Book excerpt: This book is concerned with the unique findings, contributions and recommendations made on several crucial issues, relating to the concomitant subjects of direct real estate (DRE) risk premiums and DRE risk management. Chapter 1 examines the institutional nature of legal origin and the total returns (TRs), from investing in a country’s DRE and via the adoption of a multi-factor arbitrage pricing theory (APT) model. Chapter 2 affirms the true historical volatility to be a reasonable estimation of international DRE risk premiums, when the autoregressive lag orders of the de-smoothed returns and the multi-factor model are taken into account. Chapter 3’s real world of international DRE investing counts on sustainable international DRE investing, imperative for the investing organization’s willingness and preparedness to effectively manage risk or uncertainty, early enough as part of the risk management cycle, in pursuing high risk-adjusted TRs for DRE assets. Chapter 4 recommends a model of the intuitive build-up approach of forming the DRE investment hurdle rates for new DRE investing. The resultant DRE risk premiums serve a rough guide to ensure that the DRE hurdle rate is stringent and high enough, to achieve the risk-adjusted and Sharpe-optimal portfolio TR. Chapter 5 examines the integrated DRE investment strategy for a 13-city Pan Asia DRE portfolio, of office, industrial real estate and public listed DRE companies, adopting the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the Markowitz quadratic programming models. Such models enable the versatile strategic asset (SAA) and the tactical asset (TAA) allocations. Chapter 6 enables the DRE institutional investor to achieve a comprehensive and in-depth return and risk assessment at the DRE level for the 4 prime Asia residential sectors of Shanghai (SH), Beijing (BJ), Bangkok (BK), and Kuala Lumpur (KL), under the DRE VaR, incremental DRE VaR and the risk-adjusted return on capital (RAROC), Chapter 7 reiterates that public policies on macroeconomic management have to be consistent and non-conflicting in a widely accepted ‘policy compact’. It is because the policies reinforce the fundamental investment value of large and complex developments, affecting the sustainable viability like the integrated resort (IR)-at-Marina-Bay, Singapore. Chapter 8 draws attention to the aftermath of the Asian economic crisis, terrorism and viral epidemics, that compel more DRE investors to risk-diversify their operations beyond their primary market into other parts of Asia. However, limited studies examine risk-reduction diversification strategies via split returns i.e. decomposing TRs into rental-yield returns and capital value (CV) returns. Chapter 9 proposes and recommends the intelligent building (IB) framework, via the fuzzy logic (FL) engine, leading to a robust measure of building intelligence, and a standard guideline for a consistent performance-based structure for the promotion of the correct IB classification.