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Abstract
Interest in sustainable real estate has grown since 2009 when the American Real Estate Society launched its open access Journal of Sustainable Real Estate. Using this as a catalyst, we abstracted and analyzed 265 articles published in the nine other journals in the ARES/IRES sustainable real estate space, documenting the evolution of sustainable property research for research topic, geography, methods, and property types. From an article count, the most numerous types of studies in this corpus are from North America, using regression analysis or another quantitative technique to evaluate residential property. Popular research topics of late were the sustainable/green category, building efficiency/operations, negative proximity influence and urban form. Dynamic research topics that are consistently of interest over the past ten years are climate change and flood, earthquake, hurricane risk. Green retrofitting of buildings and green development were popular over the past five years. Regression analysis using citations as the dependent variable revealed that variables positively associated with more citations are green certification, survey research, theory building, and JRER. On the negative side, Asian markets, case study, financial and economic analysis, other research methods, building operating efficiency, and other property types are less likely to be cited.
Notes
1 In addition to The Journal of Sustainable Real Estate (JOSRE), the American Real Estate Society (ARES) also publishes the flagship Journal of Real Estate Research (JRER), Journal of Real Estate Portfolio Management (JREPM), Journal of Housing Research (JHR), Journal of Real Estate Literature (JREL), and the Journal of Real Estate Practice and Education (JREPE). Several sister organizations in the International Real Estate Society (IRES) family also publish the Journal of European Real Estate Research (JERER), International Real Estate Review (IRER -from Asia), Pacific Rim Real Estate Research (PRRER), and the Journal of African Real Estate Research (JARER).
2 CIT is the dependent variable and includes total citations since the study period began in 2009; Citations/year, which is the total divided by the number of years the study has been out; and log of citations/year. For example, if a study had 20 citations total, and was published in 2018 (5 years ago) it would have 10 citations per year. Alternatively, if a study had 10 citations total, and was published in 2013 (10 years ago) it would have 1 citation per year.
3 RETYPE includes the mutually exclusive categories of residential buildings. office buildings, retail/commercial structures, other property (industrial and institutional -schools) and land and community development. The generic term “buildings” was an early artifact of sustainable research, and as can be seen in , largely fell out of fashion after about two years as more precise research questions were addressed by the literature. Portfolios in this context means securitized property ownership, i.e., collective not individual properties as the unit of analysis.
4 Unfortunately, we could not test open access because there was not enough variation in the sample. Nearly all these journals offer some form of open access.
5 We also ran a model with the log of total citations as the dependent variable. The same variables were statistically significant, but the R-Squared results there were slightly lower, so we use this version.
6 With the exception of number of authors, the statistical results for this weaker group are only significant at p <.15.
7 The African finding is only significant at a p <.15 level of confidence.