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Exploring the ‘what ifs?’ in real estate 

The opacity of real estate markets and the wide spectrum of potential outcomes makes it hard to understand performance. Running a historical “what if” analysis may help institutional investors understand how different choices could have impacted outcomes.

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What’s the downside in real estate? 

Real estate has always been marked by periods of expansion and sometimes painful corrections. But all cycles are not alike.

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Real estate may be yielding less than you thought 

Income has long been an important part of real estate returns meaning yields are often heavily scrutinized by investors. However, headline yields do not factor in capital expenditure requirements which can vary significantly. Investors looking to better understand potential “free cash flow” positions of portfolios post-capex may want to adjust the yields they use to account for it.

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The changing face of real estate portfolios 

Office and retail investments’ historic dominance of commercial real estate portfolios is decreasing, with other property types — including logistics centers, student housing, and data centers — increasing. This evolution highlights how technology and the search for yield have led investors to diversify and seek exposure to other property types.

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Asian retail resilience: Have store hours affected performance? 

Industrial real estate has outperformed retail assets in recent years, but the trend has been less pronounced in Asia, where store hours, among other reasons, might have led to more resilient retail performance.

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Measuring real estate capital growth isn’t rocket science, is it? 

In September 1999, NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter was lost, at a reported cost of USD 125 million, due to a mix-up in measurements.

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Global real estate: To hedge, or not to hedge 

While not quite as profound as the Shakespearean original, it is still quite a tricky one for real estate investors to grapple with. Until fairly recently, it is one that has been avoided by the majority of real estate investors due to their heavy home bias. But the increasing global nature of the asset class, combined with rising currency volatility, means the question is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid.

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For real estate, all rate rises are not created equal 

A decade after the global financial crisis, the era of ultra-low interest rates may be drawing to a close. Many real estate investors worry that rising rates could hurt their portfolios. However, our analysis suggests it’s the macroeconomic fundamentals driving interest rates, not the rise itself, that are most important.

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Have Big-Ticket Properties Performed Better Than Lower-Value Properties? 

It is sometimes assumed that larger real estate assets perform differently to smaller assets thanks to reduced accessibility and competition at the top end of the market. Using MSCI’s global private real estate dataset, we find evidence to support the assertion that the size of an asset does have an impact on its performance.

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Are low yields a risk for your private real estate portfolio? 

In a global environment of sluggish growth and low interest rates, yields on private real estate are under sustained pressure. Yields have been compressing since 2010 and are now lower than before 2007.

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Has foreign capital changed the face of Australian real estate? 

In recent years, Australian commercial real estate has attracted considerable attention from international investors, changing the dynamics of what was historically a domestically dominated market.