Development Of A Property Risk Assessment Tool

The importance of real estate risk management has increased recently since formerly public-owned housing companies try to act more professionally and Basel II has imposed new requirements on the credit grantors who pass them on. Therefore many companies already have established a risk management system. Most of the risk management systems suffer from two problems: On the one hand, there is usually a lack of the systematic reconnaissance of the risks. A risk catalog takes remedial action here. On the other hand the assessment of the recognized risks is often still carried out by ìgut feelingî instead of a standardized and structured procedure. The paper presents such an assessment tool developed at the Chair for Sustainable Management of Housing and Real Estate. At first the paper discusses several methods for evaluation and aggregation of risks. As mathematical-statistical methods are due to the lack of data usually not applicable in the real estate area a scoring model is chosen. In the following the paper comments on the basic problem of scoring models to choose weights for the single indicators and risk, which often leads to errors. To avoid problems the model uses a kind of dynamic weighting which emphasizes extreme more than average values. As already stated in previous papers (e.g. Urschel/L¸tzkendorf 2007: The Risk Net: A New Approach to Risk Analysis and Portfolio Management in Housing Companies) risks cannot be assessed separately, the influences among them have to be taken into consideration additionally. For this purpose the ërisk netí method has been developed, which is also included in the risk assessment procedure. The paper ends with an outlook on the use of the risk assessment tool in a portfolio context as well as in scenario analysis.