What Moves Retail Property Returns at the Metropolitan Level?

In this article the determinants of metropolitan-level appraisal-based retail property returns are examined by estimating a six-equation model of retail construction starts, retail sales, stock-market returns, commercial mortgage rates, inflation, and the logarithm of stock-market volatility. Residuals from these equations are then used to explain actual movements in retail real estate returns. Our empirical procedure looks at both unadjusted and unsmoothed appraisal-based retail real estate returns. The general finding is that unsmoothed appraisal-based retail real estate returns lag significantly behind market conditions. Furthermore, the results suggest that very little of the variation in metropolitan-level appraisal-based retail real estate returns can be explained by macroeconomic news events

Commercial Mortgage Prepayments Under Heterogeneous Prepayment Penalty Structures

Much of the literature on pricing commercial mortgages and commercial mortgage-backed securities has assumed homogeneity in prepayment penalty structure. In this paper, we provide evidence that such an assumption is inappropriate and examine the effect of penalty structures observed in actual contracts. After conducting preliminary simulations, we present hazard models estimated from data on 1,165 multifamily mortgage loans to show how empirical prepayment rates vary with alternative penalty structures. While yield maintenance and lockout provisions are relatively more effective than fixed or step down structures in reducing or postponing prepayment, none completely eliminates the risk. Our empirical results generally confirm the theoretical findings of Kelly and Slawson (2001).

Estimating Property Values by Replication: An Alternative to the Traditional Grid and Regression Methods

This paper proposes and develops a replication method for estimating property values, in which optimal weights of comparable property attributes that best duplicate the subject property are determined. In a setting where the number of comparables is large compared to the number of attributes, replication weakly outperforms traditional general least squares regression by making use of potential correlations in the error structure. A similar result obtains in comparison to the grid method, which may suffer from subjective price adjustment factors. The replication method suggests using a large sample regression analysis to obtain the functional form of the error variance-covariance, and then replicating the subject with a smaller, attribute-close set of comparable properties.

How Tax Credits Have Affected the Rehabilitation of the Boston Office Market

This paper is concerned with the extent to which rehabilitation tax credits affect the conditional probability of commercial real estate rehabilitation. Very little has been written about the rehabilitation tax credit, despite the fact that it has been a feature of the U.S. tax code since 1978. Our analysis suggests that rehabilitation tax credits have been a significant determinant of the conditional probability of rehabilitation in the Boston office market. We also find that a significant portion of rehabilitation tax-credit investment is investment that would have been invested elsewhere, about 60 to 65 percent in certain periods, but rising to as high as 90 percent in other periods. We find that the rehabilitation tax credit has a significant and substantial influence on the conditional probability of rehabilitation. We also find that the greatest amount of slippage, not too surprisingly, generally occurs when the tax credit is low and when the gain from rehabilitation before the tax credit is high.

Alternative mortgage instruments : their distributional effects on homeownership, housing consumption, and the use of mortgage credit.

Thesis. 1977. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH.Vita.Bibliography : leaves 334-342.Ph.D