Property Development: Agency Theory – What does agency ‘theory’ help you understand within the context of real estate development? How might you illustrate this understanding through a case study of a development project?

Development projects are the primary means of creating capital assets in the form of infrastructure and/or buildings. Development is a complex process that involves a number of discrete stages, multiple stakeholders, regulatory procedures and financial models. The Real Estate Development

module has a focus on agency theory as a means of understanding these relationships and their impact on the development process. Practitioners (Miles, et al., 2015 and Poorvu, 2008) comment on the benefits of understanding how to manage these stakeholders as agents within the development process. While academics have developed models to understand these role-based relationships (Adams & Tiesdell, 2013) and their implications on the real estate development process

(de Magalhaes, 2002).

What does agency ‘theory’ help you understand within the context of real estate development? How might you illustrate this understanding through a case study of a development project?

References

Adams, D and Tiesdell, S (2013) Shaping Places: Urban Planning, Design and Development.

London: Routledge.

De Magalhaes, CS (2002) Social agents, the provision of buildings and property booms: The case

of Sao Paulo. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23(3): 445–463.

Miles, ME, Netherton, LM, and Schmitz, A (2015) Real Estate Development: Principles and Process.

5
th ed. USA: Urban Land Institute.

Poorvu, WJ (2008) Creating and Growing Real Estate Wealth. Upper Saddle River: FT Press.

Coursework notes

Please note that you should engage critically and actively with the literature on agency theory based

on your initial position statement or question regarding agency theory as a means of exploring or analysing real estate development. One approach would be to use a development project with which you are familiar as your case study.

This assignment is an essay of a maximum of 2,200 words. This is will be 90% of the final mark for this module.

Marks (see attached marking scheme)

Introduction and problem statement: 20

Discussion and analysis: 50

Conclusion: 20

Overall: 10

Body of work is : 2,300 word no more than 2500 max.

Mark Scheme will be attached.

I will try to find examples of previous works.