Impact of macroeconomic forces on real estate investment returns- A cross country comparison

Abstract

Among great challenges in handling European financial crisis, restoration of investors’ confidence and improving employment situation are the priorities. Real estate investment in a business portfolio is becoming popular due to its risk hedging characteristics and is considered as a potential threshold for uncertain days. By monitoring the global as well as country level economy, it is possible to reform CRE investment policies in better ways. In this regard, it is important to analyze the impacts of the macroeconomic forces, e.g., GDP, inflation, employment condition and investment costing on real estate return, especially, when the impact varies due to geographic differences.

In this thesis, I aim to find the macroeconomic condition differentials of European countries and their impact on real estate. I choose three north-European countries, Finland, Sweden and UK for my study. In this research, I concentrate on the impact of the macroeconomy on commercial real estate. The focus of the thesis is finding the value appreciation of commercial real estate return due to macroeconomic changes over time. This study compares from cross-country perspective- the macroeconomic impacts on the commercial real estate markets.

In this thesis, I would like to conduct a quantitative experiment for the empirical part. After I unsmooth the data, necessary tests are done before making it stationary. Different statistical methods are explored and applied before applying panel data analysis where random effect model is found to be appropriate. For cross-country comparison, I measure covariances and correlations between variables. VAR model is also applied to find out significant variable for each country.

The main conclusions of the thesis are that the real estate capital return mainly depends on GDP, long-term interest rate and short-term interest rate among the macroeconomic elements. According to the random effect model, GDP and long-term interest rate impact capital return positively and the short-term interest rate, inflation and unemployment rate impact the capital return negatively.

For Finland and Sweden, GDP is found to be the only significant force. However, for the UK, the short-term interest rate is also found to be significant along with GDP among the macroeconomic elements. From the country-level analysis, the vector autoregression models for individual countries could not detect any significant macroeconomic variables.