Fractional Cointegration Analysis of Securitized Real Estate

This paper uses fractional cointegration analysis to examine whether long-run relations exist between securitized real estate returns and three sets of variables frequently used in the literature as the factors driving securitized real estate returns. That is, we examine whether such relationships are characterized by long memory (long-range dependence), short memory (short-range dependence), mean reversion (no long-run effects) or no mean reversion (no long-run equilibrium). The forecasting implications are also considered. Empirical analyses are conducted using data for the U.S., the U.K., and Australia. We find strong evidence of fractional cointegration between securitized real estate and the three sets of variables. Such relationships are mainly characterized by short memory although long memory is sometimes present. The use of fractional cointegration for forecasting purposes proves particularly useful since the start of the financial crisis.     

Long-Term Co-Memories and Short-Run Adjustment: Securitized Real Estate and Stock Markets

This study considers whether securitized real estate and stock markets have long-term co-memories and implications for short-term adjustment. Our results offer reasonable support for fractional cointegration (characteristic of a long memory process) between securitized real estate price, stock market price and key macroeconomic factors in some economies. The implication is that where fractional cointegration prevails, securitized real estate and common stocks are substitutable assets over the long run and these assets may not be held together in a portfolio for diversification purpose. Furthermore, short-run analysis indicates that the speed of adjustment towards the long-run equilibrium is faster for fractional integrated vector error correction model (FIVECM) than VECM as the former incorporates a long history of past cointegration residuals. Additional comparisons of the two models’ forecasting accuracy show that incorporating fractional cointegration in a VECM model improves the forecasting performance over conventional VECM models. Our results reinforce the notion that cointegration, fractional cointegration and short-run adjustment dynamics are important in understanding market integration/segmentation.     

Common factors in international securitized real estate markets

This study investigates the presence of common factors in the securitized real estate markets of the Untied States (US), United Kingdom (UK), Hong Kong (HK), and Singapore (SG). Using a combination of factor analysis and canonical correlation analysis on 10-year monthly return data for 142 real estate securities in the four markets, more common risk factors among real estate securities within a country than across countries are detected. In addition, there is at least one common securitized real estate market factor that is moderately correlated with the world real estate market, and to a lesser extent, with the world stock market. However, the degree of linkage across the four securitized real estate markets is much weaker than the strong linkages present across the four economies. It further appears that the extent to which correlations are found in international securitized real estate markets might largely be due to the increasing integrated nature of the world real economy, rather than a result of the globalization of financial markets. The results are preliminary, but indicative, and suggest that more studies exploring how common factors, together with the local market portfolio, could help explain the return-generating process of securitized real estate.     

Net Asset Value Discounts for Asian-Pacific Real Estate Companies: Long-Run Relationships and Short-Term Dynamics

This study investigates the time series behavior of real estate company net asset value discount/premium (NAVDISC) in eight Asian-Pacific securitized real estate markets from 1995 to 2003. We postulate that if there is a stable NAVDISC for real estate companies in the long-run, then there should be a long-run cointegrating relation between their stock prices (Ps) and net asset values (NAVs). Employing panel data cointegration econometrics that comprises three approaches; panel unit root test, heterogeneous panel cointegration test and dynamic panel error-correction modeling (ECM), we find that long run NAVDISCs persist in individual Asian-Pacific securitized real estate markets and the regional market. All the NAVDISCs exhibit mean reversion and that the respective disequilibrium errors fluctuate around the mean values. Moreover, NAV is an important factor that statistically explains the price variations in real estate stock prices regardless of their speed of mean-reversion in the NAV discount /premium.     

