Commercial Real Estate
Paper Session
Sunday, Jan. 4, 2026 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM (EST)
- Chair: James Conklin, University of Georgia
The Term Structure of Lease Rates
Abstract
In financial markets, forward contracts reflect market perception of future price dynamics. Nontransparent markets, like commercial real estate investments, lack such tools, often hindered by both data availability and heterogeneity in the underlying asset. We introduce a methodology for unbundling information in leases, allowing us to filter a dynamic term structure of forward lease rates for a median-quality asset. We implement the methodology using a panel of NYC and Boston office leases between 2005 and 2017. The imputed term structure reflects changing expectations by tenants and landlords about future rental contract conditions. This term structure is time-varying, generally upward-sloping, and exhibits an inverted-U shape in NYC. We also find that shocks to forward lease rate dynamics are dominated by a single factor that is most keenly felt in the long-dated lease market. Beyond shedding new light on rental market dynamics, our model can be used to quantify risk and reward for real estate strategies. To illustrate this, we examine the financial viability of a nascent ``long-short" space market strategy commonly used by coworking providers in the last business cycle.REIT Equity Offerings and Capital Investment in the Presence of the Central Bank Put
Abstract
This study demonstrates that real estate investment trusts (REITs), operating with minimal tax distortions and information asymmetries, actively issue equity to finance productive capital investment in response to positive stock demand shocks. We exploit a unique setting in which the Bank of Japan (BOJ) generates identifiable demand shocks by directly purchasing REIT shares as part of its unconventional monetary policy. The BOJ intervenes following negative index returns at the end of the morning trading session, providing put-option-like downside protection and reducing daily return volatility. At the monthly level, greater BOJ allocations to targeted REITs are associated with increased seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) and capital investment, particularly when idiosyncratic volatility declines. These SEOs generate no evidence of value destruction or operating underperformance. Our results demonstrate market timing behavior that is consistent with neoclassical investment theory: REITs issue equity when the cost of equity capital is low, using proceeds for productive investment that maintains firm value.Persistently Poor Performance in Private Equity Real Estate
Abstract
We compare risk-adjusted investment performance of closed-end Private Equity Real Estate (RE) funds to Buyout (BO) and Venture Capital (VC) funds. In the process we introduce a Machine Learning-based method to impute returns for funds that are missing cash flow information. We find that RE funds underperform BO and VC on a risk-adjusted basis. In RE, worse-performing fund managers survive at a high rate. And unlike BO and VC, RE is also susceptible to diseconomies of fund scale with no positive fund manager selection effects to offset negative scale diseconomies. Analysis of noisy fund manager selection indicates that RE investors are not disadvantaged relative to BO and VC with respect to learning about GP skills over time, where lax selection explains the apparent slow rate of learning in RE. LP investors in RE funds seem to be optimizing something other than, or in addition to, investment return when selecting fund managers.Discussant(s)
Jiakai Chen
,
University of Hawaii-Manoa
Albert (Pete) Kyle
,
University of Maryland
Sugata Ray
,
University of Alabama
Xue Xiao
,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
JEL Classifications
- R3 - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm Location