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REAL ESTATE: How to Interpret City Rankings?
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How to Interpret City Rankings?

Author: Michael Hart has spent more than 20 years in China in the commercial real estate industry and over a decade of that time in Tianjin.

BT 201906 real 08

如何解读城市排名?

仲量联行伦敦办公室的 Jeremy Kelly最近发表的一篇文章引起了我的注意。该报告罗列了“全球20强:创新与人才”领域的前20名城市。但在我深入研究该报告之前,我想解决一个问题,“这些排名是否有效?”

避免“清单体文章”

几年前,我了解了一个相对较新的名词,即“清单体文章”。它们是标题中带有数字的文章,围绕这个主题构建清单。 清单体文章在网上变得特别受欢迎,点击量很大,但往往不会教给读者太多。这类文章背后的数据支持非常单薄,毫无实际意义。但Jeremy的文章并非如此。Jeremy团队在他们的网站cities-research.jll.com上分享了大量数据。

思考数据来源

考虑谁是作者,他们的动机是什么。JLL集团是一家房地产咨询公司,他们的排名结果倾向于依据房地产库存的大小(已建成多少)和交易(已售出多少)等数据。因此,像天津这样拥有相对少量房地产存量的城市可能并不会排名特别高。所以当排名与您熟悉的主题的直觉不符时,请深入研究数据并尝试找出原因。

不在排名中的

重要的是要记住,虽然我们有越来越多的数据涉及比我们想象的更多的东西,我们有工具来帮助我们排序和解释这些数据,有时这并不能说明整个故事。排名可能会错过游客和居民可以感受到的东西,这些东西很难量化。

未来远景

如果发表的研究突出了高绩效城市并且背后有真实的数据,那么值得进一步研究。如果城市领导者想要了解如何真正改善这些特定区域,那么看看哪些城市在这些排名中表现良好可能具有指导意义。

在天津的案例中,美商会最近的白皮书虽然不是城市排名,却注意到美商会会员公司代表认为天津的宜居性在过去几年中一直在改善,这应该让当地市领导人相信他们在正确的轨道上。

BT 201906 real 05People on the streets of Yuyuan Garden during the day of the Dragon Boat Festival in Shanghai, on June 7, 2019.

A recent post by Jeremy Kelly out of JLL’s London office caught my eye. He was promoting a recent piece of work his team had done on “Global Top 20: Innovation & Talent” featuring the top 20 cities in this sphere. It is actually a small part of a larger research project they had done to look at 300 cities across the globe and group them by areas of focus and success. But, before I dive too deep into that report, I want to address the question, “Are these sorts of reports useful?”

BT 201906 REAL 02Beijing’s CBD area and the CCTV headquarters. Beijing is among the most innovative cities in the world, ranking the fourth in a JLL study, ahead of Shanghai. Photo: Simon Song

Avoid “Listicles”

A few years ago I learned about what I believe is a relatively recent invention, the “listicle.” They are articles with a number in the title and structured around this “list”, such as “Top 5 ways to get a promotion.” Listicles have become especially popular online, where they garner clicks, but often don’t teach the reader much. Fine for popular topics perhaps, but for government leaders or urban planners trying to learn how to improve a city or attract companies, these sorts of articles with very shallow data behind them are meaningless. That is not the case for the article I mentioned. Jeremy and his team have loads of data at their site: cities-research.jll.com

BT 201906 real 07Downtown Hong Kong.

Consider the Source

Next, consider who the author is and what their motivation is. In the case of JLL, a group I used to work with is a real estate consultancy group, so their lists lean towards rankings that include size of real estate stock (how much has been built) and transactions (how much has been sold), so cities like Tianjin that have relative small amounts of real estate stock compared to their population may not rank particularly high. Likewise, a company or organization focused on environmental factors may rank cities with little heavy industry quite high, but a place with no jobs and loads of trees might be a great place to visit, but not to live in, as it might lack job opportunities. And, if the rankings just don’t correspond with your gut feel about a topic you know well, dig into the data and try to figure out why. You might get a new insight that you had missed before.

BT 201906 real 09The Tianjin metro line 9 runs past Binhai International Convention Center station

Look for Improvement

If a specific set of rankings is deemed relevant by the public, government or industry leaders, it will be updated periodically. In that case, see how the city is trending. City leaders, who get feedback and then work to improve, will see their rankings rise over time across a range of areas. Alternatively, recent revelations that some Chinese cities were trying to game the pollution rankings by tampering with the equipment or understating their pollution levels, should make one sceptical not only of the pollution rankings, but of most things those city leaders claim to have been doing. And remember, some things can’t be fixed easily. I was heartened by a plan announced by the Tianjin city leaders a year or so ago, where they were going to open up the hukou or household registration rolls to young professional staff, who were willing to bring their talent to Tianjin. Offering young talented folks a path to home ownership and local residency in order to build a long term professional workforce is a goal that may not achieve immediate success, but should be saluted.
 

The Rankings

So, what do the rankings show? Below I share the list of innovative cities, and then although Tianjin doesn’t make the first on the list, which I don’t think should surprise us, I extract some other things the website does say about Tianjin.

BT 201906 real 03BT 201906 real 04Not in the Rankings

It is important to remember that although we have increasing amounts of data about almost more things than we can imagine, and we have tools to help us rank and interpret that data, sometimes that doesn’t tell the whole story. Sometimes a city has a great vibe and it starts attracting a group of talented young folks, who will help drive the city for the next few decades, and the rankings don’t seem to tell us why. Rankings may miss things that visitors and residents can feel. In the past few years, visitors from Beijing have remarked to me with surprise about how much they enjoy visiting Tianjin. It may be the cool new microbrewery, a great experience at a hotel, the riverside path or the blooming roses and pear trees in spring. These things are hard to quantify, but they do in fact sometimes count.

BT 201906 real 06Tall buildings of Shanghai's Lujiazui financial district rise above a morning fog.

Outlook

If research is published highlighting high performing cities and it has real data behind it, then it is worth further study. City and industry leaders need not feel bad that they don’t appear at the top or even on any specific list of “leading city” reports. This is especially true for cities in China, which will always be competing with Beijing and Shanghai for attention. They are both big and in Shanghai’s case, globally recognized as being an exciting place to live. However, what is important is that there are some things that all well-functioning cities need, like mass transit and clean air. There are other things that cities, which depend upon the service sector, will need, like hotels, a work force and entertainment options. If city leaders want a road map for how to actually improve those specific areas, seeing which cities are doing well in these rankings can be instructive.
 

In Tianjin’s case, AmCham China’s recent white paper, although not a city ranking, did note that representatives of AmCham member companies felt the city’s liveability has been improving over the past several years and that should give local city leaders some confidence that they are on the right track. And in this particular case, Tianjin didn’t make the cut for innovation, but a further study of the background materials showed that Tianjin does have some things going for it and is starting to move up the rankings in some areas as long-time residents will certainly recognize.

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