U.S. Monetary Policy Surprises and International Securitized Real Estate Markets

This paper examines the impact of U.S. monetary policy surprises on securitized real estate markets in 18 countries. The policy surprises are measured by both the surprise changes to the target federal funds rate (the target factor) and surprises in the future direction of the Federal Reserve monetary policy (the path factor). The results show that most international securitized real estate markets have significantly positive responses to surprise decrease in current or future expected federal funds rates, though such responses vary greatly across countries. Also, while the U.S. securitized real estate market reacts mainly to the target factor, foreign securitized real estate markets react to the path factor. Furthermore, we find that the cross-country variation in the response to the target factor is correlated with the country’s exchange rate regime and its degree of real economic and particularly financial integration, while the cross-country variation in the response to the path factor is mainly related to the country’s degree of financial integration.     

Dynamic Interactions Between Private and Public Real Estate Markets: Some International Evidence

This study evaluates long-run relationships and short-run linkages between the private (unsecuritized) and the public (securitized) real estate markets of Australia, Netherlands, United Kingdom and the United States. Results indicate the existence of long-run relationships between the public and private real estate markets of each of the countries under consideration. This implies that for all countries, investors would not have realized long-term portfolio diversification benefits from allocating funds in both the private and public real estate markets since these assets are substitutable over the long run. Short-run analyses also reveal significant causal relationships between private and public markets of all countries under consideration. As expected, it was found that price discovery occurred in the public real estate market in that it leads but is not led by its private real estate market counterpart.     

Testing Calendar Effects of International Equity and Real Estate Markets

There are a lot of previous studies on calendar effects. However, most of them use traditional methods like regression. Hui et al. Habitat International 48, 38–45, (2015b) incorporated Shiryaev-Zhou index with logistic regression to study the Halloween and January effects of eight securitized real estate markets, but they fixed the moving-window size to be 130 days. How the change in moving-window size affects the calendar effects cannot be seen. In this study, we also apply the Shiryaev-Zhou index, but we allow the moving-window size to vary. Furthermore, we incorporated Shiryaev-Zhou index with analysis of mean (ANOM) and logistic regression to examine calendar effects of general equity and securitized real estate indices of Hong Kong, Japan, US, UK, France and Germany during the period 1996 – 2014. The results show that our new methods can detect additional channels of significant calendar effects of which normal methods fail to show. Furthermore, the general equity indices show significant Halloween and January effects. However, for the securitized real estate indices, the Halloween and January effects are less significant or even go into reverse in some cases. This study has two main implications. Firstly, investors can formulate a better trading strategy to earn more profits. Secondly, trends and phenomena found in equity markets may not be applicable to real estate markets, so investment rules on equity markets may not work on real estate markets.     

Are REITs real estate? Evidence from international sector level data

The aim of this study is to examine whether securitized real estate returns reflect direct real estate returns or general stock market returns using international data for the U.S., U.K., and Australia. In contrast to previous research, which has generally relied on overall real estate market indices and neglected the potential long-term dynamics, our econometric evaluation is based on sector level data and caters for both the short-term and long-term dynamics of the assets as well as for the lack of leverage in the direct real estate indices. In addition to the real estate and stock market indices, the analysis includes a number of fundamental variables that are expected to influence real estate and stock returns significantly. We estimate vector error-correction models and investigate the forecast error variance decompositions and impulse responses of the assets. Both the variance decompositions and impulse responses suggest that the long-run REIT market performance is much more closely related to the direct real estate market than to the general stock market. Consequently, REITs and direct real estate should be relatively good substitutes in a long-horizon investment portfolio. The results are of relevance regarding the relationship between public and private markets in general, as the ‘duality’ of the real estate markets offers an opportunity to test whether and how closely securitized asset returns reflect the performance of underlying private assets. The study also includes implications concerning the recent financial crisis.     

Volatility Spillovers, Comovements and Contagion in Securitized Real Estate Markets

This paper analyzes the relationships between local and global securitized real estate markets, but also between securitized real estate and common stock markets. First, the volatility transmissions across markets are examined using an asymmetric t-BEKK (Baba-Engle-Kraft-Kroner) specification of their covariance matrix. Second, correlations from that model and tail dependences estimated using a time-varying copula framework are analyzed to assess whether different dynamics underlie the comovements in the whole distribution and those in the tails. Third, we investigate market contagion by testing for structural changes in the tail dependences. We use data for the U.S., the U.K. and Australia for the period 1990–2010 as a basis for our analyses. Spillover effects are found to be the largest in the U.S., both domestically and internationally. Further, comovements in tail distributions between markets appear to be quite important. We also document different dynamics between the conditional tail dependences and correlations. Finally, we find evidence of market contagion between the U.S. and the U.K. markets following the subprime crisis.     

