A Fundamental Comparison of International Real Estate Returns

This study analyzes commercial real estate returns in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States over the period 1985-95, from the perspective of a U.S. investor. Because national indices can consist of differing property mixes, this study separately analyzes the office, retail, and warehouse sectors. Moreover, these analyses also convert total returns into their fundamental components: initial yield, growth in income, and shifts in capitalization rates. The paths of currency-adjusted income and asset values and, therefore, capitalization rates are also presented. Generally speaking, the fundamental components of retail returns across the four countries exhibit greater divergence than the office and warehouse sectors. It is interesting that the U.S. property sectors showed the worst performance, while the Australian retail and the British office and warehouse sectors were the best performers (both before and after currency adjustments). Additionally, the currency-adjusted Australian returns were adversely effected by exchange rate movements, while the British returns were positively effected. Lastly, the correlation of the quarterly percentage change in income was generally lower and less statistically significant that the correlation patterns observed among the other components of return. This might suggest that more idiosyncratic risk can be found in the real estate space markets (as proxied by income changes) than in the real estate capital markets (as proxied by the pricing of the income--that is, capitalization rates), which appear to be more globally influenced.

Twenty Years of the NCREIF Property Index

This study overviews the performance of the NCREIF Property Index, by property type, over the twenty-year period ended in 1998. More exactly, performance is analyzed from the perspective of the fundamental sources of return: initial earnings yield, dividend payout ratios, earnings growth, shifts in capitalization rates and other (less significant) effects. (While this approach is here applied to private real estate equities, nothing precludes its application to a variety of other investment classes.) Our results indicate the fundamental sources that have contributed to the Index's considerable cross-sectional variation as well as its time-series variation. Therefore, this study should be viewed as a useful historical account for those interested in understanding the "ex post" return-generating process of the Index and its property-type components as well as those who wish to model the "ex ante" return-generating process for a variety of applications in both the equity and debt markets-regardless of whether the securities are publicly or privately traded. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001.