A University of Aberdeen Business School student has scooped a top prize and £1,000 for her dissertation.
Olawumi Oni, 26, was awarded the inaugural Investment Property Forum Educational Trust (IPFET) prize for the best MSc dissertation on real estate investment and finance.
Her work was chosen from five entries by a panel of academics from the Business School in liaison with a representative from IPFET.
Olawumi’s dissertation "The Long-Run Dynamics between Direct and Securitized Real Estate" covers price discovery in the UK real estate market.
Dr Rainer Schulz, Lecturer in Real Estate in the Business School, said: “Price discovery exists if return rates from one real estate investment market help to predict what will happen in another market. The dissertation examines such price discovery between the return rates of listed UK real estate companies and the return rates of actual buildings held in investor portfolios.
“She employs different statistical methods in her dissertation to explore this question and finds overall that information from the listed market can be helpful for predicting return rates of actual building investments. Therefore, information from the listed market should not be overlooked by investors in the private real estate market.
“She was a worthy winner of this inaugural prize.”
The IPFET prize is for dissertations written in the final stage of the academic year and to be considered for the prize, students must deliver an outstanding dissertation in Property (BU5904) or Finance (BU5903) on a real estate investment and finance topic.
To find out more about the IPF, the IPFET, and suitable dissertation topics, visit http://www.ipf.org.uk/or contact Dr Rainer Schulz r.schulz@abdn.ac.uk