A Systematic Review of Locational Decisions of Property Developers

This paper aims to review published articles on private property developers’ locational decisions for the period 1970-2023 to provide a comprehensive review and offer implications for academic researchers and industry practitioners. A thorough and systematic review of published literature was conducted until December 2023 across Scopus, Elsevier (ScienceDirect), and Google Scholar. Manual research was performed using Litmap and Research Rabbit to identify relevant papers. Thirty-nine research studies on property developers' decision-making met the inclusion criteria and were critically evaluated using internationally accepted standards. The data were extracted, and the findings were summarised and synthesised in a narrative format. This review shows that knowledge about property developers' locational decisions remains theoretically unstructured, with scholars primarily relying on mainstream economic theory and traditional methodologies to understand developers’ decisions. The findings are categorised as follows, i) geographical context of knowledge production, ii) profile and nature of property developers, iii) strategies and motivations of developers, iv) the link between urban planning and property developers’ decisions, and v) methodological insights. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to review property developers' locational decisions literature, providing valuable insights and guidance for researchers and practitioners in the property development sector.