Research Paper: A slowdown in 2016 brought fears that global real estate returns might have reached a turning point, as worries about the growth of e-commerce, political populism and rising interest rates weighed on expectations. Were those concerns realized in 2017?

Blog Post: 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. But determining underwriting assumptions for individual properties requires greater specificity.

Blog Post: 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.

Blog Post: 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 internet-resistant retailers, such as supermarkets, dominated the top-performing retail assets in 2017.

Blog Post: 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?

Research Paper: 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, providing stable returns and operating metrics. All the same, the changing retail environment means portfolios must be well managed to be positioned for the transition underway.

Research Paper: Investors often target certain markets when executing their allocation strategies. However, differences between individual properties and high asset-specific risk mean that holding just one or two assets is not usually sufficient to replicate the market. This paper — which uses an example of an investor targeting specific global office markets — shows that a representative exposure could have been achieved with portfolios approaching 10 assets in size. Most of the reduction in tracking error comes from the first few assets acquired, but investors should be aware that the number of assets needed to approach market exposure can vary from market to market.

Blog Post: Increasingly, institutional investors with international strategies tend to concentrate their search for attractive property investments in established Central Business Districts (CBDs) within “global gateway cities,” such as New York, London and Hong Kong.