Can you own a slice of a building? This research deep-dive examines what tokenisation—blockchain-based fractional ownership of real estate—actually delivers, and where it's likely to gain traction first.

Martin explores Andrew Baum's Oxford FoRE report "Tokenisation – The Future of Real Estate Investment?" which objectively examines mechanisms for tokenising single assets, debt, and funds across Europe.

The evidence: • Funds and debt: most viable near-term path—structure and demand already exist • Single assets: sketchy demand, costly intermediate structures, obstacles significant • IPSX and BrickMark: early examples, but mass market for single commercial assets may be some way off

Why it matters: The report warns that focusing solely on single-asset tokenisation could set innovation back years. Funds and debt offer immediate opportunities to establish credibility.

Paper: Tokenisation – The Future of Real Estate Investment? (Oxford FoRE, January 2020)

Disclaimer: The audio and transcript were generated using AI.

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What happens when an entire city goes remote? This research deep-dive uncovers a shocking twist: remote work is actually pushing companies toward premium central locations, not away from them.
Martin explores Olivier Denagiscarde's breakthrough study "Remote Work and the Intracity Dynamics of Office Markets: Evidence from Paris" - a comprehensive analysis of 233 municipalities that challenges everything we thought we knew about remote work's urban impact.
The surprising findings:

✓ Office vacancy surged 2+ percentage points in remote-work areas

✓ Even brand-new, high-quality buildings sitting empty

✓ Investment activity crashed 10% with major price discounts

✓ Local restaurants and services lost 2.5-3% of jobs

✓ Supply side frozen - virtually no conversions or construction changes
The paradox explained:

When companies need half the space, they can afford twice the rent per square foot. This "flight-to-quality" creates winners (premium central districts) and losers (peripheral business parks).
Why this matters globally:

These aren't temporary pandemic effects. The patterns persisting through 2023 reveal persistent structural changes affecting investors, planners, and policymakers worldwide. This research provides the first solid empirical evidence of how remote work reshapes cities from within.
Essential for real estate professionals, urban planners, investors, and anyone curious about the future of work and cities.
Disclaimer: The audio was generated using AI.
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When do retail non-compete agreements help versus hurt market competition?
Camilla Schneier scraped thousands of documents from Chicago's county recorder office and found something unexpected about exclusive dealing contracts in real estate.
These agreements - where retailers tell landlords "don't rent to my competitors" - were overall pro-competitive in Chicago. But Camilla's framework examines when they might flip to anti-competitive.

Key insights:

• Contracts are highly heterogeneous and very local in scope

• Effects depend entirely on context - "aren't always good at every point"

• Different retailers block completely different competitor types
Disclaimer: The audio of the intro and the outro was generated using a text-to-speech model.
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When Zillow exited the iBuying market in 2021, many wondered if instant home sales were fundamentally flawed. In this episode of The Property Pod, guest host Cloé Garnache speaks with So Hye Yoon, economics PhD candidate at Princeton, whose research reveals the real problem wasn't bad algorithms – it was information asymmetry. So Hye proposes revenue-sharing contracts and AI-powered text analysis as solutions that can make iBuying profitable and sustainable.

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Why don't profitable green building investments often don't happen?

Martin Schmalz explores PACE financing with Brian Lancaster (Senior Lecturer, Columbia Business School and University of Oxford) and Cameron LaPoint (Assistant Professor, Yale School of Management).

PACE is a mechanism that makes loan payments run with the property like taxes, solving important problems for green investments. In Florida, PACE loans increased home values 20-25% and cut insurance premiums 50%. Surprisingly, 60% of funding goes to disaster-proofing, not traditional energy efficiency.

Disclaimer: The audio for the intro and the outro were generated using AI.

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How can a simple piece of information about hot water usage lead to unexpected energy savings across an entire building? Join host Martin Schmalz on The Property Pod as he explores fascinating research from economist Harald Mayr at the University of Zurich, who is uncovering the surprising ripple effects of behavioral interventions in energy conservation.

