Franz Fuerst

Green Noise or Green Value? Measuring the Effects of Environmental Certification on Office Values

This study investigates the price effects of environmental certification on commercial real estate assets. It is argued that there are likely to be three main drivers of price differences between certified and noncertified buildings. These are additional occupier benefits, lower holding costs for investors and a lower risk premium. Drawing upon the CoStar database of U.S. commercial real estate assets, hedonic regression analysis is used to measure the effect of certification on both rent and price. The results suggest that, compared to buildings in the same submarkets, eco-certified buildings have both a rental and sale price premium.

Sustainable Building Certification and the Rent Premium: A Panel Data Approach

This paper investigates whether obtaining sustainable building certification entails a rental premium for commercial office buildings and tracks its development over time. To this aim, both a difference-in-differences and a fixed-effects model approach are applied to a large panel dataset of office buildings in the United States in the 2000–2010 period. The results indicate a significant rental premium for both ENERGY STAR and LEED certified buildings. Controlling for confounding factors, this premium is shown to have increased steadily from 2006 to 2008, followed by a moderate decline in the subsequent periods. The results also show a significant positive relationship between ENERGY STAR labeling and building occupancy rates.

Determinants of Green Building Adoption

In this paper we investigate variations in the adoption of LEED-certified commercial buildings across 174 core-based statistical areas in the United States. Drawing upon a unique database and using a robust analytical framework, the determinants of the proportion LEED-certified space are modeled. We find that, despite high growth rates, LEED-certified stock accounts for a relatively small proportion of the total commercial stock. The average proportion is less than 1%. A further contribution of the paper is that our concentration measure avoids the biases associated with simple percentage measures that were used in previous studies of this topic. Strongest predictors of the proportion of LEED-certified commercial space in a local market are market size, educational attainment and economic growth. In terms of policy effectiveness, it is found that only a mandatory requirement to obtain LEED certification for new buildings has a significant positive effect on market penetration.

Flight to quality

Purpose - – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of the crisis on the pricing of asset quality attributes. This paper uses sales transaction data to examine whether flight from risk phenomena took place in the US office market during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. Design/methodology/approach - – Hedonic regression procedures are used to test the hypothesis that the spread between the pricing of low-quality and high-quality characteristics increased during the crisis period compared to the pre-crisis period. Findings - – The results of the hedonic regression models suggest that the price spread between Class A and other properties grew significantly during the downturn. Research limitations/implications - – Our results are consistent with the hypothesis of an increased price spread following a market downturn between Class A and non-Class A offices. The evidence suggests that the relationships between the returns on Class A and non-Class A assets changed during the period of market stress or crisis. Practical implications - – These findings have implications for real estate portfolio construction. If regime switches can be predicted and/or responded to rapidly, portfolios may be rebalanced. In crisis periods, portfolios might be reweighted towards Class A properties and in positive market periods, the reweighting would be towards non-Class A assets. Social implications - – The global financial crisis has demonstrated that real estate markets play a crucial role in modern economies and that negative developments in these markets have the potential to spillover and create contagion for the larger economy, thereby affecting jobs, incomes and ultimately people’s livelihoods. Originality/value - – This is one of the first studies that address the flight to quality phenomenon in commercial real estate markets during periods of financial crisis and market turmoil.

Style Analysis in Real Estate Markets: Beyond the Sectors and Regions Dichotomy

If in equity markets style analysis has been studied extensively, in real estate ones it is only now emerging as a valuable tool for measuring and benchmarking performance and risk. So far studies in the property market have identified three investment categories (rather than styles): sectors (offices, retail and industrial), eadministrative regionsi (as defined by IPD) and economic regions. However, the low explanatory power reveals the need to extend this analysis to other investment styles. In fact real estate investors set their strategies considering other factors which may be found relevant as for other assets. Building on finance literature, we identify four main real estate investment styles and test their significance in explaining portfolio returns. We apply a cross-sectional multivariate model to a dataset of more than 1,000 properties containing qualitative information to define the different styles. We find that eequity-likei styles increase the explanatory power and should then be used by fund managers to set benchmarks and to analyze portfolio returns.

