Retail Leasing: The Determinants of Shopping Center Rents

The determinants of lease rentals are of fundamental importance to real estate researchers and practitioners. Retail leases are unique in that they typically have two rental components: a base rent and an "overage" rent equal to a percentage of the tenant's gross sales above some threshold level. In this paper, we develop and test a simple cash flow model of retail lease valuation that predicts that base rents are lower with higher percentage rent rates and are higher with greater threshold levels of sales. Using a sample of shopping center leases, regression analysis indicates that these tradeoffs are observed in the market.     

Valuing Retail Shopping Center Lease Contracts

In this article we set up a real option model of retail shopping center leases. The model incorporates the effects of stochastic sales externalities and the possibility of tenant default, and in the presence of these effects, we derive and solve a partial differential equation that can be used to price a lease transaction. The model then sums across all tenants to determine the value of the shopping center. The model generates a number of new predictions, including why a Jorgensonian user cost of capital may overestimate shopping center values, why the general industry practice is to ignore percentage rent payments and tenant default risk in commercial mortgage underwriting and why shopping center owners may not act opportunistically as most observers seem to think they do.     

Valuing Lease Contracts Under Incomplete Information: A Real-Options Approach

This paper presents a unified framework for the pricing of leasing contracts in an option framework within incomplete information. Incomplete information is defined in the context of Merton's (1987) simple model of capital market equilibrium with incomplete information. Information costs are also used in Bellalah (1999, 2001, 2002) models for the pricing of derivative assets in the presence of shadow costs of incomplete information. The model is based on the main concepts behind interest rate models. It can be used to determine equilibrium lease rates for different types of leases such as forward leases, leases with options to renew or cancel, lease insurance contracts, adjustable rate leases, and leases with payments contingent on asset usage.     

Gross Lease Premiums

The premium for the gross lease relative to the net lease is estimated using a large sample of leasing data for office properties in seven U.S. markets during 2011. After matching gross leases with net leases on propensity scores, analysis for the matched sample of 9,860 lease observations reports the gross lease premium estimated at 12.9%. The relative premium of a gross lease responds to property‐specific characteristics, including tenant size, property size and property class, and is increasing with operating expense expectations. Gross lease premiums are increased in low‐vacancy markets. The findings support theoretical predictions from the existing literature.     

Cancellation Strategies in Commercial Real Estate Leasing

In a contractionary corporate environment, lease cancellation strategy becomes an important component of corporate real estate leasing decisions. This paper presents a leasing model in which less well-informed lessors offer leases with alternative lease cancellation options. The model demonstrates that a tenant's choice of cancellation option reveals his private information with respect to the likelihood of option exercise. Tenants who select a lease with a downsizing option are more likely to exercise the option. Given the higher likelihood of option exercise, the model suggests that the downsizing option will be priced higher. We examine a sample of 311 leases, and consistent with the model's prediction, we find that on average leases with a downsizing option have significantly higher contract rent. However, termination and sublet options are not associated with higher rent. The evidence suggests that market uncertainty, private information and adverse selection affect the pricing of alternative cancellation options and the choice of cancellation option.     

Optimal inventory and pricing policies for remanufacturable leased products

In this paper we consider a company which leases new products and also sells remanufactured versions of the new product that become available at the end of their lease periods. When the amount of end-of-lease items in stock is not sufficient to meet the demand for remanufactured products, the firm may purchase additional cores from a third-party supplier. We develop a dynamic programming formulation for determining the optimal price of remanufactured products, and optimal payment structure for the leased products. Our objective is to maximize the discounted system-wide profit over a finite horizon. The profit function consists of revenues that are obtained from remanufactured product sales and leasing, remanufacturing and manufacturing costs, inventory holding and shortage costs. We consider a consumer choice based demand model for mapping a potential customer into one of the product segments (a remanufactured product customer or a customer for a leased product with a particular lease period) for a given price/lease payment vector. We explore several properties of the discounted profit function and provide insight on the behavior of pricing and inventory policies. We also investigate the effect of key product characteristics such as deterioration in age, cost of shortage in remanufacturable product inventory, and key market characteristics such as relative willingness-to-pay for buying a remanufactured product and relative willingness-to-pay for leasing a new product on optimal pricing policies through a computational study.     

Percentage Rents with Agency

Retail leases often include a constant percentage rent above a breakpoint. Most breakpoints are restricted to a natural breakpoint, calculated as base rent divided by percentage rent. Frequently, breakpoints are much greater than sales when leases are signed. Both within and across categories of retail, percentage rents vary widely. On average percentage rents are lowest for large stores, like anchors, and highest for small stores with high operating margins. Retail leases with these and other common characteristics are shown to support second‐best investments by landlords in their stores both inside and outside shopping centers. The second‐best schedule of breakpoints and percentage rents is calculated explicitly.     