This episode examines the landlord-tenant dilemma - a fundamental challenge where landlords must invest in energy efficiency improvements but tenants receive most of the benefits, causing economically beneficial projects to stall. Harald's field experiment in Swiss rental properties tested whether providing tenants with information about their hot water consumption could reduce energy use. The intervention included usage feedback, modest savings goals, and small lottery prizes for those who met their targets.

While the experiment successfully reduced hot water consumption by 5-6%, something unexpected happened: tenants also significantly reduced their heating energy use - behavior that wasn't even targeted. This spillover effect proved to be the main driver of energy savings, lasting at least a year after the intervention. The findings suggest that when people successfully change one environmental behavior, they develop a self-image as environmentally conscious individuals, which then influences other energy-related behaviors.

Key insights include:

• Why economically beneficial energy efficiency projects often don't happen in rental properties
• How an information campaign about hot water use reduced both hot water and heating consumption
• The psychology behind spillover effects in environmental behavior
• Future research directions on individual metering vs. building-level energy billing

For the real estate sector, this demonstrates how low-cost behavioral interventions can be effective even when financial incentives are minimal, highlighting the importance of information and environmental awareness in driving conservation.

Disclaimer: The audio of the intro and the outro were generated using AI.

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As the world goes toward net-zero targets, a critical question emerges: how do we properly account for carbon emissions across time? Should we treat carbon emitted today the same as carbon emitted 30 years from now?

In this episode of The Property Pod, we explore groundbreaking research from Oxford D.Phil candidate Jimmy Jia, who is revolutionizing how we think about carbon accounting in real estate and finance.

Jia's research tackles a fundamental problem: current carbon accounting systems like Life Cycle Assessment simply add up all emissions from "cradle to grave" without considering the time value of carbon. This creates a massive blind spot when evaluating projects like passive houses, which require higher upfront carbon emissions but deliver significant savings over decades.

Using a real case study of a passive house built at New College Oxford in 2024, Jia demonstrates how financial accounting principles—including discount rates and time-value concepts—can be applied to carbon flows. The result? A new framework that aligns carbon accounting with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

The implications are profound: for the first time, investors and policymakers could have compatible tools to evaluate both financial returns and carbon impacts using the same time-based logic.

This conversation with Jimmy Jia reveals why the future of sustainable finance depends on solving this accounting puzzle, and what it means for real estate investors, policymakers, and anyone trying to build a net-zero future.

Disclaimer: The audio and the transcript of the intro and the outro were generated using AI.

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In early 2025, California faced another devastating wildfire season, with more than 16,000 structures destroyed and up to $53.8 billion in property damage. Events like these raise a big question: how do real estate markets respond to climate risk?

In this episode of The Property Pod, we take a deep dive into the 2023 paper Does the Salience of Climate-Related Risk Affect Asset Prices? by Dr. Cloé Garnache.

Through our Oxford Future of Real Estate Initiative, she lectures on Real Estate in the Executive MBA programme at Oxford Saïd Business School, teaching modules on negotiations and auction strategies, the valuation of environmental amenities, and the impact of climate change on insurance and mortgage markets.

Dr. Garnache’s study looks at a 2007 wildfire risk re-zoning policy in California to explore whether homebuyers respond to the salience of climate risk (when a risk is made more attention-grabbing through zoning labels) or to actual increases in underlying wildfire hazard.

The results are surprising: prices didn’t drop just because a home was suddenly in a labeled “risk zone”. Using detailed transaction data and high-resolution fire risk models, the study reveals hat property prices do not drop at the new risk zone boundary where actual risk is constant. Instead, prices decline—by about 2.5%—in areas where the objective risk of wildfire actually increases.

In other words, homebuyers aren’t just reacting to maps or warnings—they’re responding to real risk. It's a finding that sheds light on how climate threats get priced into real estate, and what that means for markets going forward.

⁠⁠Link to the paper

Disclaimer: This episode’s audio and transcript were generated using AI.

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