Abdul Hamid Mar Iman

Office quality classification theoretical and empirical issues

Office quality classification literature recognises identification of office classes through division of office market rent distribution into intervals but failed to provide sound theoretical framework and comprehensive empirical approach to this method. This paper theorised that as office rental levels are a function of office quality; high quality office classes should have their mean rents greater than average market rent and mean rents of low quality classes. Also that heterogeneous nature of property coupled with lack of perfect information to market participants could result into differential evaluation of rent and quality of the same property by different market participants. The behaviour of participants normally reflects in distribution of market rent by depicting natural breaks in the distribution that could be captured by univariate data exploration. Frequency and histograms of rent distributions that were assumed to depict the behaviour of market participants were used to divide rent distribution to intervals to identify office quality classes. The results of this classification were validated by discriminant analysis. 67% and 59% accuracies were achieved for estimation and holdout subsamples respectively. This paper extended theoretical and empirical approaches in office quality classification. The proposed empirical approach could be used in future classification research.

Spatial–temporal neighbourhood-level house price index

Purpose The purpose of this study is to develop a spatio-temporal neighbourhood-level house price index (STNL-HPI) incorporating a geographic information system (GIS) functionality that can be used to improve the house price indexation system. Design/methodology/approach By using the Malaysian house price index (MHPI) and application of geographically weighted regression (GWR), GIS-based analysis of STNL-HPI through an application called LHPI Viewer v.1.0.0, the stand-alone GIS-statistical application for STNL-HPI was successfully developed in this study. Findings The overall results have shown that the modelling and GIS application were able to help users understand the visual variation of house prices across a particular neighbourhood. Research limitations/implications This research was only able to acquire data from the federal government over the period 1999 to 2006 because of budget limitations. Data purchase was extremely costly. Because of financial constraints, data with lower levels of accuracy have been obtained from other sources. As a consequence, a major portion of data was mismatched because of the absence of a common parcel identifier, which also affected the comparison of this system to other comparable systems. Originality/value Neighbourhood-level HPI is needed for a better understanding of the local housing market.

Company's performance self-assessment (CoPSA) among facilities outsourcing firms in malaysia: a focus on service delivery

Company performance self-assessment (CoPSA), whose fundamental purpose is to provide a check-and-balance mechanism for practice performance through progress-and-performance self-assessment (PaPSa) is yet to be in place in the facilities management industry. Specially needed by facilities service outsourcing firms (FSOFs), CoPSA benefits the top management from organizational introspection of companys own performance. This paper proposes and tests a CoPSA model using a parametric approach. Managers’ perceptions about service delivery performance of their firm are measured using the likert scale and then deduced into a three-equation two-step recursive model. From a total of 207 randomly chosen Malaysian outsourcing firms, sixty responses were obtained. The results indicate that more than half of the sampled managers have envisioned high performance delivery, with 80% achievement as their goal. However, this has not been adequately supported by a coherent firms internal structure. In view of the finding, the study concludes that the service delivery strategy of small fSofs in Malaysia is perceived to be rather passive.