A Comparison of the Recent Performance of Publicly Traded Real Property Portfolios and Common Stock

In this study we compare the returns earned by investments in publicly traded limited partnerships (PTLPs), finite life equity REITs, and traditional equity REITs with those resulting from investing in common stocks (proxied by closed-end mutual funds). Performance comparisons are made using generalized stochastic dominance (GSD). This tool avoids the joint hypothesis problem that arises when an asset pricing model is used as a performance benchmark. The results of the analysis indicate that the performance of the closed-end mutual funds was preferred to that of the individual equity REITs (both traditional and finite life) and PTLP securities by a wide array of risk-averse investors. This result was most pronounced following the passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 which severely restricted the tax deductibility of real estate losses. When the equity REITs were combined into portfolios, their performance dominated the mutual funds during the 1980–85 period. Further, the PTLP portfolio returns were preferred to several of the mutual funds even in the post-1985 period. These findings reflect the fact that the securitized real property portfolios studied are not as well diversified as mutual funds. However, the mutual funds remained the dominant investment alternative in the post-1986 period.     

Capital Structure Decisions in Real Estate Investment

This study examines the financing decisions of real estate investors and the choice of capital structure when acquiring income-producing properties. Drawing from the literature in finance and real estate, we develop a capital structure model for real estate investment and derive six hypotheses regarding the relationship of the overall loan-to-value ratio chosen by an investor to selected characteristics of the investment. The hypotheses are then tested using financing data from a sample of apartment and commercial transactions over a fifteen-year period in a specific real estate market. The empirical findings strongly support the importance of depreciation deductions, financial distress costs, capital constraints, tax rates, and interest rates as determinants of the capital structure of real estate investors.     

Real Estate Investment Acquisition Rules for Life Insurance Companies and Pension Funds: A Survey

Real estate comprises the major wealth of the United States as well as the world. Life insurance companies and pension funds are rapidly becoming major investors in real estate due to their large portfolios and annual cash inflows. Aggregate inflows of life insurance companies and pension funds are estimated to be about 150 billion dollars per year. Increasing amounts of these funds are believed to be going into real estate investments. This study surveys life insurance companies and pension managers on all facets of their real estate investments. The survey covers real estate portfolio size and type, portfolio composition, investment by property type, international investments, before-tax analysis, after-tax analysis, diversification strategies, computer usage, holding period assumptions and criteria for obtaining mortgages, equity positions and construction loans. The results of this study are then compared and contrasted with previous studies.     

Real Estate Investment Analysis: New Developments in Traditional Leverage Concepts

The advantages of utilizing leverage in real estate investments has received much attention in the past, but little guidance has been offered that shows the investor the most opportune leverage position for a given investment alternative. Traditional leverage concepts are explored in this article, prior to developing a financial indifference point model and a continuous-function degree of financial leverage (DFL) formula. The indifference point and DFL as shown here are relatively simple to calculate and provide additional insights into risk, return and leverage concepts for real estate investments.     

Portfolio Considerations in the Valuation of Real Estate

When a real asset rises in price faster than inflation (as real estate did in the late 1970s) and rises significantly in price over an extended period (as real estate has done for the last decade and one-half), it concerns valuation and investment professionals who fear about it being over-valued. One of the reasons for such price performance may be an increase in demand due to the portfolio characteristics of the asset during the period of time in question. For real estate this means the proportion included in optimal portfolios should be significant and increasing as individual tax rates increase in an environment of increasing average tax rates.
This study uses six tax brackets (0%, 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%) and portfolios consisting of three traditional assets (NYSE common stocks, corporate bonds and small stocks) plus three types of real estate (residential, business and farmland) to demonstrate that this is what has transpired in the real estate markets. Optimal portfolio weights are derived for each asset for after-tax portfolios. Real estate in general and residential real estate especially increased as a proportion of the optimal after-tax portfolio as individual tax rates increased. Other studies are used to demonstrate an environment of increasing average tax rates.     

Real Estate in a Mixed‐Asset Portfolio: The Role of the Investment Horizon

In this article, three oft‐mentioned special characteristics of the real estate asset market—high transaction costs, marketing period risk and return predictability—are addressed in analyzing the role of U.K. commercial real estate investments in a mixed‐asset portfolio. Due to favorable horizon effects in risk and return, the allocation to real estate in a portfolio with stocks, bonds and cash increases strongly with the investment horizon. Examining the relative importance of return predictability, transaction costs and marketing period risk for the optimal allocation to real estate, the article finds that the consideration of return predictability is very important, except for short‐term horizons. Accounting for transaction costs is crucial for short‐ and medium‐term investors. Marketing period risk appears to be negligible. Traditional mean‐variance analysis—that is, ignoring return predictability, transaction costs and marketing period risk—can be very misleading.     

