FCBE Professors & Ph.D. Students Co-Authored Paper Winning the Practitioner Research Award at American Real Estate Society Annual Conference

For release:  May 14, 2018

Dr. Ronald W. Spahr, Professor of Finance, Dr. Mark Sunderman, Morris Fogelman Real Estate Chair of Excellence and Professor of Finance, current Ph.D. students: Wei Sun and Mixing Sun, and Dr. Ying Huang, Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of South Alabama and UM Ph.D. graduate were honored earlier this month at the American Real Estate Society (ARES) annual conference, receiving the Practitioner Research Award for their paper, "Neighborhood Blight Indices, Impacts on Property Values and Blight Resolution Alternatives." The award is given for papers presented at the 2017 meeting and awarded during the 2018 ARES meeting.

The paper identifies real and social costs associated with neighborhood blight, and advances the applicability of a 2016 blight survey of each City of Memphis, TN property by suggesting cost-effective blight abatement strategies. The paper measures the validity of blight survey data, finding that each property's assigned blight rating is accurately predicted by supplemental information collected for each property during the survey. The paper constructs a blight index for each neighborhood based on averaged individual property blight scores, and finds that both individual property blight scores and neighborhood blight indices negatively impact sale prices and County Assessor assessed valuations. Further, the paper applies factor analysis and Shapley-Owen Value decomposition to define blight drivers and economic factors associated neighborhood blight and formulate resolution alternatives for addressing both individual property and neighborhood blight problems.

Dr. Ronald W. Spahr, Dr. Mark Sunderman, Wei Sun, Mixing Sun, and Dr. Ying Huang were honored at the American Real Estate Society Annual Conference.