Investment Analysis Provided for Developers in the Housing Sector Using the Internet

Real estate Brazilian industry is now dealing with innovations in project finance that requires more advanced techniques to generate information for the decision-making process, if com pared to those currently used to uphold investment decisions. We can clearly state that decisions can no longer be supported by past experiences nor by adopting the same successfully ideas or projects former used. Nowadays, to repeat old formulas cannot guarantee project fund nor market penetration. In the 80' was created in the Polytechnic School of University of São Paulo the Real Estate Research Group. This group is dedicated to studying, researching and teaching, at under -graduate and graduate programs, issues specially related to real estate economics and finance, valuation, portfolio securitization, funding systems, risk analysis, modeling and project finance. This set of studies conducted by researches of the Real Estate Research Group permitted to settle a strong relationship with the real estate business community in Brazil. As a matter of fact, we can say that the main goal of the Real Estate Research Group is precisely to produce and to transfer knowledge in the real estate affairs to the Brazilian business community. In Brazil is well known that small and medium sizes firms have significant participation in the Real Estate business, specially concerning housing sector. Usually, office buildings, shopping centers, hotels, etc. have been developed in the Brazilian market by big developers, whereas great part of the projects in the housing sector have been successfully developed by small and medium sizes corporations due to the possibility of funding the project by selling it during its construction. On the other hand, frequently those small firms don't have well structured planning systems to support the decision-making process neither have financial conditions to contract specialist advisors. Under this kind of scenario, The Real Estate Research Group of the Polytechnic School - University of São Paulo has prepared a system for investment analysis in the housing sector and offer it to the Brazilian developers community using the internet through www.realestate.br website. This paper starts reviewing and focusing the need of appropriated information in making better decisions in the Real Estate market. A second approach on this manuscript is related to identifying and explaining how Brazilian developers must proceed to contract The Real Estate Research Group of the Polytechnic School to provide them Investment Analysis toward housing sector. Finally, this paper describes briefly a prototype of a report generated by the system.