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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.
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Blog posts by Will Robson
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Appraisers of retail real estate have come in for criticism for excessive bullishness. Media commentary has fixated on the shuttering of shops, while retail-focused real estate investment trusts (REITs) are priced at substantial discounts to the value of their assets.1 Against this backdrop, many question whether appraisers are overvaluing retail properties. But MSCI data on transacted assets suggests that appraisers haven’t been over-optimistic on the retail sector; and, if anything, they appear to have appraised retail assets more accurately than other property sectors — industrial real estate, in particular.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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?
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Institutional investors use factors to capture returns and understand drivers of risk and return in their listed securities portfolios. Can factors that have generated long-term premia in equity markets help identify private real estate assets that have outperformed historically?
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