Certification systems, that assess companies? work with social and environmental issues, have emerged in an increasing number of industries. Today, there are environmental certifications for the food industry, the forestry, the fisheries sector and several more. In apparel industry, certification for sustainable working conditions has been of major impact. The property sector is no exception from other industries.

This thesis aims to investigate the information effects of fair value accounting in Nordic real estate companies. As a consequence of the mandatory IFRS adoption in the European Union in 2005, listed Nordic companies are allowed to recognize investment property at fair value in accordance with IAS 40. Theory suggests that fair value accounting should lower information asymmetry. Therefore, this study aims to examine correlation between fair value accounting of investment property and information asymmetry on the stock market. To investigate this, we use bid-ask spread as a proxy for information asymmetry and examine Nordic real estate companies before and after the implementation of IFRS.

In today's society, the availability of energy plays an integral part in our everyday lives. Unfortunately, the price of energy in Sweden has increased in recent decades. A large part of our energy consumption goes to heating modules for houses, where heating methods that depend on energy sources such as electricity, district heating, fuel oil, gas and biofuels are the most common ones. During the winter period, the increase in energy costs becomes significantly evident, especially for small Property owners. This increase in energy cost is most noticeable for home owners with electric heating.This thesis is written at the Halmstad University, in cooperation with a company, which makes parts of this thesis confidential.

Wind and wind damage has become a hot subject because of the storm ?Gudrun? in January 2005. The main purpose of this study was to establish how the land owners attitude toward preventive wind damage actions was changing immediately after they had been struck by a storm. The result of the study was built on interviews. In springtime 2005 a total number of 20 private land owners were interviewed. Ten of the landowners lived in the province of Småland and ten in the province of Värmland.

HSB Göteborg owns and manages the property Masthugget 11:13 also called the Corvette in Gothenburg. The Corvette contains mostly office space but also shops, homes and garages. HSB Göteborg utilizes approximately 5000 square meters to its headquarters but in December 2014 they will move operations to Johanneberg Science Park. The risk of an increased proportion of vacancies in combination with relatively low rents and other tenant terminations allows HSB to ask for a future plan for how the real estate should be developed in order to remain profitable.Through studies of the area, urban office prospects, property current status and legal and economic conditions have different potential types of businesses been evaluated. City Planning Office program proposal forms the basis for the analysis of future plans for the area.

The Swedish government has set up 16 environmental goals for Sweden to achieve. One ofthem is ?Living forests?, which is the foundation for the ?National strategy for the formalprotection of forests?. The ?National strategy? puts the private forest owner at the centre ofattention in order to achieve the environmental goal ?Living forests?.

The Anglo-Saxon trust is not a new phenomenon, but existed as early as in the Middle Ages. The concept is customary among common-law countries, such as England the US,but unfamiliar to civil-law countries like Sweden. The person who creates the trust is called a settlor, the one who holds and administer the property is a trustee and the person who benefits from the settlement is called a beneficiary.In Sweden there is no legislation of how the trust ought to be assessed, but the need to understand it has probably increased with the internationalization.The Swedish Supreme Administrative Court has had a few opportunities to elucidate some of the uncertainties regarding trusts, but chose to abstain. With this The Swedish Tax Panel has very limited guidance from the court when they receive an application of an advance notice.A trust is not a legal entity nor a tax subject. This differs the trust from a foundation and they can not be placed on an equality from a Swedish tax perspective.In an advance notice, 2010-03-23 (dnr 103-09/D) om Inkomstskatt: Inkomst av tjänst ? värdepappersförmån, the Swedish Tax Panel equalizes the trust property with shares when determining how to tax the assets.

The invisible entrepreneurship is a study of owners of businesses with foreign heritage. It describes the unexplored relationship between ethnicity and class within this group of entrepreneurs.The result of the study is a model which I have found to be suitable to use when depicting the relationship between the ethnic profile and class. The model indicates that the importance of ethnicity decreases as both the owner of, and the business reach a more prominent class. The method of collecting data has been interviews with owners of businesses and Grounded theory has been used to analyse this data. Theories on ethnicity, owners of businesses with foreign heritage, and class in relation to ethnicity have been discussed on the basis of social constructivism.