Long-Term Ground Leases, the Redevelopment Option and Contract Incentives

Ground leased property trades at a discount relative to the fee interest. We explore contractual alternatives that would be Pareto preferred by owners of the leased fee estate and the leasehold interest. The sharing of the value of the residual claim between the owner of the leased fee and the leasehold and a lease extension clause triggered by redevelopment can enhance the value of the asset to both parties. The results suggest that employing such contractual terms in ground leases in the United States would lead to outcomes more consistent with the fee simple case. Escalation clauses also have a potential impact on the timing and intensity of redevelopment.     

Return Risk and Cash Flow Risk with Long-term Riskless Leases in Commercial Real Estate

This paper presents a conceptual analysis of some of the key fundamentals that underlie the risk characteristics of commercial real estate returns. In particular, the relationship between the property's return risk and its cash flow risk is explored. This relationship is important because it is the return risk that should matter most to investors, yet it is the cash flow risk or market risk about which we may have the most objective information and the most intuition. This is because real estate assets are generally unsecuritized and trade too infrequently to observe time series of returns (including appreciation) that could be used to directly study the risk characteristics of the returns. By explicitly incorporating the possibility of cash flows governed by riskless long-term leases, this paper also explores the relationship between lease term and both cash flow risk and return risk.     

金融租赁业务的信托方式运用探讨

在目前信贷偏紧的情况下,流动性趋紧,融资难度加大,电力企业需广泛拓展融资渠道。信托加金融租赁的融资模式,可利用企业固定资产或大型设备购置,将信托优势与金融租赁业务特点相结合,丰富企业的融资行为。对电力企业融资租赁和经营性租赁2种信托业务模式进行了对比研究与分析,以期对电力企业选择融资方式提供有益参考。     

The Wealth Effects of Sale and Leasebacks: New Evidence

This paper investigates the phenomenon of sale and leasebacks as one way in which firms may use financial contracts to rearrange their organizational architecture. A theoretic model links the length of initial leaseback period to incentives to make noncontractible future investments in the lease relationship and predicts that firms choose shorter leases when landlords make relatively important investments. Using a sample of 71 sale and leaseback events from the 1990s, we document a significant mean abnormal return of 1.3% for shareholders of seller/lessee firms announcing relatively short leasebacks. The evidence suggests that firms may use sale and leasebacks to optimize their claims to real estate.     

Durable goods oligopoly

This paper models a durable-goods oligopoly as a differential game. Two cases are treated: sales, where firms cannot lease but must sell the good in question, and leasing, where firms do not sell but only rent. In the sales case, firms face increasing marginal cost of production and the good in question depreciates. For this case, a rational expectations feedback Nash equilibrium is constructed for which monopoly or oligopoly output is less than the efficient level. This gap between oligopoly and competitive output diminishes as the number of firms increases. When firms can only lease the good, the good is assumed not to depreciate and the monopoly level of steady state output is compared with the level of steady state output for a feedback equilibrium duopoly. For this case, the duopoly equilibrium has steady-state output that is less than the corresponding efficient level, but greater than the monopoly level. The leasing model is shown to be isomorphic to the adjustment-cost duopoly model of Driskill and McCafferty (Journal of Economic Theory, 49 (1989) 324–338).     

Semivariance of Property Value Estimates as a Determinant of Default Risk

Standard practice in the residential mortgage underwriting industry is to estimate collateral values via independent appraisals conducted by third parties. This paper empirically examines the role of property value ( i.e. , appraisal) uncertainty as a determinant of default on residential mortgage loans. Based upon an analysis of 1,428 residential loans drawn from the portfolio of a national mortgage lender, we find evidence that semivariance in property value uncertainty is related to default risk. Specifically, subject properties that are valued above the sales price of recently sold "similar and proximate" properties show evidence of greater default risk. Interestingly, a variance (range) measure of property value uncertainty is not significantly related to default risk.     

Optimal Comparable Selection and Weighting in Real Property Valuation

This paper formalizes certain aspects of the sales comparison approach to valuation that heretofore have been quite ad hoc. Specifically, it applies statistical theory to decisions about how many comparables to select, what the criteria for comparable selection should be, and how the proper weights for each adjusted value estimate can be determined such that the final value estimate is both unbiased and of minimum variance. Several results are derived that run counter to conventional practice; for example, it may not always be optimal to consider first the "best" comparables because of a lack of independence among their adjusted value estimates. Furthermore, it is always desirable to consider more comparables (regardless of how "bad") so long as their adjusted value estimates are optimally weighted in the final value estimate. Finally, weights usually selected for "inferior" comparables are typically too small. A final exercise empirically applies the methodology to a sample of sales.     

