Research Paper: At MSCI Real Estate we are seeing a greater demand from clients for benchmarking and the analytics to aid decision and communication right across the investment process, from allocation to execution. Our latest paper outlines the need for a coherent benchmarking framework to better understand the drivers of performance, irrespective of the portfolio's structure or investment objectives.

Blog Post: Real estate investors sometimes treat core and opportunistic funds differently, but comparing the two showed similar cyclical patterns.  Are there further insights to gain by using relative market analysis for opportunistic strategies?

Blog Post: Real estate investors have historically had a strong home bias. However, the increasingly global nature of the asset class, combined with rising currency volatility, means deciding whether to hedge currency risk or not is becoming an important consideration.

Research Paper:  In 2017, industrial real estate had the highest sector total returns across many global markets. We explore whether this outperformance was a rerun of industrial’s normal cyclical rotation among the commercial real estate sectors, or represented a secular shift among the sectors.

Research Paper: MSCI began systematically estimating the size of professionally managed real estate investment markets in 2004. These estimates are fundamental to the creation of the IPD Global Annual Property Index and a range of other multinational indexes and benchmarks, and they provide insights into the coverage of MSCI’s direct property indexes. This paper sets out the 2017 market size estimates and explains the main changes between 2016 and 2017.

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.