Multiple Regimes and Volatility Transmission in Securitized Real Estate Markets

We examine the dynamics and transmission of conditional volatilities with multiple structural changes in return volatility using Bai and Perron (2003)’s methodology, across five major securitized real estate markets as well as employing a multivariate regime-dependent asymmetric dynamic covariance methodology (MRDADC) that allows the conditional matrix to be both time- and state-varying. Our results imply that a multiple-regime time varying asymmetric variance and covariance approach is important in modeling real estate securities valuation and selection and portfolio optimization, and is consistent with popular beliefs that market volatility changes over time. Our MRDADC models detect the presence of significant mean-volatility linkages across the five major securitized real estate markets under different volatility regimes and would have implications for global investor in terms of estimating a dynamic risk-minimizing hedge ratio in international portfolio management.     

Property Investment and Property Development Firm Performance Around Initial Public Offerings and Rights Offerings: U.K. Evidence

In contrast to the well-documented underperformance of equity issuers, property investment firms undertaking initial public offerings and rights issues have performed indistinguishably from similar nonissuing firms. Property development companies that issued equity over the same period performed significantly worse than nonissuing firms. The major difference between property development and property investment firms is that property investment firms hold portfolios of real estate assets and thus have more certain prices. The lower pricing uncertainty of property investment firms results in normal long-run performance. Tests of the cognitive bias hypothesis provide only weak support of this explanation, while size and book-market effects are unable to account for the performance of property investment and development companies. The findings of underperformance for rights issues suggest that timing equity issues to take advantage of new shareholders may not be linked to the existence of cognitive bias. An important finding for the international growth in securitized real estate markets is that no evidence is found suggesting equity issues of securitized real estate firms should be avoided.     

Is There Volatility Convergence in Asia-Pacific Securitized Real Estate Markets?

We assess whether a group of eight Asia-Pacific securitized real estate markets display similar volatility trend over the past 15 years, 1995–2009, using an econometric model that incorporates common volatility effects across the sample markets. The empirical results indicate the presence of at least one common variance component, and thus partial volatility convergence, among the sample Asia real estate securities markets. During the global financial crisis period, some real estate securities markets are co-integrated in both their first and second moments and demonstrate partial price and volatility convergence. Our analysis that focuses in capturing the common roots in the second moment whilst accounting for time-varying variance has important implications for international real estate portfolio investment.     

News Effects and Structural Shifts in Price Discovery in Hong Kong

This paper examines two questions about the temporal stability of the price discovery relationship using data from Hong Kong. We first study the extent to which abnormally large returns (positive or negative) to securitized real estate are transferred to the returns in the direct real estate market. Our regressions show that price discovery is much reduced in the period following a news event. They show that the estimate of the long run price discovery effect also is reduced once we control for news effects. The second question we examine is whether the price discovery relationship is stable over time. The evidence appears to indicate that the post-1994 period was different from the preceding period. The change in the strength of the price discovery effect may be linked to a change in banking regulations in February 1994 that limited banks' risk exposure to real estate loans by capping them at 40 percent of total lending or to anti-speculative measures introduced by the government in the second quarter of 1994 to curb speculation in the residential market. Our statistical tests of structural stability give mixed results and are therefore inconclusive. These findings suggest that the size of the price discovery effect depends upon the amount of real estate information embedded in the history of securitized returns. The findings further suggest that the securitized return series itself may be an incomplete measure of the quantum of information.     

