Editorial: The world is changing – real estate in the 2nd quarter of the 21st century

Abstract

Welcome to the 44th volume of the Journal of Property Investment & Finance (JPIF). It feels like only yesterday when Andrew Baum, the original editor of the journal (previously called the Journal of Valuation), kindly offered me the post of Assistant Editor. Since that day, JPIF has been ever-present in my working life.But so much has changed since that day in 1982. The world has changed beyond recognition, as has the property, or as we now call it, the real estate world.When I qualified as a chartered surveyor in the mid-1980s, property was all about the physical asset. Yes, it was an investment class, but most investors specialised in property and there were only a few erudite fund managers who recognised the role of property in a multi-asset portfolio. But even they were still buying property as direct physical assets.Indeed, I remember one of the first public lectures (admittedly to an audience of valuers) that I ever gave, where I was looking at property returns relative to the other principal asset classes of stocks and shares. I was castigated by many in the audience who saw no point in comparing property to paper assets, and when I started to discuss the different risk profiles of each asset class and how you could look at diversification as a way to mitigate portfolio risk, they simply dismissed the exposition as having nothing to do with being a property professional. As a young, naïve lecturer, I did question whether what I was saying was important to making property investment decisions. But then I spoke with an editorial board member who worked for one of the big London/international firms, and they told me that everything that I had said are things that they discuss with their clients. In other words, the world was starting to change, and the role of real estate within the investment world was expanding.Since then the speed of change has been exponential. The introduction of indices on which to judge performance and hang your advisor hat. Then there was the introduction of indirect property as a route into investment – initially with Property Unit Trusts (PUTs) and latterly with the proliferation of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). More recently we have seen the emergence of a new subsector (or is it just a tool?) under the heading of PropTech (Property Technology – the use of digital technology and software to innovate and streamline the real estate industry). All things that were not even imagined at the start of my career.And now, we have somehow entered the 2nd quarter of the 21st century (wasn't it just yesterday that we were panicking about the world being destroyed by the millennium bug?), and the speed of change has increased. We have the new opportunities (challenges?) of artificial intelligence (AI), tokenised real estate and a new generation of automated valuation models (AVMs), and the list goes on.If you were to look at the table of contents in the first volume of JPIF and look at the papers that we publish today, it is chalk and cheese. Both are/were relevant for the time they were published, and I would argue many were groundbreaking and stepping stones to the new opportunities that we have today. But, there is no denying, they were very different. Market heuristics and local benchmarking have been replaced (or enhanced) by algorithms and numerous international indices. The need for a good knowledge of construction has been superseded by the ability to undertake financial modelling. And who knows what is to come? I have an idea, but there will be changes that we simply can't foresee. And that is why journals such as JPIF are so important. They act like a torch into the darkness of the future to come.Nick FrenchReal Estate Valuation Theurgy, Chichester, UKJanuary 2026