Browsing: Real Estate Equity Investments

By Fritz Louw and Niel Harmse The recent market turmoil has resembled the global financial crisis and other volatile periods, in that we have observed a widening of the dispersion of returns across real estate assets. This widening spread has been most pronounced in retail property — a sector thatRead More

By Aaron Filbeck, CFA, CAIA, CIPM, Associate Director, Content Development at CAIA Association, and Keith Black, PhD, CFA, CAIA, FDP, Managing Director, Content Strategy at CAIA Association “Diversification is back” – now that’s not a phrase we’ve heard in a long time…long time. Considering recent market performance, we thought thatRead More

By Aaron Filbeck, CFA, CAIA, CIPM, Associate Director, Content Development at CAIA Association Excerpted from the Alternative Investment Analyst Review, Volume 8, Issue 1 The Alternative Investment Analyst Review is the official publication of the CAIA Association. Access to the most current issue is an exclusive benefit of CAIA MembershipRead More

By Aaron Filbeck, CFA, CAIA, CIPM, Associate Director, Content Development at CAIA Association Central Issue of the Paper If you’re a social media junkie, you have probably seen “#goals” in your timeline. In most cases, the hashtag is referring to an attractive couple or an aesthetically pleasing plate of food.Read More

Investment management firms are increasingly hard-pressed to hedge away risks, increase alpha, and lower costs: a daunting agenda. One way of going about that is by knowing what is going on in the underlying markets more quickly than the competitors and counterparties do.  To that end: alternative data. Investment firms,Read More

By David O’Brien, CFP, CAIA The Opportunity Zones Program, enacted as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, has great potential to create jobs and spur economic growth while creating a potentially powerful tax strategy for investors and asset managers. The Opportunity Zone Program is designed toRead More

What’s in the future for alternative investments asset management? A new publication from Ernst & Young, London, contends that allocations to alternative investments and are “robust,” but that there is an important shift underway in favor of private equity and at the expense of hedge funds. In 2018, 40% ofRead More

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch (@FactorResearch) INTRODUCTION Surveys often reveal investor behaviour that is challenging to understand. For example, Preqin’s Alternative Investor Outlook for H2 2019 highlighted the following: 65% of institutional investors believe that real estate is overvalued and a correction likely to occur in 2019, 2020, or beyond.Read More

A new study from Nuveen looks at how to assess properly the value of real estate and farmland. There are four key points: That a “doubleness” of vision is necessary. You need to take a macro view of the investment world and a micro view of the farms and otherRead More

Cushman & Wakefield, Chicago, has released a discussion of blockchains in connection with real estate. The paper argues that the technology could “transform CRE transactions ranging from property listings, asset management, and the purchase and sale of properties.” It reminds us that blockchains are shared digital ledgers, both tamper-proof andRead More

The illiquidity premium is one of the most frequently discussed and hotly disputed subjects in financial economics. Speaking broadly, an investment is not a checking account. One generally cannot just “get the cash back” at a moment’s notice, by visiting some equivalent of an ATM. How long will it takeRead More

PricewaterhouseCoopers, the London-based professional services network, in conjunction with the Urban Land Institute, has prepared a report on ongoing trends in real estate, which sheds some light on the attractions of alternative real estate. The background to the report is the continued and intensifying consensus that a recession is nigh,Read More

A recent study of public employee retirement systems in the United States reaches conclusions, that, after a fair amount of “grey tsunami” alarmism in recent years, sound reassuring. The study, based on a recent survey of system managements conducted by the National Conference of Public Employee Retirement Systems (NCPERS) inRead More

An agtech-focused venture firm has issued a report about global VC activity across agtech and its subsectors. The firm, Finistere Ventures, which describes itself as in the business of helping “ambitious founders transform food and agriculture,” collaborated with Pitchbook in preparing the review. Finistere looks specifically at: (a) macro trends,Read More

A new paper by Alexander D. Beath and Chris Flynn examines the significance of real estate investing within the portfolios of large European institutional investors from 2005 to 2016. Beath is a senior research analyst with CEM Benchmarking, with a PHD. from McGill University on condensed matter and materials physics.Read More

Intralinks has once again collaborated with Global Fund Media in a survey of limited partners on their satisfaction with recent results and on how they see global investment opportunities near-term. As to satisfaction: 18% of LPs say that their results from alternative investments have been better than they expected. ARead More

By Bill Kelly, CEO, CAIA Association Many of us have had the experience of buying a home and often turn to the bank to provide some level of secured funding for that purchase. Banks, of course, require documentary evidence for the value of their collateral which, invariably, results in a market-based appraisal process resultingRead More

The outsourcing of fund administration tasks in real estate is not a new idea. But, as KPMG says in a new paper, the marketplace has been slow to take the administrators up on their offerings.  So it may still be the wave of the future even though it has aRead More

A London-headquartered specialist consultant, bFinance, has prepared a report on the trends that have emerged over the last decade in the way both investors and managers think about the real assets in portfolios. There are, the paper says, three trends at work. First, investors are becoming both more sophisticated andRead More

KPMG has posted a new paper looking at the role of real assets (defined as “anything where there is a tangible/physical asset being traded”) within a portfolio, with a focus on opportunities for U.K. based institutional investors, especially pension schemes. It begins with a brief survey of the field. RealRead More

The global real estate division of financial consultancy Ernst & Young recently published a report on the private equity outlook in the real estate space. As the head of the division, Mark Grinis, says in an introduction, the premise of the report is that success in this space requires managerialRead More

By Diane Harrison It’s been years since investors have been able to get excited about the term “yield” when referencing their investment portfolio. Too many individuals have been hanging onto cash while searching fruitlessly for somewhere other than equities to put their money to work. Advisors haven’t been much helpRead More

