Breadcrumb
Extended Viewer
Will Robson
Executive Director & Head of Real Estate Solutions Research
About the Contributor
Will Robson is Executive Director & Global Head of Real Estate Solutions Research. He is responsible for the direction and delivery of MSCI’s applied real estate research agenda. Previously, Will spent close to five years and was a founding member of the real estate research team at the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Will holds both an MSc and BA in Economics from the University of York and University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
HTML Displayer Portlet
Blog posts by Will Robson
Extended-lister
-
As 2021 real estate index returns roll in, we’ve seen a broad-based acceleration of returns across nearly all countries and property types. But what can looking beyond the aggregate index returns tell us about the difference between the winners and losers?
-
Private-asset investors are waking up to the urgency of the climate crisis, while dealing with other long-term disruptive trends that accelerated during the pandemic. We may see a substantial reallocation of capital as investors respond to these challenges.
-
Real estate investors have increasingly sought pan-regional funds to diversify globally. But such funds’ exposures can be significantly different from the market at large. What’s an appropriate benchmark for these diversified fund investments?
-
BLOG
Translating Climate Goals into Action in Real Estate Portfolios
Jun 28, 2021 Will Robson , Niel Harmse
Learn MoreMany investors have made bold commitments to transition their real estate portfolios to net-zero carbon emissions and are now developing and implementing plans to achieve this goal. But what could this transition look like in practice for property portfolios?
-
BLOG
Real Estate’s Climate-Transition Risk: The Path to Net-Zero
May 25, 2021 Will Robson
Learn MoreThe 2015 Paris Agreement seeks to keep the rise in global temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and many governments are aiming for 1.5°C through nationally determined contributions. What are the implications for real estate markets?
-
COVID-19 has caused a severe and rapid economic contraction and accelerated secular changes already hitting parts of the real estate markets. Investors face a fundamental question: How will real estate evolve as a sector and asset class? Here are our 2021 real estate trends to watch.
-
Infrastructure investments have not been spared the effects of the pandemic. A closer look across investment types, subsectors and risk levels over time may provide useful perspective as private-capital firms and their investors manage through.
-
From managing climate risk to advances in analytics, 2020 may be a watershed year for real estate. Read our top five emerging trends likely to be front of mind for global real estate investors in 2020 and beyond
-
BLOG
Digging deeper into pan-European property funds’ performance
Nov 26, 2019 Will Robson
Learn MoreProperty investors who invest across a broad region, like Europe, can use a peer-group benchmark to gauge relative performance. But to determine the specific drivers of returns, detailed asset-level performance attribution can help shed light.
-
BLOG
Underwater assets? Real estate exposure to flood risk
Sep 17, 2019 Gillian Mollod , Will Robson
Learn MoreReal estate investors are buying and leasing assets that might be jeopardized by a climate-changed world. A new analysis can help investors identify high-risk U.K. locations.
-
Media commentary has fixated on the shuttering of shops, while retail-focused REITs are priced at substantial discounts to the value of their assets. Have appraisers of retail real estate been excessively bullish?
-
For real estate investors, 2019 may be a year of adjusting to rapid changes arising from a variety of sources, including environmental, social and governance-related (ESG) risks; geopolitical uncertainty; and disruptive technology.
-
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.
-
Due to the private nature of real estate, investors are often faced with making decisions based on broad market-level information or data relating to a rarified class of hypothetical, top-quality, perfectly located, “prime” benchmark properties, which, much like Peter Pan, never age.
-
Retailer bankruptcies, department store struggles and empty malls have dominated recent headlines. The apparent culprit? A massive movement toward online shopping, driven by retail giants such as Amazon and Walmart.
-
When developing investment strategies, institutional investors in private real estate tend to rely on market-level performance data. But many real estate investors know that every asset is different and even two seemingly identical assets in the same area can produce very different returns. How can they better understand the true risk underlying their exposures when developing their strategies?