On the Hybrid Nature of REITs

The consensus that emerges from the current research on the linkage between securitized and direct investment in real estate is that direct (private) real estate returns play a relatively minor role in the real estate investment trust (REIT) return generating process. However, this result may at least partially be due to the coarseness of the measures of direct real estate returns or the relatively short return horizons used in previous studies. This study takes a different and unique perspective. Unlike earlier studies we do not use aggregated, average appraisal based returns on direct real estate investment. Instead, we use the MIT TBI indexes, which are transaction based price indexes, available both on the aggregate and sub-index levels. We find that the relation between REIT and direct real estate returns appears to be stronger at longer horizons. More specifically, using a cointegration framework, we find robust evidence that REITs and the underlying real estate are related and that they share a long run equilibrium. Interestingly, we find that both REITs and direct real estate returns adjust towards this long run relationship. When we examine property type level data we find similar results.     

Volatility Decomposition and Correlation in International Securitized Real Estate Markets

This study contributes to the literature in international securitized real estate market volatility in three ways. Each market’s conditional volatility is decomposed into a “permanent” or long-run component and a “transitory” or short-run component via a component-GARCH model. Even though with the same number of common factors derived from the “permanent” and “transitory” volatility series, their loadings are not similar and consequently the long-run and short-run volatility linkages for some markets are different. Finally there are significant volatility co-movements between real estate and stock markets’ “permanent” and “transitory” components suggesting that real estate markets are at least not segmented from stock markets in international investing.     

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.

Are Securitized Real Estate Returns more Predictable than Stock Returns?

This paper examines whether the predictability of securitized real estate returns differs from that of stock returns. It also provides a cross-country comparison of securitized real estate return predictability. In contrast to most of the literature on this issue, the analysis is not based on a multifactor asset pricing framework as such analyses may bias the results. We use a time series approach and thus create a level playing field to compare the predictability of the two asset classes. Forecasts are performed with ARMA and ARMA–EGARCH models and evaluated by comparing the entire empirical distributions of prediction errors, as well as with a trading strategy. The results, based on daily data for the 1990–2007 period, show that securitized real estate returns are generally more predictable than stock returns in countries with mature and well established REIT regimes. ARMA–EGARCH models are found to have portfolio outperformance potential even in the presence of transaction costs, with generally better results for securitized real estate than for stocks.     

Interactions Between Property and Equity Markets: An Investigation of Linkages in the United Kingdom 1972–1992

Two strands of real estate research—that concerned with the relationships between securitized real estate and the underlying market and that dealing with the role of property in the wider economy—rarely are considered together. The paper utilizes the U.K. equity market and property company share data to explore the relationships between real estate and the rest of the economy, using a two-sector analytic model. Causality analysis suggests that the wider economy leads the real estate market in the short term but that, with a longer lag structure, positive real estate returns may point to negative future returns in the rest of the economy. This provides weak confirmatory evidence for theories of capital switching between sectors.     

Do Unexpected Land Auction Outcomes Bring New Information to the Real Estate Market?

Land and real estate are intrinsically related but generally traded in two different markets. Vacant land, being a major “raw material” for development of real estate, is traded by developers who actively manage development risk for profit. Real estate, being a long lived final product, is traded by end-users or investors for use or investment in the secondary market. This study examines price discovery between the two markets. The key question is whether land transactions, in the form of public auctions, convey any new information to the secondary real estate market. Our results suggest unexpected land auction outcomes have both market-wide and local effects on real estate prices. However, the impacts are asymmetric. We found that lower than expected land auction prices have a significant negative market-wide and local impact on real estate prices while higher than expect land auction prices have little or no impact.     

REITs,real estate,and inflation: Lessons from the gold market

This studyindirectly tests whether equity Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) proxy for real estate when examining real estate's inflation hedging ability. The hedging properties of gold, an underlying asset, are compared against those of gold stocks, a securitized form of the asset, and gold is shown to perform well as an inflation hedge, while gold stocks do not. This divergence between an asset and its securitized form suggests caution in drawing conclusions about real estate's ability to hedge inflation from equity REIT studies.