Commercial Real Estate Valuation, Development and Occupancy Under Leasing Uncertainty

A model of commercial property valuation is developed where individual property owners are price takers and tenants randomly arrive and depart. Spot lease and tenant reservation prices are stochastic and correlated and can divert from but eventually revert back to market equilibrium. Within this framework we examine built property values and vacancy rates for varying parameter sets representing differing markets and economic conditions. We also examine how potential and existing vacancies, spot lease prices and tenant reservation prices feed back into development decisions. We demonstrate how preleasing acts as a hedge to the developer against the risk of leasing uncertainty.     

Joint ventures vs. Non-joint ventures: An empirical investigation

This paper describes a longitudinal empirical study comparing joint ventures and non-joint ventures in the petroleum industry as they compete for oil and gas leases. Results indicate that, while enjoying a significant advantage in market power, joint ventures do not perform any better than non-joint ventures at identifying potentially productive leases. Because of the higher payments made for these leases, the overall performance of joint ventures is significantly lower than that of non-joint ventures.     

Creating value in business relationships: The role of sales

Understanding the creation of value in business relationships has been a long-standing goal of researchers and managers alike. By adopting a relational perspective, recent research on business relationships has made much progress in understanding value-creating processes. As the sales function is thought to be a pivotal part of the value-creating processes in business relationships, the evolving view on creating relationship value clearly has implications for our understanding of the role of sales in these processes. In contrast to its importance, the question of how the sales function contributes to creating value in business relationships has been largely neglected in extant literature. The objective of our paper is to answer this question by systematically linking the relational value creating process to the sales function's content. Interpreting value creation as interaction process, we identify four features of value-creating processes in business relationships suggested in recent research (i.e., jointness, balanced initiative, interacted value, and socio-cognitive construction) and, based on these, outline a framework that is used to define a set of tasks that are key to creating value in business relationships and hence become critical for sales in its hitherto neglected role as co-creator of relationship value. We illustrate the various tasks of this new role of sales with data from 43 interviews with sales managers and salespeople. Along with related normative recommendations in extant literature, the interviews provide support for the validity and relevance of our framework for understanding the role of sales in creating relationship value. This framework puts forward a much-needed first effort towards a theory of sales' role in creating relationship value and offers several opportunities for future research.     

Understanding sales manager effectiveness: Linking attributes to sales force values

Although sales managers influence a variety of sales force outcomes critically important in the dynamic business environment of the 21st Century, research examining sales manager effectiveness is limited. As such, an investigation of the attributes of effective sales managers, as well as the impact of these attributes on the sales force, is warranted. To explore these issues, the authors employed value laddering, an in-depth interview technique that facilitates the identification of key attributes and the subsequent linkages of those attributes to consequences and underlying values or goals held by respondents. Data collected from sales professionals resulted in 308 ladders that were subsequently aggregated across subjects and used to generate a hierarchical value map (HVM) reflecting the associations among constructs. The HVM highlights the attributes of effective sales managers, as identified by respondents, and reflects three major sales management roles: communicator, motivator and coach. Each of these roles is explored and managerial and research implications are discussed.     

REIT Asset Sales: Opportunistic Versus Liquidation

This study provides novel evidence that the outcome from REIT sales of office and apartment property is signaled in the transaction price managers accept relative to the fundamental value. The identification strategy recognizes opportunistic sales as sold at prices above fundamental value. Opportunistic sales are followed by positive abnormal returns, measured relative to the market and associated benchmark indices. Assets sold below fundamental value are liquidated by firms with low profitability, low cash and low investment opportunities. Discounted transactions experience zero abnormal returns. Returns following asset sales are influenced by accounting measures, the flow of funds and financial constraints.     

Agricultural supply response and poverty in Mozambique

This paper identifies key causal factors behind farmers’ marketing decisions in Mozambique. A two-step decision making process is outlined. Farmers decide, first, whether or not to participate in the market. Next, they decide how much to sell. The model is estimated using a Heckman switching regression approach. The key importance of non-price factors such as risk, technology and transport infrastructure come out clearly. Marginal effects are calculated for poor and nonpoor households and broken down into a market participation and a quantity (sales value) component. The marginal effects for the poor are not substantially different from those of the nonpoor. This suggests that differences in area-based characteristics (especially risk and technology) are more influential in the commercialization process than differences in how the poor and the nonpoor respond to incentives. Moreover, interventions to promote market access are likely to solicit a greater volume of additional supply from peasants entering the market for the first time than from existing market participants stepping up their production and sales. To achieve pro-poor rural growth it is essential to address explicitly the conditions of high-risk, low productivity and low capital endowments of poor farmers.