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Real Estate Investment: Plan Your Search

How to search for and find information on real estate investment

What is real estate investment research?

 

Real estate investment is a largely quantitative process, and as such your Excel spreadsheet will be as important to your studies as any book.

Despite this, real estate investment requires familiarity with a variety of information sources: from market, demographic and industry data to professional reports and government publications. In addition to this, you'll use books for theory, news articles for current trends and journal articles to find case studies and developing techniques in academia.

The sample search below will show you how to construct a search from an assignment question. We'll then take this search and look for information on the Search for Information page. 

Sample assignment topic

 

Sydney skyline at night image

Kantona, W. [@wimkantona]. (2015). [Sydney skyline at night] [Stock Image]. Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/photos/bridge-sydneyharbour-sydney-965076/

Discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with the implementation of strategic asset management within an organisation.

Answer the three following questions within an essay structure:

1. Why should an organisation adopt an asset management approach?

2. What challenges would they face with implementation?

3. How could such challenges be addressed?

Identify your key concepts

 

Before you begin searching, it's a good idea to identify the main ideas (or keywords) in your assignment question. 

Our sample question asks us to discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with implementation of strategic asset management within an organisation.

The question has additional elements, but the main three might be:

  • strategic asset management (keyword 1)
  • the organisation it is being applied to (keyword 2)
  • and finally the implementation of strategic asset management to the organisation (keyword 3)
Keyword 1 Keyword 2 Keyword 3

strategic asset management

organisation

implementation

Brainstorm keywords and synonyms

 

Once you have your main keywords you can use them to map out some similar or related terms to search with. Google, Wikipedia and (where permitted) GenAI products like Microsoft Copilot are good places to learn more about the background to your topic and help you discover similar and related terms.

Once you have your similar and related terms, you can add them to your list of primary keywords:

 

strategic asset management organisation implementation

SAM

asset management

physical asset management

organization

corporation

company

property

real estate


 

framework

challenges

opportunities

 
  • For strategic asset management we've come up with terms like SAM and physical asset management
  • For organisation we've come up with terms like corporation and company, as well as more specific terms related to our study area like real estate and property.
  • For implementation we've added terms like framework, as well as other words from the assessment question that are not equivalent to implementation but can be substituted to discover other aspects of the assessment question, like challenges and opportunities

Now that we have these similar and related terms we can use them in searches to find additional information our primary keywords could not.

Remember: you do not need to use all three keywords in every search. Some searches could be formed just by using strategic asset management and implementation together, or strategic asset management and organisation together

Build your search

 

When searching, it's best to start simple. For our topic that might be just strategic asset management implementation or strategic asset management property

Again, you don't need to use all three keywords at once when searching. Try swapping in different combinations from columns 1, 2 and 3 until you feel you have enough material. 

If you don't find much, you can try Boolean Operators. Boolean Operators can be used to search for all possible combinations of your search at once. The idea behind this is to find more material, and also to save you time in having to run many different searches.

Boolean searches for our topic

 
  • Use OR to add similar and related terms into your search
  • Use parentheses ( ) to group your related terms together, otherwise the search often won't work

("strategic asset management" OR SAM)

  • If you have keywords that are two words or longer enclose them in double quotes, eg: "real estate"
  • Use an asterisk * to search for words that end in different permutations. Eg: opportunit* for opportunity or opportunities
  • Then, combine OR searches together using the operator AND:

("strategic asset management" OR SAM) AND (organisation OR organization OR company OR corporation OR "real estate" OR property) AND (implementation OR framework OR challenge OR opportunit*)

To see how these searches can be used to find material in the Library, see the Search for Information page: