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Property Economics: Search for Information

How to search for and find information on property economics

Finding property information

 

In the sample assignment, you have to value a business on a retail strip in Sydney.

To do this, you'll need to:

  • Look up properties along that strip and learn more about them 
  • Find the price they sold for and are being rented for
  • Find demographic information on the people that live in the area
  • Use this information to value your property. This process is known as a comparative market analysis. 

The main tool you'll use to value land is a database called Pricefinder APM. A link to it and some additional demographic data can be found below.

Finding books & articles

 

You can supplement the data you find in Pricefinder with literature from the Library catalogue. The Library catalogue will find books and journal articles on your topic. 

Example: 

A search in the Library Catalogue using the search term retail valuation found this book and article.

'Real estate market valuation and analysis' - book from Library catalogue

'The valuation of retail property in Australia' - article result from Library catalogue

 

Tips for searching... 

  • Books

Use general or broad keywords if you can't find books using more specific keywords (e.g. If you can't find a book on "retail property valuation", try "property valuation" instead as this more general search will create more results). 

  • Journal articles

Try restricting your search to peer reviewed articles. Because peer reviewed articles have been double-checked by academic experts, it's easier to be sure that the words and ideas you're using are of sufficient quality for a university assignment. 

Other places to search

 

Using the same searches you've mapped our earlier, try using some of the key resources for property economics (linked below). You'll find the results are different in each database. The picture below is one of the top hits from ProQuest.

'Income capitalisation method and hedonic model' - article from Proquest database

Boolean Searching

Having tested a simple search like retail valuation, we can now try a more complicated search

This search is the one we developed in the Plan Your Search page:

(retail OR property) AND (valuation OR appraisal) AND 
(comparison OR capitalization OR capitalisation OR income)

Again, the intention here is to find more topical material and to bring articles from lower down in the results list up to the top of the search so we can find them more easily

Notice that when you add the extra search terms it changes the top hits in the search?

'The valuation of real estate' - article found with Boolean search in catalogue

Evaluating your results

 

Not all the information you get from a search will be useful. A successful search will show results relevant to your topic. If your results are not relevant go back and try different keywords in your search.

To evaluate whether your source is of sufficient quality use the S.I.F.T Test. Click on the letters of the acronym to learn more: