The nature of listed real estate companies: property or equity market?

This paper addresses the question of whether shares of public real estate companies should be treated as real estate or as equity investments. Because theoretical considerations do not suffice for making such a classification, we empirically investigate correlation structures and cointegration relationships of private and public real estate and equity markets for the United States and the United Kingdom. Our results suggest that public real estate stocks show similarities to the general stock market with regard to short-term return co-movements. For long-term investment horizons, the interdependence between direct and securitized real estate is much stronger. However, in the latter case, real estate stocks substantially lead the private property markets.

Office Construction in Singapore and Hong Kong: Testing Real Option Implications

We advance the real-option-based empirical analysis of commercial real estate investment in three respects. First, we test several real option implications for real estate construction that have not been examined in the commercial real estate investment literature. In particular and in line with the predictions of real option models, we show that the effects of real interest rate and the expected demand growth on hurdle rent become more negative when the market volatility is greater. Second, we use a cointegrating vector of office employment and office stock to provide a better control of the demand for new construction than traditional indicators based on real estate prices and vacancy rates. Third, whereas the existing studies focus on the U.S. commercial real estate markets, we study two major office markets in Asia, namely Singapore and Hong Kong. We rely on the local stock market in the two city states to derive forward-looking measures of office demand growth expectations.

Hedging House Price Risk with CME Futures Contracts: The Case of Las Vegas Residential Real Estate

Until the recent introduction of real estate futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), there have been few opportunities to manage house price risk. This paper examines whether house price risk can be effectively hedged in Las Vegas, one of the CME contract cities. The analysis considers hedging from the viewpoint of real estate investment groups, mortgage portfolio investors, builder/developers and individual homeowners. For investment groups and mortgage holders holding a mix of new and existing home assets, CME futures would have reduced house price risk by more than 88% over the 1994–2006 period. Similarly, homeowners implicitly hedging price volatility of existing homes also would have fared well over the sample period. However, builder/developers worried about new home price appreciation would have been much less successful in managing their risk. One important caveat, minimum variance hedge ratios change over time and may cause hedge performance to suffer.

Trading Intensity and Real Estate Performance

This paper investigates whether it is possible to create value through the active management of direct property portfolios. Using data from the USA, the UK and Australia, we examine whether trading intensity and portfolio growth explain the risk and return characteristics of listed property companies. The results suggest that beating the market by pursuing tactical asset selection and investment timing strategies is difficult even when acquiring and disposing of properties in illiquid private property markets. When the property type in which the firm specializes is included as a control variable in the regressions, none of the portfolio management intensity indicators developed in this paper is significantly associated with abnormal performance or systematic risk.

Commercial Real Estate Valuation: Fundamentals Versus Investor Sentiment

This paper investigates the role of fundamentals and investor sentiment in commercial real estate valuation. In real estate markets, heterogeneous properties trade in illiquid, highly segmented and informationally inefficient local markets. Moreover, the inability to short sell private real estate restricts the ability of sophisticated traders to enter the market and eliminate mispricing. These characteristics would seem to render private real estate markets highly susceptible to sentiment-induced mispricing. Using error correction models to carefully model potential lags in the adjustment process, this paper extends previous work on cap rate dynamics by examining the extent to which fundamentals and investor sentiment help to explain the time-series variation in national-level cap rates. We find evidence that investor sentiment impacts pricing, even after controlling for changes in expected rental growth, equity risk premiums, T-bond yields, and lagged adjustments from long run equilibrium.

Discovering REIT Price Discovery: A New Data Setting

This study decomposes real estate investment trust (REIT) returns into two components: (1) real returns, and (2) public returns. The real returns are based on the changes in the private, appraisal-based net asset values of REITs, whereas the public returns are measured by the variations in REITs’ premiums/discounts. This study then investigates the price discovery of REIT prices. The results indicate that lagged public returns are useful in predicting real returns. In addition, the study documents concurrent factor exposures for public returns and lagged factor exposures for private returns under a variety of asset pricing models. Overall, the results are consistent with the notion that public markets are more efficient in processing information.

Estimating Default Probabilities of CMBS Loans with Clustering and Heavy Censoring

This paper provides a comprehensive default estimation of commercial real estate loans with a complete commercial mortgage backed securities (CMBS) loan history database. Standard survival models assume that eventually every observation will experience the event. However, often there is a high proportion of censored observation in the sample. A mixture model is proposed to disentangle the probability of “long-term survivorship” and the timing of default occurrence. Loans within the same geographical area and property type tend to exhibit correlation in default incidence. A multilevel model is proposed to capture this correlation within and between clusters.

Volatility Transmission in the Real Estate Spot and Forward Markets

How shocks in one market influence the returns and volatility of other markets has been an important question for portfolio managers. In the finance literature, many studies found evidence of volatility spillovers across international markets, as well as between spot and futures markets. Although real estate is often regarded as a good vehicle for diversification, the dynamics of its volatility transmission have been largely ignored. This paper provides the first study to examine volatility spillovers between the spot and forward (pre-sale) index returns of the Hong Kong real estate market through a bivariate GARCH model. Transaction-based indices were used so that our volatility modelling was free from any smoothing problem. Our results showed that real estate returns exhibited volatility clustering, and the volatility of the forward market was more sensitive to shocks than the spot market. Moreover, volatility was mainly transmitted from the forward market to the spot market, but not vice versa.

Mortgage Put Options and Real Estate Markets

In this paper we offer direct evidence that financial intermediation does impact underlying asset markets. We develop a specific observable symptom of a banking system that underprices the put option imbedded in non-recourse asset-backed lending. Using a dataset for 19 countries and over 500 real estate investment trusts, we find that, following a negative demand shock, the “underpricing” economies experience far deeper asset market crashes than economies in which the put option is correctly priced.

Real Estate Risk Exposure of Equity Real Estate Investment Trusts

This study examines the linkage between equity real estate investment trust (REIT) returns and the private real estate factor. The results reveal a tighter connection between REIT and the private real estate market starting from 1993. In addition, large-cap REITs seem to behave more like real estate than do small-cap REITs. Overall, the results are consistent with three notions: (1) that institutional investors provide information-gathering services (Bradrinath et al., Rev. Financ. Stud., 8:401–430, 1995), (2) that a more sophisticated investor base improves information flow, and (3) that a high degree of participation from institutional investors strengthens the linkage between REIT returns and the underlying real estate factor (Ziering et al., The evolution of public and private market investing in the new real estate capital markets, Prudential Real Estate Investors, Parsippany, NJ, 1997).

How Does the Market for Corporate Control Function for Property Companies?

We investigate 95 takeovers of property companies all over the world and find that only two of those are hostile. To determine the effectiveness of the market for corporate control, we first study characteristics of targets and acquirers compared to a control sample, using the complete global universe of listed property companies during the most recent takeover wave (1999–2004). We find that the inefficient management hypothesis holds for both REITs and non-REITs, as targets exhibit significant underperformance before takeovers. In the second part of this study, we investigate shareholder wealth effects following takeovers and confirm previous findings that abnormal returns for targets and bidders are distinctly different for the real estate sector. Moreover, we show that this difference not only holds for REIT-to-REIT mergers, but also for mergers of real estate firms without a REIT-status.

The Effect of Time-on-Market and Location on Search Costs and Anchoring: The Case of Single-Family Properties

Regarding single-family residential properties purchased for investment (non-owner occupied) we examine whether out-of-state buyers pay more than in-state buyers. We focus on the effects of search costs and anchoring. We use data on 2,828 Las Vegas non-owner occupied (investor) residences, 40% of which are purchased by non-local investors. We find that the location of the property affects the empirical results. Specifically, search cost and anchoring effects that appear significant when the location of the property is ignored disappear when location is introduced as an independent variable.

Principal–Agent Conflict and Broker Effort Near Listing Contract Expiration: The Case of Residential Properties

In the real estate market the seller/agent relationship changes over the course of the listing contract. As the contract expiration nears, brokers may increase efforts generating more potential buyers and, perhaps, a higher offered price. Brokers may also persuade the seller to reduce the reservation price. These two aspects have different implications for the selling price of the property. Employing a sample of 24,100 properties sold in Clark County, Nevada, we investigate the relationship between the selling price and the time-to-expiration of the listing contract. We find that prices are lower if the property is sold near the expiration of the listing contract, indicating that the price-reduction effect dominates the broker-effort effect.

