The home-owning family's equity is a piggybank that can be broken open by borrowing. Each borrowing increases liabilities and cash equally, initially leaving net wealth unchanged. When those funds are spent and cash balances fall, consumption increases even as net wealth can decline. In a...

This paper develops an option-theoretic model of a retail lease. The standard retail lease contains provisions for a security deposit, a base rent, and a percentage rent or a sharing between landlord and tenant of rent revenue above a preset sales threshold or break point level. The findings...

This paper explores the profitability of real estate franchises. The database for the study consists of observations from the National Association of Realtors' 2001 survey of real estate brokerage firms. Franchises are found to generate additional revenue for franchisees. However, net margins...

Real estate markets remain localized and reflect differences by region. With a large number of brokerage firms and a smaller number of franchisors, a testable hypothesis is whether in equilibrium fees and royalties are equal to the additional return to the franchisee. If fees are set uniformly...

The positioning of a property along a given rent-vacancy signaling frontier depends on its ownership, branding, and quality. Confirmation of a separating equilibrium occurs if the quality from the branding, itself dependent on costly management decisions, results in rent differentials. For...

The consumption function for the U.S. economy is estimated with real estate and financial wealth for quarterly data for 1952:1-2001:4. An additional dollar of real estate wealth increases consumption by 8 cents in the current year, as compared with only 2 cents for financial wealth. The results...