Value migration in the real estate industry

Value chains are in constant motion: new links supplement or replace old links, margins shrink or grow, the number of market participants changes. One can say that the value migratesÛfrom one industry to the other, from one sub-segment to the other, in the real estate economy as well as in any other industry. That makes it difficult to answer the question on which stages of the chain how much value is created and where the stages with the highest relative creation of value will lie in the future. But answering this question is important for the strategic planning of enterprises because they depend on the timely identification of growth fields in order to secure their long-term position in the marketplace. So far the real estate economic literature has largely neglected the topic value creation. Therefore this paper tries to design a method to identify value migrations particularly for the real estate industry. For this, the concept of Slywotzky (1996) which was developed for other industries serves as the intellectual basis. The work is divided into a theoretical and an empirical part. In the first part the terms value, value creation, and value chain are defined for the real estate economy. Characteristic difficulties show up with distinguishing between the different links of the value chain. Then a method is presented for the measurement of the creation of value and the size of the market. Finally it is demonstrated, how assumptions on future value migrations can be derived. The second part contains the results of an empirical study of the value chain of commercial real estate in Germany. For this purpose, the authors interviewed industry experts and evaluated available statistic data. Furthermore tendencies for the future value migration are derived.