Content area
Full Text
Professional Real Estate Development: The ULI Guide to the Business. Second Edition. Richard B. Peiser and Anne B. Frej, 2003, 397 pages, Urban Land Institute.
The second edition of this ULI-sponsored book appeared in print last year. The first (1992) edition's authors were Richard B. Peiser and Dean Schwanke and the acknowledgments and foreword to this second edition are both by Richard B. Peiser. The book is essentially a practical guide on developing the five major types of real estate: land, residential, office, industrial and retail.
The authors' progress through the chapters is logical and the later chapters do a very good job of building on the basics presented in the earlier chapters. After two relatively short chapters, entitled "Introduction" and "Organizing for Development," the third and fourth chapters, "Land Development" and "Multifamily Residential Development," respectively, set out the foundations of real estate development. The third chapter covers the subdivision process by which raw land is transformed into parcels ready for building. The fourth covers multifamily residential development but includes a step-by-step analysis of topics common to all forms of development. The remainder of the book covers office, industrial and retail development and ends with a chapter entitled "Trends and Issues" that examines the industry.
Organization and Readability
As is common with ULI publications, the book contains occasional text boxes or short topics alongside the main text meant to elucidate or provide historical insight. All the text boxes are relevant and promote a fuller understanding of the topics discussed. Someone relatively unfamiliar with real estate development would undoubtedly be lost without the diagrams, photos, charts and extra text. Occasionally the text boxes are used to introduce developers or development companies or specific development projects, giving the reader a sense of real-life applications.
One potential problem with any development book is that there are many topics and details must be left out. This results in many...