Finance & Real Estate
Edited by Andrea Beltratti and Alessia Bezzecchi
Real Estate and Sustainability: One Size Does Not Fit All
The attention to Environmental, Social and Governance criteria (ESG) and to sustainability is a consolidated trend by now. We all take it for granted that eight billion people can live together on the planet earth only following certain basic rules that require not depleting limited resources and managing them with a very long temporal horizon. The lifestyle each of us follows is the necessary condition for well-being and sustainability, and requires adequate buildings, that minimize the use of energy resources, are compatible with landscape constraints, and contribute to a sense of beauty. What ...
SESG for Asset/Wealth Management and Real Estate
"We inherit the earth from our parents, but we borrow it from our children," is a sentence used so often in official reports (a famous example is the Brundtland Report of 1987 entitled Our Common Future) that it cannot be attributed with certainty to some great thinker. It is one of the most effective ways to intuitively and comprehensibly describe the concept of sustainability. Having capital and not wasting it, but caring for it and growing it gradually over time. And what is the most precious capital for all of us, especially in the "global village" in which we live? The planet. Thinking in ...
Economic Policy, Finance, and Real Estate
More than six months after the start of the pandemic, we can use market prices to understand the opinion of investors regarding the consequences of the health shock. This is a particularly important analysis, especially given the contrast between the data coming from the real economy and that from the financial markets. Drawing inspiration from the customary international benchmark to then derive implications for Italy, we note that the United States economy contracted by one-third in the second quarter of the year, and the Fed foresees a drop in GDP of 7 percent for 2020. At the same time, the ...
The Importance of Big Data for Real Estate
In addition to the loss of numerous human lives, the COVID-19 pandemic is causing significant economic harm to our country. An additional aspect, which is just as important, though less discussed, regards the role of data. It is sometimes said that data is the "new oil," to reference the potential wealth linked to the creation and use of sources of reliable data. This is not really a new discovery: still today history books speak of how the great civilizations of the past, from the Egyptians to the Assyrians, distinguished themselves precisely for the systematic collection of empirical evidence ...
The World to Come
In 1963, Charles Eric Maine published The Darkest of Nights, translated into Italian and published in 1973 with the title Il grande contagio. The novel explores the social aspects that emerged due to the spread of a new, highly contagious virus, with a mortality rate of 50 percent, that emerged in Japan and spread throughout China and Russia. Nobody knows how we will manage co-existence with COVID-19 and when a vaccine will be available. What is certain from the start, is that our life will be different, because "health risk" will be a central element in the risk management activities of companies ...
Value Creation in Asset/Wealth Management
In the 1960s, some thought that corporate social responsibility meant making a profit. This is a strong idea, with important implications. If a company must make profits, then it becomes easier to give a straightforward evaluation of the implications of possible decisions, and to choose the ones that allow for increasing earnings with the least possible risk. Gordon Gekko is the best representative of this school of thinking, and the film Wall Street an excellent vehicle for understanding the implications of this approach. Sixty years later, has the world really changed? Or as the Eagles sang ...
Real data for real estate
"Alternative" is again a fashionable term. Yet we are no longer talking about travel or lifestyle, as happened in the 1970s. Today investors are seeking alternative assets, while data providers and many companies seek to stand out in the collection of alternative data, and in their processing through unconventional models and algorithms, often based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). The stakes are high: on the one hand, a better understanding of consumer behavior; on the other, the streamlining of production processes. Real estate and data The real estate sector has never ...
RE-flexibility, RE-generation, RE-modeling
The world of real estate is wrongly considered a “petrified forest,” to borrow a term used thirty years ago to describe the situation of the Italian banks. Many top managers think that in the coming years real estate will be the sector with the lowest intensity of business transformation. The question of the degree transformation of the sector in coming years is very important for economic growth, given the many implications of real estate for the daily life of businesses and people. Yet if we look at the sector from a bottom-up standpoint, the image that emerges is very different than that ...
What is Asked of Wealth Management Today
The sector of asset/wealth management is in a phase of profound transformation. It is anticipated that revenues will not grow in the next three years, due in part to the pressure on management fees. In the U.S., the average cost of bond and equity funds fell from 0.76% and 0.99% in 2000, to 0.48% and 0.59% respectively (Investment Company Institute). The trend has recently become stronger: on August 1, 2018, Fidelity launched a true trade war by offering the sale of two market index funds with zero fees. As we have seen for some time, such as when Amazon announces its entry into new sectors, the ...