Abstract
We examine the diversification properties of holding listed REITs versus listed property companies (LPCs). If holding LPCs in addition to REITs provides excess diversification benefits, this would imply that investors have a larger pool of real estate assets in which to invest. Preliminary tests, however, show they are not comparable enough to be direct substitutes for each other. In portfolio performance analysis, LPCs alone provide certain diversification benefits, but the gains are slightly lower than those provided by REITs alone. We find little, if any, additional gains from holding both assets simultaneously. Further investigation suggests a long-term cointegration relationship between these two assets that is driven by property market conditions, yield term structure, default risk premium, and institutional money funds flow. In the short horizon, we observe unilateral Granger causality running from REITs to LPCs, suggesting that REITs are the leading index, while LPCs are followers in the system. Overall, our findings suggest that LPCs widen the number of public real estate securities that can be used. However, they are not quite as effective as REITs in terms of diversification benefits.
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Notes
Institutional Real Estate, Inc. (IREI), Visions, Insights & Perspectives (VIP), Real Estate 101, February 11, 2011.
A comparison of REITs and LPCs is analogous to a comparison of car makers and car dealers. In other words, either one offers an opportunity to invest in the automobile industry. But having both options ensures a wider asset choice for portfolios.
We thank an anonymous referee for proposing tests on these portfolio implications.
The Tax Reform Act (1986) had important implications for REITs that became detectable by 1990.
The S&P Dow Jones US Property index began on July 1, 1989.
The construction process we use is intended to eliminate various forms of undesirable sampling biases. First, the performance of firms subsequently removed or deleted from the indices is retained for all prior periods of inclusion, which mitigates survivorship bias. Second, only live contemporaneous data is used in construction, which assures the indices have no look-ahead bias. Third, thinly traded companies, corporate holdings, private control blocks, government holdings, and legally restricted shares are excluded, which ensures that illiquid securities do not unduly inflate market performance.
Our REIT index exhibits correlations of 99.99% and 99.17% with the Ziman REIT index and the S&P Dow Jones REIT index, respectively, over the sample period.
There is no recognized non-REIT LPC index.
In our sample, 11 firms have a REIT second share code and a non-REIT LPC SIC code. For example, Supertel Hospitality, Inc.’s (Permno =81,087) SHRCD is 18, and its SICCD is 7011. Ziman treats this company as a REIT.
The findings are largely the same. So, for the sake of brevity, we report only the value-weighted results. Full results are available from the authors upon request.
The risk-free rate has zero conditional variance because the return is known at time t-1.
When N approaches infinity large, there will be no difference between using equally or value-weighted indices because the weights of all components approach zero.
We also conduct Ng and Perron (2001) unit root tests with MZ a and MZ t test statistics, and we find consistent results. To conserve space, these results are not tabulated, but are available from the authors upon request.
Engle et al. (1983) provide a detailed explanation of exogeneity.
For robustness, we also obtain the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and the Schwartz Bayesian Criterion (SBC) to calculate lag length. We again find consistent results.
For testing deterministic components of VARs, Johansen (1994) proposes five models:
1. H0(r): a quadratic trend in the levels of data that is eliminated by the cointegrating relationships.
2. H0 *(r): a linear trend in the cointegration space that excludes quadratic trends from the data.
3. H1(r): a model allowing for trends in the levels of data or non-zero means in the differences, but where the trends are eliminated by the cointegrating relationships.
4. H1 *(r): a model allowing for a non-zero constant in the cointegration space, but excluding all deterministic trends in the levels of data.
5. H2(r): a model that allows no deterministic terms in the vector error correction model.
Our results indicate that the best-fit deterministic component for each testing window contains a constant with no deterministic trends in the cointegrating relationship. To conserve space, we do not tabulate the results of these five models here, but they are available from the authors upon request.
The linear autoregressive Johansen results may be questionable if equity indices exhibit non-linear dependencies. All data series are log-transformed to mitigate any non-linearity in the data series. We also find no evidence of non-linear dependencies in equity indices, implying no need for non-linear non-parametric rank tests or the cointegration tests of Bierens (1997a, 1997b) and Breitung (2002). We monitor structural breaks by using the likelihood ratio (L-R) test of Johansen et al. (2000). We find no evidence of significant structural breaks in any of our testing windows.
Large shocks are defined as residuals that are statistically significant at a 1% level (input threshold =2.576). We report the following exogenous shocks: 1990:08, 1990:09, 1994:03, 1998:04, 1998:08, 1998:11, 2001:09, 2004:04, 2008:06, 2008:10, 2008:11, 2009:01, 2009:02, 2009:04, 2010:06, 2011:09, and 2011:10. Residual normality is monitored by the chi-square test.
Chen et al. (1986) introduced the first five factors.
Granger causality differs from a test for exogeneity because weak exogeneity implies a long-horizon relationship, while Granger causality implies a short-horizon linkage. For example, a necessary condition for the exogeneity of Y is that current and past values of X do not affect Y. Therefore, over a short horizon, if X Granger-causes Y, then Y is not weak exogenous, and so there is no need to further test whether Y is strong-form weak exogenous. It is possible that the short-horizon causality runs from X to Y, but there is no long-horizon causality between X and Y.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/financial-crisis/full-timeline. On February 27, 2007, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) announced it would no longer buy the riskiest subprime mortgages or mortgage-related securities. On December 24, 2009, the Treasury Department made an unprecedented announcement that it would provide Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with unlimited financial support for the subsequent three years, despite acknowledging that they had experienced losses in excess of $400 billion by that time.
The recursive analysis can be conducted with either the “Z-representation” or “R-representation.” However, Hansen and Johansen (1999) argue that the results from the “R-representation” are more appropriate in the recursive estimation test.
The full unreported cointegration robustness test results are available from the authors upon request.
We test for multicollinearity by calculating the uncentered variance inflation factors (VIFs) for the independent variables. We find that the VIFs (= 1.94) do not indicate multicollinearity.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Katsiaryna Salavei Bardos, William J. Crowder, J. David Diltz, John G. Gallo, J. Andrew Hansz, (Grace) Qing Hao, Xin (James) He, Walter F. Hlawitschka, Gregory D. Koutmos, Valeria Martinez, John McDermott, Emmanuel Morales-Camargo, David Rakowski, Sanjiv Sabherwal, Salil K. Sarkar, Simon Stevenson, and Le Wang for their comments. We thank John G. Gallo for providing Ziman REITs and S&P Dow Jones data. We also thank Xiaolei (Laura) Liu for providing CRR five-factor data. We thank seminar participants at the 2013 Global Chinese Real Estate Congress (GCREC) Annual Conference, the 5th International Conference on Financial Risk and Corporate Finance Management (FRCFM) in 2013, the 2015 World Finance & Banking Symposium. We also thank seminar participants at Fairfield University and the University of Texas at Arlington for a number of insightful comments. All remaining errors are our own.
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Glascock, J.L., Prombutr, W., Zhang, Y. et al. Can Investors Hold More Real Estate? Evidence from Statistical Properties of Listed REIT versus Non-REIT Property Companies in the U.S.. J Real Estate Finan Econ 56, 274–302 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11146-017-9601-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11146-017-9601-8