Books & Supplements

Epilog to the 3rd Edition

Roger J. Brown

Author

Roger J. Brown

Title

Epilog to the 3rd Edition

Description

Epilog to the 3rd Edition: Private Real Estate Investment

Category

Books & Supplements

Keywords

Real Estate, philosophy

URL

http://www.notebookarchive.org/2024-06-dugzvab/

DOI

https://notebookarchive.org/2024-06-dugzvab

Date Added

2024-06-30

Date Last Modified

2024-06-30

File Size

10.59 kilobytes

Supplements

Rights

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Private Real Estate Investment
Roger J. Brown
Epilog to the 3rd Edition

I remain happy with the Epilog in the 2nd Edition, reproduced below. This edition is all electronic and all Mathematica so I include it in that form in the interest of consistency. But there are no fancy graphics, no numerical-computerized wizardry in either Epilog, just boring old text.

Time has passed, once again, about a decade since editions. The world is, of course, different. The term “algorithm” now permeates our vocabulary and even society itself. The enterprising reader can combine the decision tree at the end of Chapter 11 with entropy described in Chapter 17, add some insight into Gini Impurity and discover why Amazon knows what book you are looking for before you do.

How much will data science and machine learning affect real estate? There are two answers to that question. One is “Probably not a lot” when thinking about land and buildings per se. The other is “Perhaps plenty” if you view it from the standpoint of what the people who occupy the real estate do. Land and buildings, while perhaps the most dramatic part of real estate, are ancillary to the rights people have to use that real estate. When those rights change the people and their land change with them.

As I write this I recall a conversation I had with someone I have known a long time who I know to be a power broker in the commercial field. Referring to retail he said to me “The internet is finally making a real difference in sales at the brick-and-mortar level...” One can interpret that to mean that the algorithm is superseding the concrete block. Rather than learn what you have just struggled through 17 chapters of, perhaps you should focus on computer programming. There is a good example of this at this link. There the author shows you the code that turns data into decision trees. In the coming revolution knowing that code might be more important than knowing how to compute IRR.

Regardless, your author exhorts you to continue to learn. If real estate has taught me anything, it is that change is constant. Change on the ground changes the use that land is put to. Be alert. Watch that change. If you don’t get it then it will get you.

RJB

July, 2024

Epilog to the 2nd Edition

You have now survived Private Real Estate Investment. Ten years after I wrote the Preface to the first edition much about the world and the author has changed. As I revised and expanded the second edition in the Brave New World of government bailouts on a scale never imagined, I am even more convinced that all of what we consider solid is to be found in real estate. The scale of the numbers may have changed but the computations have not.Technology has moved publishing into a phase as new and different as the era ushered in by Johannes Gutenberg. It is moving so fast you may have this in print or electronic form before the interactive version is available. Check www.mathestate.com for updates on versions, errata and other useful tools that will be developed to enhance this effort.My librarian wife will scold me for not providing an index for the print version. In the Old Media days an index was the hallmark of a quality book. The second edition was written primarily to be an electronic book. Searchable e-books make an index a thing of the past. The print version suffers accordingly but Mathematica does not support the easy creation of an index, for which Wolfram Research and I beg forgiveness.Two themes, important since long before even Gutenberg, dominate the message in this text. They are fundamental principles that every real estate investor, indeed every informed citizen of a free society should always have in mind. The study of real estate in an advanced secular society may be described as the search for the answer to two questions:1. What is it that we value? The answer to this is NOT the bricks and mortar or the land and buildings. The thing we value is the right to use the land. Property rights are the foundation of every other right in society. Without a place where you can exclude others, the right to privacy has no meaning. Without a place to stand and speak where you are undisturbed, the right to free speech is meaningless. One can find analogs between property rights and all other rights in a civil society.2. How do we value these things? In order for the things we value to have meaning we must agree on a method to compare them to other things. That method is unquestionably mathematical. The failure to precisely measure the benefit of ownership of property rights may be found at the base of a host of financial problems at the personal and national level.The conclusion of this book, following most of half a century in the field, naturally comes near the end of my career. It has been a great run. My only regret is that I don’t have another 40 or 50 years to do it again.RJB

January, 2012

Cite this as: Roger J. Brown, "Epilog to the 3rd Edition" from the Notebook Archive (2024), https://notebookarchive.org/2024-06-dugzvab