Property Investment Appraisal

When first published in 1988 this book was acclaimed by a number of commentators as being the first critical work about UK property appraisal, previous work was at a basic level concentrating solely on communicating applications in practice so that students and practitioners were able to fulfil the valuation function. Critiques of this practice had previously been confined to academic papers in academic and professional journals. In 1995, the authors published a second edition which developed some of the applications in the text to more complex lease structures and added material on falling income flows. During the previous five years, the property crash of 1990 had caused valuers to re-appraise traditional valuation approaches and some of the developmental work in the previous edition was applied to the changed cash flow expectations caused by the inflexible lease conditions. Since 1995, property investment appraisal has developed and a new edition is required to take note of these developments. The issue of flexible leasing has become one of the major Government policy initiatives within direct property investment and the pricing of the lease contract needs to be addressed. In addition, there has been a steady research output concerning the valuation process rather than methods and this whole area, including the behavioural aspects, should be considered within any modern appraisal text. Some other specific aspects which impact on appraisal are advances in our understanding of risk and the definition and measurement of depreciation.and these also need to be incorporated into a new edition. Despite the second edition being nearly 10 years old, more recent texts appear to have retained a descriptive approach and therefore PIA remains the major critical work outlining the limitations of UK property investment appraisal and valuation whilst still providing readers with enough practical application to help them to undertake appraisals.

Andrew Baum , Professor Land Management, University of Reading; Neil Crosby, also a Professor of Land Management at Reading. Both are well known in authors and researchers in this field - as well as being experienced consultants.