Subject to legal limitations, the owner of undeveloped real estate can
determine both the date and density at which to develop his property.
Alternatively, he can abandon his property. The value of these options
depends partly on the stochastic evolution through time of the operating
revenues and construction costs of developed property.In this book the
option pricing problem is solved analytically and numerically for the
optimal data and density of development, the optimal date of
abandonment, and the resulting market values of the developed and
undeveloped properties.The financial crisis showed, once again, that
neglecting real estate booms can have disastrous consequences. In this
work we spell out the circumstances under which a more active policy
agenda on this front would be justified. Then, we offer tentative
insights on the pros and cons as well as implementation challenges of
various policy tools that can be used to contain the damage to the
financial system and the economy from real estate boom-bust episodes.