Designer Buildings: Estimating the Economic Value of ‘Signature’ Architecture

This study investigates whether commercial offices designed by ‘signature architects’ in the United States achieve rental premiums compared with commercial offices designed by nonsignature architects. Focusing on buildings designed by winners of the Pritzker Prize and the Gold Medal awarded by the American Institute of Architects, we create a sample of commercial office buildings designed by signature architects, drawing on CoStars comprehensive national database. We use a combination of hedonic regression model and a logit model to estimate the various price determinants. The results of the hedonic analysis suggest that, compared with buildings in the same submarket, office buildings designed by signature architects have rents that are 5%–7% higher, and sell for prices 17% higher. The results from the second-stage logit estimation suggest a rental premium of approximately 5% for signature architects in large architectural practices, while the sales-price premium identified in the first stage hedonic regression was not confirmed.

Do responsible real estate companies outperform their peers

This paper investigates the relationship between corporate social and environmental performance and financial performance for a sample of publicly traded US real estate companies. Using the MSCI ESG (formerly KLD) database on seven Environmental, Social & Governance dimensions in the 2003-2010 period, and weighting the dimensions according to prominence in the real estate sector, we model Tobins Q and annual total return in a panel data framework. The results indicate a positive relationship between ESG rating and Tobins Q but this effect is driven by ESG concerns rather than strengths. Consistently across all model specifications, overall ESG ratings are associated with lower returns. Negative scores appear to result in higher returns in the short run but positive scores have no significant impact on returns.

Measuring the financial performance of green buildings in the UK commercial property market: Addressing the data issues

Purpose – Given the centrality of data and information to the evaluation and operation of policies to reduce carbon emissions, the purpose of this paper is to investigate potential sources of data within in the UK on the commercial building stock in terms of its physical characteristics, financial performance, energy consumption and environmental performance. The research aimed to increase understanding of the potential sources of data on property attributes, financial performance and energy use or environmental performance, with a particular emphasis on evaluating their strengths and weaknesses in terms of scope, quality, availability and practicability.Design/methodology/approach – This is an explorative, qualitative study that uses semi‐structured interviews conducted with 11 different data holding organisations.Findings – Whilst public sector organisations have the potential to provide the data required for large samples, there are major barriers to obtaining and linking the different databases. Data ...

Analysing the performance of nonlisted real estate funds: a panel data analysis

The rapid growth of nonlisted real estate funds over the last several years has contributed towards establishing this sector as a major investment vehicle for gaining exposure to commercial real estate. Academic research has not kept up with this development, however, as there are still only a few published studies on nonlisted real estate funds. This article aims to identify the factors driving the total return over a 7-year period. Influential factors tested in our analysis include the weighted underlying direct property returns in each country and sector as well as fund size, investment style gearing and the distribution yield. Furthermore, we analyse the interaction of nonlisted real estate funds with the performance of the overall economy and that of competing asset classes and find that lagged Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth and stock market returns as well as contemporaneous government bond rates are significant and positive predictors of annual fund performance.

Green luxury goods? The economics of eco-labels in the Japanese housing market

Using a unique transaction database of condominiums in the Tokyo metropolitan area and a hedonic analytical framework, we find that eco-labelled buildings command a small but significant premium on both the asking and transaction prices. This finding is consistent with results from other countries but in contrast to these studies, the present analysis also incorporates buyer characteristics which provide further information on the sources of demand for eco-labelled real estate. A separate estimation by subgroups reveals that the price premium is primarily driven by wealthier households that exhibit a higher willingness-to-pay for eco-labelled condominiums, both as a total amount and as a fraction of the total sales price. Less affluent households are also shown to pay higher prices for the eco label but the effect is less pronounced. The results indicate that capitalised utility bill savings are likely to account for a large proportion of the observed premium but the higher premium paid by affluent households suggests that more intangible benefits of living in a green building may also play a role.