Currency Swaps and International Real Estate Investment

This paper examines the efficacy of currency swaps as a hedging mechanism for the exchange rate risk associated with foreign investment in real estate. Earlier studies have concentrated on short-term hedging instruments such as options and forward contracts. Currency swaps are better suited for use on investments with long-term holding periods such as real estate. The findings indicate that, although hedging United States real estate investments with currency swaps suppresses most of the risk induced by currency instability, the improvements are insufficient to produce diversification gains for foreign investors in the context of mean-variance portfolio performance.     

Alternative Benchmarks for Evaluating Mutual Fund Performance

While real estate investment trusts (REITs) have experienced very high growth rates over the past 15 years, the growth in mutual funds that invest in REITs has been even more dramatic. REIT mutual fund returns are typically presented relative to the return on a simple value-weighted REIT index. We ask whether including additional factors when benchmarking funds' returns can improve the explanatory power of the models and offer more precise estimates of alpha. We investigate three sets of REIT-based benchmarks, plus an index of returns derived from non-REIT real estate firms, namely homebuilders and real estate operating companies. The REIT-based factors are a set of characteristic factors, a set of property-type factors and a set of statistical factors. Using traditional single-index benchmarks, we find that about 6% of the REIT funds exhibit significant positive performance using traditional significance levels, which is more than twice what random chance would predict. However, with the multiple-index benchmarks that we prefer, this falls considerably to only 0.7%. In addition, we find that these sets of factors and the non-REIT indices better explain the month-to-month returns of the REIT mutual funds. This suggests that investors or researchers evaluating REIT mutual fund performance may benefit from a multiple-benchmark approach.     

Pension-Plan Real Estate Investment in an Asset–Liability Framework

This study explores the role of pension-plan real estate investment in an asset–liability framework. By assuming that the pension-plan manager wishes to have assets of at least equal value to the liabilities at all points in time, an asset selection process is derived which depends on both the asset's covariance with other assets and its covariance with the liability stream. We generally find real estate not to be highly correlated with pension-plan liabilities. This finding is of general interest, since it helps to explain why pension-plan real estate investment is extremely limited and much smaller than one would expect if pension-plan investors cared only about the mean and variance of the real return to their invested wealth.     

Analysis of the Characteristics of Individual Investors in Real Estate Securities and Income-Producing Property

Analysis of the responses to a nationwide survey of investors demonstrates that individuals who invest in real estate differ in a predictable way from those who invest in assets other than real estate. Two types of real estate investment vehicles are studied: income-producing (rental) property and real estate securities. A multiple group discriminant analysis model is presented which successfully classifies prospective investors into four groups (owners of income property only, real estate securities only, both, neither) with a predictive accuracy more than double the chance probability of correct classification. The results provide insights useful in policy analysis and the design and marketing of real estate investments.     

A Comparative Anatomy of Residential REITs and Private Real Estate Markets: Returns,Risks and Distributional Characteristics

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are the only truly liquid assets related to residential real estate investments. We study the behavior of U.S. Residential REITs over the past three decades and document their return characteristics. REITs have somewhat less market risk than equity; their betas against a broad market index average about 0.58. Decomposing their covariances into principal components reveals several strong factors. Residential REIT characteristics differ to some extent from those of the S&P/Case‐Shiller (SCS) private real estate markets. This is partly attributable to methods of index construction. Our examination of REITs suggests that investment in residential real estate is far more risky than what might be inferred from the widely followed SCS series. Although the SCS and REITs indicate little support for being able to predict each other, there is strong evidence of self‐predictability for the series.     

Personal Residential Real Estate Investment in Australia: Investor Characteristics and Investment Parameters

To date our understanding of the factors affecting the housing supply stem from the private provision of new units through real estate development. This article investigates a different aspect of housing supply, the private provision of rental housing through investment in existing properties. Using logistic regression and a series of micro data sets of Australian households, we examine the investment decision of residential rental property investors over the period 1990–2004. The sample period incorporates a full real estate cycle. Our results indicate that wealth-related factors are the dominant factors driving these investments. Life-cycle factors such as marriage and children play a less important role. Most of the determinants of income property investment do not vary with the property cycle. Marriage is an exception. It became more important as house prices rose.     

Real Estate for the Long Term: The Effect of Return Predictability on Long-Horizon Allocations

We examine how the predictability of real estate returns affects the risk of, and optimal allocations to, real estate for investors of differing investment horizons. Returns to direct real estate are mean reverting, and risk decreases with horizon. This is driven by a tendency for property transaction prices to overshoot inflation. Mean reversion in real estate returns is weaker than that of equities, resulting in real estate having similar risk to equities for long-term investors. However, optimal portfolios have large allocations to direct real estate at all horizons, and the allocation increases with horizon. Finally, we find that real estate investment trusts are a redundant asset class for investors with access to direct real estate as an asset class, but they do have a role in optimal allocations when direct property investment is not feasible.     

