You don’t have to be a master craftsman to appreciate the benefits of using the right tool for the job. Even the most casual do-it-yourselfer has experienced the frustration of using the wrong screwdriver for a particular job — one that doesn’t quite fit the screw properly and shreds the head, leaving it uselessly stuck in the wood without fixing anything.

Real estate investors sometimes treat core and opportunistic funds as if they were different asset classes. They are measured against different benchmarks and comparisons are limited by a lack of consistent data. But a comparison of the two shows that both core and opportunistic funds have similar return profiles — it’s the magnitude of their returns that has varied over time.

In 2017, industrial real estate had the highest sector total returns across many global markets. We have found that this was not just a rerun of industrial’s normal cyclical rotation, but that there were signs of a secular revolution starting, driven by e-commerce.  In many global markets, the spread in yields between industrial and the other commercial real estate sectors has compressed more over recent years than in previous cycles. In the U.K., where outperformance was particularly...

Although e-commerce has disrupted industries once considered staples in retail properties, certain retail assets are thriving. Simply put, some goods and services cannot be purchased over the internet: Working out at a fitness center or dining at a restaurant cannot be replicated by online transactions. And while some companies sell groceries online, most food shopping still takes place in stores. Our findings show that experience-oriented tenants, such as movie theaters and restaurants, and...

Since the Global Financial Crisis, real estate investors have turned to Global Gateway Cities as a key way to diversify portfolios and to generate capital growth. The conventional wisdom asserts these large, well connected and economically dynamic cities should provide more liquidity and more stable cash flows than those available from secondary markets. But have these cities, which include London, New York and Tokyo, offered the superior and safer investments to justify their premium pricing?

Retailer bankruptcies, department store struggles and empty malls have dominated recent U.S. retail news headlines. The apparent culprit? A mass movement to online shopping. The “retail apocalypse” has led to fears of consumers abandoning physical bricks-and-mortar stores in favor of online shopping. In this paper, we use MSCI data to illustrate that, despite the inexorable rise of e-commerce over the last 20 years, retail asset performance in the U.S. has been surprisingly resilient,...