Masters thesis in Business Economics IV, VT 2012

Linneuniversity in Kalmar

Authors: Johanna Susaeg and David Johansson

Tutor: Petter Boye

Examiner: Karin Jonnergård

Title: Fair value - How real is it?

Background and research discussion: The concept of fair value is today connected with great uncertainty, which may be a result of the various guidelines developed during recent years. Hence, auditors have an important role in situations where they have to make projections concerning fair value and also do inspections of the management´s own assumptions.    

The critique that has been shown regarding fair value is that it can be difficult to estimate, especially when there is no active market to proceed from. This problem has been confirmed through that the management often uses the estimations subjectivity to deliberately show higher or lower values in the accounts.

Purpose: The purpose of this essay is to study and describe auditors, appraisers and real estate companys interest and procedure in valuation of real estates.  We also going to describe theirs view on fair value of real estates plus analyze and explain the actor’s roles in the valueprocess and how their particular interests can affect the final valuation in different situations.

Methodology: The study is characterized by a qualitative method containing a pilot interview and several personal interviews with auditors, estimators, and real estate companies. We have used an abductive approach where we have combined the deductive and the inductive approach.

Conclusions: Our conclusions show that there is not a unified definition of fair value since various actors have different interest and purpose with the value. Further we can conclude that it is an absence of active markets that results in problems for the appraisals, because there is not enough regulations for doing a completely appraisal. We can finally conclude that these situations create wider margins to abandon the regulations and each actor can therefore act along their own interest. 

Keywords: fair value, market value real estate, auditor, appraiser, real estate company