Research

Ongoing Commissioned Projects

We highlight projects which members of the Centre have been commissioned to produce.

The Role of ESG Factors in Benchmarling Real Estate Investment Performance – Alex Moss

The consortium comprises Professor Graeme Newell of Western Sydney University Anupam Nanda, Professor of Urban Economics and Real Estate, Henley Business School, University of Reading, and Alex Moss, Director, Real Estate Research Centre, Cass Business School.

Download the Role of ESG Factors summary report.

CRE loan index - Nicole Lux

Nicole has obtained funding from a City University Enterprise Grant to pilot a UK lending database study with the aim to create a mortgage performance index. The index will allow to demonstrate the “asset class” performance of CRE lending in general return, risk analysis.

Lenders will be able to benchmark portfolio risk and credit quality and or lending styles against the overall market or matched peer-groups. The study works with key UK lenders and the Bank of England.

Download a summary of the Lending Survey 2019

Research Papers Presented

Part of the role of the Research Centre is to promote papers and work presented by members at academic conferences worldwide. Here we highlight the papers which have been presented recently

The use of listed real estate in Real Asset Funds

Author: Alex Moss

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of combining listed real estate securities with infrastructure and real asset allocations. The study looks at how the time variant the results are, as well as the extent of regional variations. Following on from the academic evidence, the paper examines the practical applications of this strategy.

The Performance of REITs in Advancing and Declining Markets Revisited

Author: Stephen Lee

The purpose of this paper is to examine the risk-adjusted performance of Equity Real Estate Investment Trusts (EREITs) and Mortgage REITs (MREITs) in advancing (bull) and declining (bear) markets. Although advancing and declining markets were evaluated ex-post, the finding that the risk-adjusted performance of EREITs and MREITs perform differently in different phases of the market is of significant importance for the decision-making of portfolio management.

The joint dynamics of European office yields

Author: Sotiris Tsolacos, Yi Wu and Samuel Duah

We examine office yield behaviour in key European cities which account for the bulk of investment transactions in Europe. We found that government bond yield and economic sentiment highly significant on office yield. But European prime office yields not as sensitive to interest rates and GDP growth. Furthermore, we found that the low sensitivity to rent growth which is consistent with existing studies. The PMG results show that the government bond yields will only have a measured effect on prime offices even in the long-run.

Media and Foreign Institutional Ownership of European REITs

Author: Yi Wu

This paper aims to investigate whether foreign investors rely more on home media (than domestic media) to make their foreign investment decisions and highlights the different sources of media news impact on foreign institutional investors' ownership of European REITs, which provides important implications for European REITs managers.

The role of emotion in a housing purchase: An empirical analysis of the anatomy of satisfaction from off-plan apartment purchases in France

Author. Mark Andrew and Fabrice Larceneux

This paper examines empirically the role of an emotion of owning a new build apartment, derived from its representation through mental imaging (‘visualization’) from marketing techniques, in influencing off-plan purchases in France, and how its effect on satisfaction evaluations of the apartment purchased affects buyer ratings of developer performance. Through structural equation modelling we show that psychological measures of perceptions influence buying decisions via satisfaction of the apartment purchased. Our analysis also sheds light on how buyer satisfaction could potentially augment the reputation of a developer to achieve off-plan sales targets.