specialist knowledge and toolbox for addressing the problems of strategic workplace management. Some potential areas for theoretical developments have been suggested in this paper.

Employing the panel data methodology, we examine the capital structure determinants of 83 property companies quoted in the UK. The empirical test reveals how the debt‐equity structure of the companies is influenced by the various firm‐specific attributes and macro‐economic factors. In particular, the evidence shows that asset structure, business orientation, and the level of involvement in property development are significant determinants of the corporate debt policy of property companies. Financial distress consideration also has a significant influence. In addition, the empirical evidence shows that corporate property managers take into consideration the prevailing market sentiment and borrowing costs when making the debt‐equity choice. Corporate performance and tax burden, however, do not appear to have any significant effect on the capital structure decision of property companies.

The volatility of a stock returns can be decomposed into market and firm-specific volatility, with the former commonly known as systematic risk and the later as idiosyncratic risk. This study examines the relevance of idiosyncratic risk in explaining the monthly cross-sectional returns of REIT stocks. Contrary to the CAPM theory, a significant positive relationship is found between idiosyncratic volatility and the cross-sectional returns. This suggests that firm-specific risk matters in REIT pricing. The regression results further show that once idiosyncratic risk is controlled for in the asset-pricing model, the size and book-to-market equity ratio factors ceased to be significant. The explanatory power of the momentum effect remains robust in the presence of idiosyncratic risk. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009Idiosyncratic risk, Asset pricing, REIT stocks,

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This article examines the price formation process under small numbers competition using data from Singapore land auctions. The theory predicts that bid prices are less than the zero-profit asset value in these first-price sealed-bid auctions. The model also shows that expected sales price increases with the number of bidders both because each bidder has an incentive to offer a higher price and because of a greater likelihood that a high-value bidder is present. The empirical estimates are consistent with auction theory and show that the standard land attributes are reflected in auction prices as expected.This article examines the price formation process under small numbers competition. The neoclassical competitive bid price model envisions an implicit auction in which the highest bidding land use obtains the land and competition among atomistic agents drives profits to zero. The model provides the foundation for modern land use theory and underlies most applied property markets analysis. The framework is easy to apply and capable of predicting how a variety of factors, including risk, affect the market price of land. The question of price formation, however, is subsumed within the competitive zero profit condition and therefore, by construction, the standard bid price model is not designed to evaluate the consequences of situations in which finite numbers of agents interact.The literature has taken several alternative paths to study price formation in real estate markets. One approach focuses on the search and matching aspect of many property markets (particularly the housing market), an extensive line of literature that is growing rapidly. A second approach focuses on the negotiation process often observed in face-to-face real estate market transactions, typically relying on Nash bargaining or similar equilibrium constructs to model price