The Impact of Real Estate Market Transparency on the Linkages Between Direct and Indirect Real Estate

Download or read book The Impact of Real Estate Market Transparency on the Linkages Between Direct and Indirect Real Estate written by Yun Luo and published by . This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, "The Impact of Real Estate Market Transparency on the Linkages Between Direct and Indirect Real Estate" by Yun, Luo, 骆韵, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Global investors often invest in publicly traded indirect real estate (IRE) such as Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) and listed property companies rather than physical real estate asset in order to get exposure in foreign real estate markets for a number of reasons that mainly originated from the high transaction cost in the direct real estate (DRE) market. However, in reality IRE is not a perfect substitute of DRE and that the substitutability between IRE and DRE varies across markets. Very little is known about the factors that contributed to the variation. One possible contributing factor is the variation in the degree of real estate market transparency across markets, which is seldom examined in the previous studies. This thesis provides empirical evidence on the impact of real estate market transparency on the linkages between IRE and DRE. This study examines two aspects of IRE-DRE linkages, namely, return (first moment) linkages and volatility (second moment) linkages. This thesis uses style analysis to measure return linkages and variance decomposition to measure volatility linkages. After that, the correlations between IRE-DRE linkages and Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL)''s global real estate market transparency index will be examined. The empirical results show that the JLL global real estate market transparency index does have a positive impact on the linkages between IRE and DRE, especially on the volatility linkages. In addition, regulatory and legal transparency sub-index as well as real estate transaction process transparency sub-index have the strongest impact on both return and volatility IRE-DRE linkages. A highly-developed legal system as well as consistent regulatory enforcement (as measured by the degree of fairness treatment towards both domestic and foreign investors) ensures that real estate investors'' rights are well protected and thus the values of the underlying real estate asset are reflected in the IRE, which strengthens the IRE-DRE linkages. In addition, having a well-functioning regulatory and legal framework also means that DRE market transaction information is reliable which can be used for more accurate valuations. This assists investors in valuing the IRE based on their audited financial statements and thus strengthens the IRE-DRE linkages. Real estate transaction process transparency refers to market transparency in both pre-sale and spot real estate market. The presale market is essentially a forward market. Price information in the spot market can assist investors in assessing the future prospect of IRE and thus facilitates the price discovery process between the IRE and DRE. High transparency in the presale market therefore lead to stronger IRE-DRE linkages. The findings of this study provide several implications for global investors and local policy makers. Though emerging markets, which have low market transparency, are playing a more and more significant role in international real estate investment portfolios, global investors should understand the limitation of investing IRE as a means to gain exposure in DRE since the IRE-DRE linkages are usually weak in emergent markets. On the other hand, policy makers should spend more efforts to increase real estate market transparency if they wish to attract investments from global investors. In particular, policy makers should aim at improving the regulatory and legal framework