Commercial Real Estate Returns

In the commercial real estate market, which is perceived to be relatively inefficient, investors have comparative advantages; hence there are significant costs to diversification. This paper presents for the first time a series of market (or quasi-market) returns for a large data base. This data base is believed to be the most complete commercial real estate data base yet constructed. The paper empirically evaluates the benefits of diversification along various dimensions within the commercial real estate opportunity set. The analysis confirms certain aspects of prior work concerning inflation protection and diversification opportunities while concluding that even investment grade real estate investments are heterogeneous assets.     

Tax Reform and Organizational Forms for Holding Investment Real Estate: Corporation vs. Partnership

Following the ERTA of 1981, partnership ownership of real estate dominated corporate ownership. This study concludes that the Tax Reform Act of 1986 provides incentive for holding real estate investments that produce sizable tax losses and/or that are eligible for large tax credits in corporate rather than partnership form. Perpetuity cash flow models are employed initially to identify key tax and cash flow variables favorable to each organizational form. The perpetuity assumption is then relaxed to consider a more representative real estate investment. A sensitivity analysis examines the extent to which the base case results are dependent on the assumed values of selected model parameters.     

Public Versus Private Real Estate Equities: A More Refined, Long-Term Comparison

In this article we compare public and private real estate equities. In so doing, we control for three of the main differences between these investment alternatives: property-type mix, leverage and appraisal smoothing. With these two restated indices, we then run tests to determine in a statistical sense whether the restated means and volatilities of the two series were different from one another. The clear answer is that they were not. The results of the statistical tests combined with the fact that the average difference between the two (restated) return series has substantially narrowed (to approximately 60 basis points) in the more recent (1993–2001) period jointly suggest a seamless real estate market in which public- and private-market vehicles display a long-run synchronicity. This has important implications for portfolio management. First, public- and private-market vehicles ought to be viewed as offering investors a risk/return continuum of real estate investment opportunities. Second, while the "platform" did not matter in terms of observed return characteristics, the platform may matter with regard to liquidity, governance, transparency, control, executive compensation and so forth; an apparent clientele effect hints at these issues being valued differently by large and small investors.     

Time and Risk Diversification in Real Estate Investments: Assessing the Ex Post Economic Value

Welfare gains to long-horizon investors may derive from time diversification that exploits nonzero intertemporal return correlations associated with predictable returns. Real estate may thus become more desirable if its returns are negatively serially correlated. While it could be important for long-horizon investors, time diversification has been mostly investigated in asset menus without real estate and focusing on in-sample experiments. This article evaluates, ex post, the out-of-sample gains from diversification when equity real estate investment trusts (REITs) belong to the investment opportunity set. We find that diversification into REITs increases both the Sharpe ratio and the certainty equivalent of wealth for all investment horizons and for both classical and Bayesian (who account for parameter uncertainty) investors. The increases in Sharpe ratios are often statistically significant. However, the out-of-sample average Sharpe ratio and realized expected utility of long-horizon portfolios are frequently lower than that of a one-period portfolio, which casts doubt on the value of time diversification.     

Public Information and Abnormal Returns in Real Estate Investment

This study performs empirical tests of the semistrong form efficiency of a real estate investment market. An asset pricing model is utilized to estimate the abnormal returns resulting from two types of public information, major changes in government tax shelter and rent control policies as well as unanticipated changes in interest rates. In both cases the results find an absence of significant abnormal returns and no evidence to suggest that real estate investors can utilize information concerning government policy changes or interest rate movements to earn higher returns on a risk-adjusted basis. In general the findings of this study conform to the semistrong form version of the efficient markets hypothesis.     

The Effect of Alternative Return Measures on Restricted Mixed-Asset Portfolios

A restricted portfolio is constructed which includes NYSE common stocks, corporate bonds, government bonds, small capitalization common stocks, residential real estate and farmland and returns for each of four different tax brackets (0%, 15%, 30%, 45%). Next, three alternative measures of rates of return for residential real estate and farmland are used. Finally, since some researchers believe that standard risk measures (variance and standard deviation) do not capture the total risk in real estate, the risk for the real estate returns is increased five times while the returns are held constant. The twenty–four optimal portfolios (four tax brackets with two measures of risk and three measure of return for residential real estate and farmland) are then derived. These results are then compared and contrasted to each other to ascertain the change in sensitivity of the optimal portfolios due to different tax rates, different rates–of–return estimates and different risk estimates.     

The Stock Performance of Securitized Real Estate and Master Limited Partnerships

This paper examines the stock performance of 144 master limited partnerships (MLPs) holding real estate and other types of assets. MLP stocks were found to underperform the market on a risk-adjusted basis during the period 1981–1991. The evidence indicates that the MLP organizational form has not been a superior vehicle for holding real estate. Also, the performance of real estate MLP stocks is similar to the performance of the stocks of other types of MLPs and that of real estate MLP stock performance is comparable to the performance of real estate investment trust stocks.