Background and research problem: The former highly inflationary property market is currently undergoing a stagnation process. Investors have been used to annual growth figures in double digits,but now this is no longer considered to be a realistic outlook for future years. According to a report from PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Urban Land Institute, published by Avanza Wealth Management,the three most attractive markets for property investment in Europe are London, Paris and Stockholm. Because of this the authors have focused their investigation on two companies in the London andStockholm. The authors will additionally use an international bank, an estate agent and a consultancy firm for further information, with regards to the property market and risks associated with these typesof investment in particular.

The development of software was considered until the beginning of the 1990th as a cathedral like product development in closed companies. This way of development changed in the last decade. Open source software (OSS) development challenged this consideration significantly. OSS is produced in co-operation by skilled people, distributed and used by many moral agents. The result, the software itself, can be studied and modified.

The development of technology and the mechanization in the Swedish forestry has during the last 60 years resulted in depopulation of the country side and due to that the amount of distance forest owners has increased. Therefore the forest companies need to make some adjustments in order to keep the distance forest owners as customers and to attract new ones. The purpose of this essay was to examine and analyze the distance forest owners satisfaction with Södras service offering and quality of service and further develop some proposals for action. A web-based survey was sent out to 634 distance forests owners in Stockholm, Sweden, all members of Södra. 269 respondents participated in the survey and of them, 27 did also participate in a follow-up telephone interview.

Innovation has been identified as one of the key factors for economic growth long ago. However, the emergence of ?knowledge century? further strengthened the role of the concept since proper management of the knowledge is essential to make the best out of the innovative capacity of the companies as well as the countries. This necessitates a balanced intellectual property rights (IPR) systems, since these rights provide the basis to solve the market failures faced by innovating firms by creating property rights over knowledge. There is an inherent dilemma between invention and diffusion.

AbstractEffective January 1, 2005 publicly listed companies were obliged to adopt a new financialreporting standard (IFRS/IAS). The objective of IFRS/IAS was to increase transparency andcomparability in financial reports between companies. The authors have chosen to write aboutIAS 40 where the accounting treatment for investment property and related disclosurerequirements are regulated.The purpose of this thesis is to investigate potential effects of valuation of investmentproperty at fair market value for real estate companies at times when market price decreasesand to investigate what an acceptable difference for the valuation could be.To fulfil this purpose the authors have chosen a qualitative method interviewing accountants,property analysts and a credit analyst to obtain a deeper understanding of the problem. Basedata for the thesis have been collected during meetings, telephone interviews and e-mails.Additional data was collected from public available sources such as the internet, relevantprofessional magazines and professional newsletters. The authors have designed a modelshowing how Income and Balance Sheet statements are influenced by changed valuation ofinvestment property.

In this thesis an explorative study was undertaken with the aim to study how a number of private care providers, as well as politicians and officials from councils in and around the Stockholm and Uppsala counties, think about the future of the Swedish elderly care from a property perspective, i.e. homes for the elderly. The analysis shows that there is a demand for capacity in 6 out of 16 municipalities, and that the property is an important part of this capacity, and the fulfillment of it. This was mainly due to the cost of capital, but also because of several other factors such as lack of land, a wish to guide the design, ideology, and in many cases a wish to use the property as an instrument of domination to control private health care providers.Also, the property was show to be connected to economic competition, to freedom of choice, and to quality. The problems related to the property in the market for elderly care still remains to be solved.

The work presented here aims to give the owners ofChâteau du Grand Val, Roland and Marie Nilssond?Aubigné an integrated creative forest management planin which their goals with the property is heeded, andwhere the plan is so clear that they can follow it withoutmuch difficulty.This work has come about through the normal processesof forest management plans, landscape architecturalproposals as well as through field trips, field andliterature studies, and our combined experience fromour studies. The study visits, both on location in Brittany,France, but also in other places, as for instance Högestad,has provided the background information that formedthe basis of our analysis and the proposal that is derived thereof. Some suggestions, which we consider importantto the overall impression of the property, is provided amore focused and detailed solution, while other parts,which are important but can either benefit from havingdynamics in the design process or will be adapted toadjacent sites, are developed using a more generalapproach. In some cases several possible developmentprinciples are presented.The proposal presents a detailed plan for themanagement of the forest from the experience, wildlifeand forestry economic standpoint.