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Real Estate Investment: Search for Information

How to search for and find information on real estate investment

Finding real estate information

 

In the sample assignment question you have to research green building techniques and sustainability goals set down by local government.

To do this you'll need to find exemplars of green building techniques, as well as ways of measuring the success of those techniques. 

Finding books & articles

 

A good place to find information is the Library catalogue. Use the Library catalogue to find books and journal articles on your topic. 

For detailed instructions on using the Library catalogue, watch this video:

Example Search: 

A Library Catalogue search for the keywords: sustainable apartment found the following book and article: 

Sustainable retrofits book found in catalogue

Mediation effects of environmental cooperation on the relationship between sustainable design and performance improvement among Chinese apartment developers - article from the Library catalogue

Tips for searching... 

  • Books

Books are good places to get a quick grounding on the areas that sit at the periphery of your expertise, or to see complex topics explored in a thorough and wholistic way.

  • 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. 

Boolean Searching

We can also try out Boolean searching in the catalogue. This search is the one we developed in the Plan Your Search page:

(Sustainability OR "low carbon") 
AND 
(Sydney OR NSW OR Australia) 
AND 
(apartment OR "high density" OR unit)

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

Article found using Boolean search in Library Catalogue

Finding government policy documents

 

To locate government policy documents in Google, try construcing a search like this:

sustainable building policy inurl:nsw.gov.au

sustainable building policy inurl:.gov.au 

Sustainable Property Guide found with in url search in Google

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 C.R.A.P Test. Click on the letters of the acronym to learn more: