Blog post: Office and retail investments’ historic dominance of commercial real estate portfolios is decreasing, with other property types — including logistics centers, student housing, and data centers — increasing. This evolution highlights how technology and the search for yield have led investors to diversify and seek exposure to other property types.

Blog post: 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?

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 MSCI 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 2018 market size estimates and explains the main changes between 2017 and 2018.

Blog post: Industrial real estate has outperformed retail assets in recent years, but the trend has been less pronounced in Asia, where store hours, among other reasons, might have led to more resilient retail performance.

Research paper: Globally, income yields on private real estate assets remained at record lows in 2018, while technological disruption had a growing impact on retail and industrial property performance. Our annual report details the consequences for real estate returns, at a global and national level.

Blog post: Given the heterogeneity of the asset class and that strategies for investing in property vary widely, finding the right benchmark for different portfolios can be a major challenge. Investors may want to ask whether a broad-market or more focused peer-group benchmark is the right tool for the job.

Blog post: Measuring growth in real estate is not a simple matter. Many investors look at asset-value growth, which shows the simple change in property value. Capital growth is more complicated and reflects the capital expenditures needed to maintain and improve properties. The investor’s challenge is to figure out which measure to use.

Blog post: Investors who buy overseas real estate inevitably take on foreign-exchange exposure. Currency volatility sometimes escalates — often spurred by political events like the Brexit referendum — which can put currency risk in stark relief. The resulting forex-market dislocations may result in near-term losses for investors, but also create attractive investment opportunities.