Teachers' Day: 5 Best Real Estate Teachers We Need To Celebrate Today

Real estate assets form an important part of the economy. It is also undeniable that most people spend a significant fraction of their household incomes on buying and maintaining their homes. Yet, real estate markets have not received its fair share of attention from the best teachers on earth. Robert J. Shiller won the Nobel Prize in Economics Sciences for his work on residential property markets in 2013, but it's also true that an economist primarily known for his work on residential property markets had never won the Nobel Prize prior to Shiller.

On Teachers' Day day, PropGuide remembers five best teachers and their contribution to real estate and residential property markets:

• Alain Bertaud

For years, former World Bank researcher Alain Bertaud tirelessly argued that India is the only country on earth where building height regulations are imposed in large cities without paying any attention to demand for residential property. It is largely because of Alain Bertaud's efforts that many Indian urban policy makers now tend to think that floor space index (FSI) values should be higher in Indian metropolises, especially in Mumbai. An important lesson Indian policy makers ought to learn from Bertaud is that for the mass transit to work, a city should have a vast population concentrated around main mass transit corridors. Without the right land use policy, right pricing and efficient residential property markets, mass transit systems will not be successful. The transportation networks in a city must adjust to the spatial structure of a city and needs of its people. Another important lesson Bertaud has to teach us is that vehicles and ox carts occupy expensive land in Indian cities without paying for it. India needs to allocate real estate in cities more efficiently. Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser once said that he learned everything he knows about land use restrictions in developing countries from Alain Bertaud. Anyone who rigorously studied real estate markets in developing countries would probably agree with Glaeser because there are few other guideposts to find.

• Edward L. Glaeser

Edward L. Glaeser is considered the foremost expert on cities and residential property markets in the world. Glaeser believes that the world should be more urbanised to become more prosperous. One of the important lessons Glaeser has to teach us is that a government cannot provide better water supply, sanitation and electricity must not engage in regulating currency exchanges. Glaeser thinks that we have many reasons to love India's slums because the best Indian cities attract low income individuals that build informal settlements in slums. In his classic 'Triumph of the City', Glaeser points out that for Indian cities to become affordable for low income individuals, homes should be more affordable. India needs skyscrapers to make homes more affordable. However, Glaeser points out that we cannot create the vibrant intellectual life and exchange of ideas by building enormous structures while ignoring what people really need. Cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru rest on intellectual capital. Glaeser teaches Economics at Harvard.

• Paul Romer

Paul Romer is an economist who thinks that India should urbanise more rapidly. Romer proposes the idea of charter cities to accelerate urbanisation. He thinks that for the NDA government's Smart City mission to be successful, the central government must create regions where policy norms are more business-friendly. Romer rightly points out that though there is no guarantee that such missions would work, China's experimentation with urbanisation was very successful. Shenzhen, a city that witnessed the highest economic growth in human history, was once a sparsely populated village. Urban planners in cities like Gurgaon have much to learn from Romer. He thinks that by protecting public spaces and building better infrastructure, the government can increase mobility in cities like Gurgaon and Noida. Romer thinks that in cities like Gurgaon, it is more efficient to plan infrastructure and public spaces before the city grows. In a developed city, planning is very costly. Paul Romer teaches Economics at Stern School of Business at New York University.

• Shlomo Angel

Shlomo Angel is a great scholar whose ideas would be of great help in implementing the mission to build homes for everyone. Decades ago, when he tried to find out how many of the households that government considers homeless are truly homeless, he found that they are merely a small fraction of the vacant homes in a developing country. When he studied the people who live in informal settlements in Bangkok, he noticed that merely 15 per cent of them were squatters. Most of them paid land rent. Schemes to build homes for everyone often ignore such fundamental facts. Angel thinks that many solutions that economists and urban policy experts in developed countries propose would not work in developing countries. First world economists often do not understand local conditions in developing countries. Angel, for instance, believes that high-rises would be very expensive to build in India because of lack of expertise and the cost of raw materials and initial infrastructure. Shlomo Angel is an adjunct professor at the New York University and senior research scholar at the NYU Stern Urbanization Project.

• Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell is a great economist who thinks that homes have become less affordable over years in many parts of the world because of regulations that make them more expensive. Like Shlomo Angel, Sowell thinks that people shelter themselves, day in and day out, in whichever way they can. For a country to shelter its people, we should see homes as goods traded on the market, like food or clothes. Sowell thinks that policies that make homes affordable by keeping interest rates artificially low would, in the long run, lead to economic crisis and high real estate prices. Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Are there better teachers of real estate you can think of? Write to us.