Alex Beath, senior research analyst at CEM Benchmarking, the Toronto-based pension research firm, has produced a white paper on the pension fund performance in the U.S. since 1998, and the news he brings is not good (for pension funds themselves, or for the hedge funds to which they have allocatedRead More

Preqin, the multinational data and consulting firm, has looked at the second quarter and found it was, for private capital fundraising  … slow. So was the quarter before it. Together they made up the first half of 2016, in which the funds closed in the world of private capital globallyRead More

Savills, a global real estate services provider listed on the London Stock Exchange, has released its annual report on the role that real property plays in the investment world.  Here are some of its key points: Real estate assets constitute 60% of the value of all assets worldwide; Residential realRead More

Guest columnist Andrew Smith, CAIA, provides an overview of real assets and their commensurate risks and rewards.Read More

There was some excitement as recently as January 2015 over renewed talk of a Yahoo/AOL deal, but after the bloom finally came off that rose, YHOO settled into a trading range has been roughly from $42 to $46. Faille guesses that there is an opportunity here on the upside of that range, because another suitor is bound to appear.Read More

Guest columnist Andrew Smith, CAIA, examines the risks and rewards of investing directly in farmland.Read More

For Faille, the stand-out essay in this collection of case studies, from CNBC's Maneet Ahuja, concerns Marc Lasry and Sonia Gardner, of the Avenue Capital Group. As Myron Scholes says in his afterword to this volume, Lasry and Gardner take returns from those whose demand for liquidity makes them willing to give them up. Read More

As a general rule, politicians [mostly] on the Democratic side benefit by raising the issue of the taxation of carried interest during campaigns and then quietly letting it die, as their donors expect, when the legislature is actually working on tax bills. It's a way of signaling who is a "populist" and who isn't. Read More

Brad Case, Ph.D., CFA, CAIA, looks at the relationships between public and private real estate.Read More

By Brad Case, PhD, CFA, CAIA This is the third in a series of articles focusing on the strengths of different indices that are published regularly and may be appropriate for benchmarking, risk assessment, and other real estate investment purposes. The first article focused on two similar index families, the Moody’s/RCARead More

Guest columnist Brad Case, Ph.D., CFA, CAIA, examines the effects of cash drag on open-end private equity funds.Read More

Brad Case, Ph.D., CFA, CAIA, guest columnist, continues his series on U.S. real estate benchmarks as he looks at the NCREIF Property Index.Read More

Guest columnist Brad Case, Ph.D., CFA, CAIA, explores the effects of leverage on private equity real estate investments.Read More

Brad Case, Ph.D., CFA, CAIA, guest columnist, examines the value of U.S. real estate benchmarks.Read More

Guest columnist Brad Case, Ph.D., CFA, CAIA, examines the differences between private and public real estate investments.Read More

Alternative investments have always been the home of innovation. Guest columnist Sourabh Jeswani looks at parking lots as the latest innovation in the Indian real estate market.Read More

Acceptance of the higher levels of volatility as a fact of life means that careful ongoing attention to risk has become the means of operations. In the United States specifically, 31 percent of institutions say that they monitor their risk budget daily to keep the overall amount of risk in the portfolio under check: more than half (53 percent) say that they do such monitoring on a weekly or monthly basis.Read More

The good news from the Preqin survey is that 37 percent of the interviewees said they expect to deploy more capital to real estate over the next 12 months than they did over the last 12 months. The better news is that in a January 2012 survey only 26 percent had said that. Read More

The reason for the increased interest in alternatives, McKinsey says, isn’t that the alternatives’ managers are slashing the price of their services. It is, rather, a discontent with the return to be gained from traditional investment. “Even with downward pressure likely over the next few years, revenue yields for institutional alternative products should remain well above the 35 bps average earned on today’s traditional institutional products.” Read More

The survey also asked that the asset managers state where their total assets are invested, using four geographical categories: Europe; Central/North America; Asia Pacific; Other. Commodity funds were easily the most heavily invested in C/NA, to the extent of 94 percent of their portfolios. Private equity funds are 61 percent invested in C/NA, and PE FoFs also have the majority of their portfolios there, at 54 percent.Read More

A veteran of hedge funds and private equity, Jeff Joseph offers some comments to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on the JOBS Act and what this legislation has the potential to mean to the global alternative investment community.Read More

K. Robert "Bobby" Turner has overseen more than $12 billion of investment into urban communities (with partners including Magic Johnson and Andre Agassi), find out why..Read More

A deeper look at alternatives with Dr. Bob Swarup, a world-renowned expert and commentator on alternatives and financial markets as well as being a visiting fellow at London School of Economics.Read More

Consultants expect that managers' need to generate steady income in a low interest rate environment will drive a lot of portfolio turnover in 2012, inclusive of the movement of alternatives into core positions within portfolios, and it will drive one-time U.S. focused investors and managers to look abroad. Meanwhile, pensions are retreating toward passive mandates. Read More

The authors of a new book from the Milken Institute contend that one factor working against the recovery of the housing market in the U.S. is that the residential finance system is almost entirely a ward of the federal government, "a situation that cannot be indefinitely sustained without seriously damaging monetary stability and the prospects for a return to long-term growth," they write. It is imperative, these authors believe, that the United States get its private investors involved again in the financing of housing.Read More

"Farhaz Miah, of Preqin, sets out the numbers for private real estate fundraising in 2011, showing that the market continues to suffer from the impact of the 2008 crisis. He notes, also, that debt strategies have become increasingly popular, both in specifically debt-strategy funds and in opportunistic funds that employ debt strategies as part of a broader structure."Read More

Will they or won't they? BNYMellon Asset Management looks at commercial real estate and speculates on the future of--dare we say it--CMBS....Read More