Maximilian Kretzschmar

Maximilian Kretzschmar is a 26-year-old master student at the International Real Estate Business School (IREBS) in Regensburg. In his master program he has decided to focus on the key module groups Real Estate Investment and Financing as well as Real Estate Development and Management. He is currently writing his master thesis on selected services of real estate service capital management companies. For that he uses a conjoint analysis (ACBC) to analyze the preferences of German institutional investors with regard to preferred services in the sector of administrative fund activities, which go beyond the legal regulations. This should increase the transparency and simplify interface management among the participants in the future.

The real estate sector was already of interest to Maximilian throughout his bachelor studies in economics. During a voluntary internship in Hamburg in 2017, the topic for the master thesis was created in cooperation with a benefactor of the IREBS. With the experience of several internships and practical studies at the IREBS on indirect real estate investments, he now deals with the topic described above in his master thesis. Methodically, he uses an ACBC without costs and prices, because it´s very difficult and maybe a bit unrealistic to find prices for the single services.

In the middle of 2018 he would like to start working in the real estate industry.

Results

[May 2019] The master thesis looked into the preferences of real estate asset managers regarding currently offered real estate services in the sector of administrative fund activities that go beyond the legally prescribed framework. For example, which services and at what level of execution do suppliers have to provide, in addition to the legally required services, in order be able to act competitively and profitably on the market? Or in how far does the offer of a real estate services in the sector of administrative fund activities cover the heterogeneous, changing needs of the customers at present and in the future? In addition to that, due to the different perspectives of the inquiring asset managers, the investors behind them as well as the real estate project developers and other real estate portfolio holders, further questions were methodologically investigated with the aid of Adaptive Choice Based Conjoint (ACBC) analysis. The ACBC was used without cost or price information because the product under investigation, together with its attributes and their levels, was due to the service characteristics difficult to define and equally difficult to quantify. In addition, price disaggregation of the product regarding the dependency of the remuneration on the heterogeneous real estate asset would not be realistic. Due to the service provided, the ACBC was relatively qualitative with an increased duration of interrogation (twelve attributes), which resulted in a greater risk to the subject and a low response rate of 21%. The attributes to be investigated were derived from the opinions of experts and specialists, in conjunction with the specification of services of the cooperating real estate service management company for the master thesis. Furthermore, the twelve attributes were fundamentally categorized in advance. Overall, seven out of twelve attributes were found to have an increased significance for the products offered by real estate capital service company. Those seven attributes exhibited above-average relative importance. Of particular note are the “IT access and workflow” and “investors and conflicts" attributes with the highest relative importance of 10.57% and 10.22%, respectively. At the same time, these confirm the trends in digitalization that currently exist in real estate investments and the efficient creation of interfaces between economic agents.