The role of perspectives and behavioural assumptions as family resemblances. Another round in creating a typology of Real Estate Business Research

Research in the field of real estate business is growing very fast. In this situation a research structure is necessary to avoid duplication of effort and to create deep synergy. A lot is written on what real estate management is and what not and as well how to classify the related research. Furthermore, the organisation of real estate research units often needs to follow a cassification. Without a doubt, taxonomic top-down approaches to break down research in a unique way have failed. More promising are cluster frameworks. But defining clusters is far away from trivial and also often far away from reality. Especially Due to the complexity of real estate business the cluster centers and boundaries are hard to define. A possible way out is Wittgensteinís idea of family resemblance (1953). Because this idea is often discussed if classification processes are polythetic, an initial proposal of an application is provided. To create a simple and distinct typology the attributes of the research results need to be carefully selected. ÑReal estate business functionì, Ñsegment of value chain ì, Ñtype of real estateì and of course Ñresearch methodologyì are prevalent. The paper shows that, in contrast to common approaches, the attributes Ñresearch subjects perspectiveì and the Ñbehavioural assumptionsì contain high explanatory power.