Purpose This paper aims to add to the existing body of literature on this subject by advocating how waqf-based entrepreneurship can be practiced in Malaysia. Design/methodology/approach The paper begins by presenting an overview of waqf and its role in entrepreneurship and proceeds by proposing a model of waqf-based entrepreneurship which is synthesized from various models existing in the Islamic world. Findings The paper concludes by recommending waqf-based entrepreneurship as an alternative socio-economic framework of society’s wellbeing. Research limitations/implications The research is limited to the preliminary aspects of waqf entrepreneurship. Practical implications Waqf organization may be able to finance its own businesses through crowdfunding and other methods and also disburse waqf funds to small and large ventures. Social implications The waqf system is a social tool that not only finances social development projects but also has social economic alternatives to assist poor and underprivileged groups in the society. This paper is toward such a socio-economic direction. Originality/value This paper might be considered the first attempt to detail the practical aspect of waqf entrepreneurship, in terms of enterprises to be financed, and how the funds to be accumulated.

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Office quality classification literature recognises identification of office classes through division of office market rent distribution into intervals but failed to provide sound theoretical framework and comprehensive empirical approach to this method. This paper theorised that as office rental levels are a function of office quality; high quality office classes should have their mean rents greater than average market rent and mean rents of low quality classes. Also that heterogeneous nature of property coupled with lack of perfect information to market participants could result into differential evaluation of rent and quality of the same property by different market participants. The behaviour of participants normally reflects in distribution of market rent by depicting natural breaks in the distribution that could be captured by univariate data exploration. Frequency and histograms of rent distributions that were assumed to depict the behaviour of market participants were used to divide rent distribution to intervals to identify office quality classes. The results of this classification were validated by discriminant analysis. 67% and 59% accuracies were achieved for estimation and holdout subsamples respectively. This paper extended theoretical and empirical approaches in office quality classification. The proposed empirical approach could be used in future classification research.

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Purpose-The purpose of this study is to develop a spatio-temporal neighbourhood-level house price index (STNL-HPI) incorporating a geographic information system (GIS) functionality that can be used to improve the house price indexation system. Design/methodology/approach-By using the Malaysian house price index (MHPI) and application of geographically weighted regression (GWR), GIS-based analysis of STNL-HPI through an application called LHPI Viewer v.1.0.0, the stand-alone GIS-statistical application for STNL-HPI was successfully developed in this study. Findings-The overall results have shown that the modelling and GIS application were able to help users understand the visual variation of house prices across a particular neighbourhood. Research limitations/implications-This research was only able to acquire data from the federal government over the period 1999 to 2006 because of budget limitations. Data purchase was extremely costly. Because of financial constraints, data with lower levels of accuracy have been obtained from other sources. As a consequence, a major portion of data was mismatched because of the absence of a common parcel identifier, which also affected the comparison of this system to other comparable systems. Originality/value-Neighbourhood-level HPI is needed for a better understanding of the local housing market.