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With continuing urbanisation, real estate (RE) has become increasingly important in crisis management. The field of crisis research is still fragmented, especially in the RE context and focuses on the retrospective analysis of single crisis events. This qualitative, futures studies–based paper aims to build a more holistic, foresight-driven understanding of how diverse crises affect RE. It identifies 128 possible future crises from a societal perspective and adopts a novel method in the field, the Futures Wheel, to collect the views of 179 practicing and academic experts via 58 multidisciplinary workshops to analyse the impacts of the identified crises. From this analysis emerged the Crisis Impact Framework for Real Estate, which includes 23 impact themes that synthesise the variety of direct and indirect crisis impacts on RE’s hard elements (e.g. the physical condition of materials) and soft elements (e.g. economic value changes). This study contributes an integrated and foresight-driven perspective to the existing research literature. The framework can assist RE market participants in preparing and assessing critical elements of RE before, during and after crisis impacts have manifested and can help spatial planners, investors and RE managers to reflect in a more multidimensional manner on their vulnerabilities and crisis preparedness.

Participants in the real estate market are exposed to a variety of endogenous and exogenous crises. Because the real estate market environment is closely interconnected with the broader society and its diverse forces, the direct and indirect impacts of crises are experienced through changes in real estate market dynamics. In the future, the market environment is expected to be even more challenging, full of complexity, uncertainties, and ambiguities, which will require developing the skills, first, to learn from crises already experienced and then to foresee, prevent, or adapt to ones yet unseen. This article aims to deepen the understanding of how crisis impacts were perceived in the real estate market during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research applies a qualitative approach by interviewing 19 real estate market professionals in Finland to identify the factors influencing market dynamics, such as market sentiments, preferences, and procedures. The results will help market participants understand the diversity of crisis impacts, their interconnections, and how they are perceived. The findings contribute to the real estate literature by offering a qualitative perspective that supports individuals and organizations in developing risk and crisis management skills and contributes to building a more resilient real estate market to support communities.

The purpose of our study was to investigate the content of sustainability reporting issued by real estate sector. Content analysis was employed to identify the strengths and weaknesses of sustainability information provided by sample companies. The content analysis structure considered both quantity and quality of information simultaneously. Our results show an inconsistency in the form, extent and quality of sustainability reports. In addition, our findings recognise a lack of clear approach to embrace materiality, external assurance, and further engagement of stakeholders in the sample reports. It seems that most of the sample companies were engaged in issuing sustainability reports to fulfil the legislative requirement and avoiding financial or legal risks. Our study provides information on the current status of sustainability reporting to real estate professionals. In addition it contributes in decreasing the financial and legal risks, and increasing the corporate reputational capital, by revealing the common weaknesses prevalent in the sustainability reports.