Real Estate Finance

Real estate research has a much longer tradition in Anglo-Saxon countries than in Germany. From a (German) research perspective, real estate with its core subfield real estate finance was rather a research niche in the past. However, its relevance is likely to rise in the future. This might not only be due to the subprime crisis. With real estate locking up a large share of capital of non-property companies, managing real estate has become a major issue for the last two decades. Apart from that, real estate represents an important asset class from an investment perspective. Therefore, this special issue of the Zeitschrift für Betriebswirtschaft intends to take a closer look at the status quo of German real estate research activities by presenting four articles with three of them focusing on special problems in the field of real estate finance. In order to get a broader insight into the whole research field as well, this special issue starts with an international overview of real estate and real estate finance as a discipline.

We present a citation-based analysis of the most important journals on real estate and real estate finance over a time period from 1986 to 2010. For each year, those three articles with the highest number of citations according to Google Scholar are identified. A thorough analysis of all 75 selected articles reveals that the focus of interest has been on (1) empirical research, (2) mainly using data of residential real estate, with (3) the primary objective of evaluating real estate investment until the midst 1990s. In order to derive reliable risk-return relations for real estate investment, (4) asset pricing as the main task of real estate appraisal is in the centre of attention, too. Appraisal issues have relatively gained importance for the last fifteen years in comparison to investment issues. Interdisciplinary aspects and sustainable issues are only very rarely integrated in appraisal methods, the focus is primarily on maximizing economic returns. Therefore, our citation analysis confirms that the Financial Management Approach of Dasso and Woodward (1980) is the predominant approach particularly in the United States. Our findings regarding our basic sample of articles are cross-checked by several robustness tests. For future research activities, it seems to be quite promising to focus on the one hand on interdisciplinary aspects and on the other hand to contribute to the theoretical foundation of real estate with the aim of developing a common body of knowledge.

The frequently large divergences between share price and net asset value (NAV) of listed real estate companies have been a key topic in real estate research for many years. However, previous research has mainly focused on the U.S. market, concentrating on companies’ performance ratios related to information from balance sheet statements and/or income statements as well as information from the stock market, and its results are not satisfying. This study, on the other hand, focuses on the European real estate market and presents a semi-rational model for explaining NAV spreads, taking into account performance ratios and market sentiment simultaneously. It appears that market sentiment in particular substantially improves the model, which explains more than 76% of the NAV spread. Thus, the developed model constitutes a significant improvement over previous studies on the explanation of NAV spreads.

In course of the recent turmoil in the financial markets, several open-end real estate funds froze redemption of their units, resulting in unanticipated and unprecedented liquidity and performance shocks for investors. Against this background, we analyze the long- and short-term risk and return profiles of open-end real estate funds and their role in efficient multi-asset retirement portfolios. To this end, we introduce the Retirement Efficient Frontier, describing those investment strategies that minimize the lifetime probability of ruin for specific levels of periodic withdrawals from a given retirement wealth. We find that for low to moderate periodic withdrawals, efficient portfolios consist of up to 85% real estate fund investments in case fund units are continuously redeemable. Moreover we show that even if there is a monthly probability of 2.5% that redemption of fund units is temporarily suspended, the allocation into real estate funds in risk-efficient portfolios is only slightly affected. Yet, if funds additionally face a high risk of having to depreciate their property portfolio during a liquidity crisis, their share in efficient retirement portfolios is reduced significantly.

In recent history, financial markets worldwide experienced severe turmoil due to the subprime crisis originating from the practice of US mortgage banks to securitize loans given especially to subprime borrowers. In the same crisis, several distressed banks were bailed out by states with even more banks receiving financial aids from governments. Using a unique data sample of 100 announcements of US mortgage banks between 2006 and 2009, this paper provides empirical evidence that isolated failures of US mortgage banks caused significant contagion effects in the US financial system. Conversely, especially the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac led to significant positive valuation effects at rival banks. In the cross-sectional analyses, contrary to previous studies in the literature on past financial crises, we find evidence for pure contagion effects following the failures of US mortgage banks. Furthermore, we analyze the reactions of the CDS spreads of several large US banks to the announcements of mortgage banks using a novel mixture copula model. The results show that the contagion effects were limited to the stock market thus underlining the notion of an irrational response of (stock) market participants. The results from our cross-sectional and CDS data analyses in turn indicate that several of the failures of US mortgage banks during the subprime crisis caused irrational contagion in the US financial system thus justifying government intervention. Finally, we rule out the possibility that the contagion effects limited to the US stock market were caused by a herding of investors.