| dc.description.abstract | Our purpose with this thesis was to illuminate a part of the real estate world that has long been somewhat inaccessible for public research. We examined the constellation of owners of commercial property in Kristiansand and calculated the Herfindahl-Hirschman index and concentration ratio for this market. It is our hope that this descriptive analysis of the market for commercial property in Kristiansand could be used for further research on market structure and urban development.
Our thesis is based on second hand data from “Kartverket”, “eiendomsverdi.no” and the municipality’s lists of valuation estimation in relation to taxation. We combined an extensive mapping of market shares in the Kristiansand commercial real estate market from these sources and based the calculations on this dataset.
Our results show that the studied market has a low concentration of providers of commercial property. The index results were far lower than the critical values used by government agencies for maintaining healthy competition. Although, we do suggest that high barriers to entry might be present in the market and act as competition hindering factors. We observe that over the last seven years the market shares of larger providers of commercial property has had on average almost twice the increase in value compared to smaller providers, while larger providers experience lower risk over the same period. There are multiple market effects affecting competition, even though we document low concentration of providers additional research is required to conclude if there is adequate competition in the market. | |