Partial Interests in Recreational Property

Changing demographics, growing real incomes, and friendly tax laws underlie the continuing growth in demand for recreational real estate in the US. The market for recreational property has undergone a major transformation over the past decades, with the refinement and deepening of markets for partial property ownership vehicles. This paper represents the first to analyze the factors underlying the demand for partial ownership interests. It develops a theory of partial ownership demand that focuses on the roles of familiarity and location-specific human capital in mediating the consumption uncertainty associated with particular recreation locations. Using private data from a survey of partial ownership participants, the empirical analysis yields results consistent with the theory: factors associated with greater site-specific recreation price, like distance between the primary residence and the recreation site and frequency of visits per week, reduce the share of ownership demanded, while factors associated with lower consumption risk tend to increase the share of ownership demanded.

Exploring the Conditional Performance of U.K. Unit Trusts

We evaluate the conditional performance of U.K. equity unit trusts using the approach of Lynch and Wachter (2007, 2008) relative to three conditional linear factor models. We find significant time variation in the conditional performance of some trust portfolios and individual trusts using the lag term spread as the information variable. The conditional performance of the trusts is countercyclical and larger trusts have more countercyclical performance than smaller trusts within certain investment sectors. These patterns in conditional trust performance cannot be fully explained by the underlying securities that the trusts hold.

Domino Effects Within a Housing Market: The Transmission of House Price Changes Across Quality Tiers

We argue that shocks to a housing market are transmitted through the hierarchy of quality tiers within a housing market. The result is the prediction of waves of house price changes accompanied by changes in transaction volume. Our study is related to existing models of spatial ripple effects across housing markets. The data are from the Hong Kong housing market. The findings from Granger causality tests strongly support the argument that domino effects within a single housing market occur in response to external shocks.

The Impact of Dual Agency

In 1984, the State of Hawaii’s legislature enacted a law making it mandatory for real estate agents engaged in dual agency relationships (i.e., when the seller’s and the buyer’s agents are employed by the same real estate firm) to disclose this fact to both parties in writing. The assumption was that the dual agency relation was damaging to the seller. This study analyzes the effect of disclosed and undisclosed dual agency, and the impact of the legislation, using data prior to and after the legislation (approximately 2,000 residential sales in each period). To account for property characteristics, hedonic models for the log of sale price and for the log of days on market are estimated in each period. Our empirical analysis suggests that dual agency significantly reduced the sales price, but the influence was much smaller after the legislation (8.0 versus 1.4%). In addition, dual agency significantly decreased the time on market by approximately 8.5% pre-legislation and 8.1% post-legislation, although the influence was much stronger for lower priced residences. These results are confirmed using a seemingly unrelated regression model.

Is the Compensation Model for Real Estate Brokers Obsolete?

This study examines the traditional compensation model for real estate brokers under which both the listing and buyer brokers are paid by the seller based on a percentage of the property sales price. We argue that this model has not evolved to reflect contemporary legal agency relationships and technology-driven information availability. It therefore creates substantial transactional inefficiencies for buyers and sellers at both the matching and bargaining stages of a transaction. While there is evidence that market forces are pushing for a change in the status quo, there is also evidence that the brokerage industry is resisting this change by pursuing anti-competitive policies and laws. We explore the economics of the current and alternative compensation structures and suggest policy implications regarding anti-competitive behavior in the brokerage industry.

Trading House Price Risk with Existing Futures Contracts

This paper examines the use of futures contracts to hedge residential real estate price risk. We examine whether existing futures contacts can effectively be used to offset volatility in national house prices. Little evidence of any simple systematic relation between national prices and futures prices is found. Since house prices are not easily replicated with a portfolio of existing futures contracts, a further implication is that the Chicago Mercantile’s introduction of a financial asset whose value reflects house prices will help complete the market. Nevertheless, the success of the CME’s new derivative contracts may be limited in light of state and regional house price correlations.

Correlation and Volatility Dynamics in International Real Estate Securities Markets

We study international correlation and volatility dynamics of publicly traded real estate securities using monthly returns from 1984 and 2006. We also examine, for comparison, the correlations among the corresponding stock markets. A multivariate dynamic conditional correlation model captures the time-varying correlation within the full period. We confirm lower correlations between all real estate securities market returns than those between the stock market returns themselves. Some significant variations and structural changes in the correlation structure happened within the sample period. We detect a strong and positive connection between real estate securities market correlations and their conditional volatilities. We also find the international correlation structure of real estate securities and the broader stock market are linked to each other. Our results have economic motivations regarding the potential integration of international real estate securities markets and the possibility of including information on changing correlations and volatilities to design more optimal portfolios for international real estate securities.