Company-specific factors and the performance of real estate investment trusts (REITs): Analysis of the global financial crisis

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Volume Title

Insinööritieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis

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Date

2018-09-24

Department

Major/Subject

Mcode

ENG24

Degree programme

Master's Programme in Real Estate Economics (REC)

Language

en

Pages

51 + 3

Series

Abstract

Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) is a corporation set-up with the aim of owning, operating or financing income-producing real estate assets. It provides transparent, stable income stream, liquid asset and minimum risk to investors. However, like any other corporation, the same issue of the business cycle such as the financial crisis affects it. The recent global financial crisis (2007-2008) revealed how volatile investment in REITs could be for investors. However, despite the severity of the impact of the crisis, some REITs were still able to perform better than their counterparts during the crisis. Whilst the previous studies have focused implicitly on the individual effect of one of these factors, this thesis set out to investigate collectively the significant company-specific factors that affected REIT’s performance during the financial crisis. This study uses pooled cross-sectional and panel data models with the available yearly data of 68 US equity REITs, extracted from S&P Market Intelligence platform over a period of 2002 to 2017. The two accounting measures of performance, return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE) were used as proxies for REIT’s performance. Our analysis of the data demonstrates that size, property-type diversification, corporate governance and operational efficiency are some of the significant company-specific factors that affect REIT’s performance in the overall period. Using the interaction of the crisis period, this study investigates the company-specific factors that affected REITs' performance during the global financial crisis. The study identifies REIT's size and property-type specialisation as the significant company-specific factors that affected performance during the global financial crisis. The result emphasises the importance of size on the performance of REITs. Large REITs were able to sustain profitable outcomes during the financial crisis. Furthermore, REITs that specialised or possessed higher composition of properties that were insusceptible to the crisis outperformed their counterparts.

Description

Supervisor

Falkenbach, Heidi

Thesis advisor

Falkenbach, Heidi

Keywords

real estate investment trust, REIT, company-specific factors, real estate, equity REITs, investors

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Citation

Permanent link to this item

https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-201810055253

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[dipl] Insinööritieteiden korkeakoulu / ENG