Real Estate Transactions. Strategic Relevance of Due Diligence:An Integrated Transaction Cost Theory Approach

Masters Thesis from the year 2015 in the subject Business economics - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,3, University of Applied Sciences Münster, course: Real Estate Economics, language: English, abstract: The sub-prime mortgage crisis caused significant damage to the international real estate market. Did the crisis teach us anything? In practice, yes. For one, examinations in the form of due diligence of real estate assets have become more frequent and more thorough. Activities on the real estate market in Germany are recovering robustly and have almost reached precrisis levels. Thus, the practice of due diligence is increasing correspondingly. However, the literature on due diligence real estate is still exiguous and lacks outright theoretic approaches. This thesis investigates the relevance of due diligence within real estate transactions by contextualizing it within integrated Transaction Cost Theory approaches and its behavioral assumptions. Transaction-cost and agency-theory parameters such as bounded rationality, opportunism and uncertainty offer approaches for describing how due diligence reduces information asymmetries, uncover hidden characteristics, and therefore prevent adverse selection. The conducted multi-method qualitative study affirms the strategic relevance of due diligence within real estate transactions. Table 1 + 2 "anonymous expert interviews", therefore no content