Sotiris Tsolacos

The impact of economic and financial factors on UK property performance

This paper employs a vector autoregressive model to investigate the impact of macroeconomic and financial variables on a UK real estate return series. The results indicate that unexpected inflation, and the interest rate term spread have explanatory powers for the property market. However, the most significant influence on the real estate series are the lagged values of the real estate series themselves. We conclude that identifying the factors that have determined UK property returns over the past twelve years remains a difficult task.

A Comparative Analysis of the Major Determinants of Office Rental Values in Europe

Presents an empirical investigation of office rental trends for some of the largest cities in Europe. Uses annual data for the period 1983‐91 to test the changes in rental values and fluctuations in economic activity. Includes a review of previous office market studies and an assessment of the research direction and information requirements of current European property research. Suggests that European rental values are determined by similar demand‐side variables and, in particular, real gross domestic product (GDP).

Modelling use, investment, and development in the British office market?

The authors provide an empirical investigation of office market dynamics and model the user, investment, and development elements of this market. They recognise explicitly that the user and investment markets in office property influence trends in development and that development activity in turn affects office use and investment. This theoretical premise suggests that an analysis of these separate components of the market can make a significant contribution to a fuller understanding of office market dynamics, including swings in development activity. In the European context, there is a lack of research on modelling the functional elements of the office market individually, although such modelling is more common in US studies. Furthermore, most quantitative empirical work lacks an examination of the investment market for property and its intertemporal effects on development activity. In this paper, the authors estimate econometric models for rents, capital values, and development activity in the national office market in Great Britain. The results establish the significant influence of demand-side economic forces in the user market and the importance of use and investment market signals in the determination of office building output. However, the findings also strongly suggest that the investment market needs to be explored in more detail in order to identify and document the nature of the forces which interact in this sector of the office market.

An econometric analysis and forecasts of the office rental cycle in the Dublin area

This paper presents an econometric investigation of office rent determination in Dublin, a small European market, over the twenty eight year period 1970-1997. Using a single equation specification based on demand and supply interactions, changes in real GDP lagged one period and changes in the office stock lagged three periods were found to be the most important determinants of changes in real rents in this market. When the forecasting adequacy of the estimated model was tested and compared with forecasts derived from commonly used alternative statistical methodologies, the forecasts based on the estimated model outperformed the alternatives.

Forecasting commercial rental values using ARIMA models

The application of short‐term forecasting techniques to the prediction of commercial rental values generates valuable information about the dynamics of rent movements. It also captures short‐run trends more effectively than do other forecasting procedures. Makes use of ARIMA models to provide one‐step‐ahead predictions. The results show that ARIMA models perform better in the case of retail and office sectors. The forecasts for these sectors are satisfactory. Retail rents bear a relationship to their past values, whereas office rents are influenced by shocks in the market – demand or supply driven. The results of the present study are useful for incorporation in more general models of rent forecasting. Also presents a full methodology which facilitates its application.

National economic trends, market size and city growth effects on European office rents

This paper extends existing research on European office markets. Using a time-series cross-sectional methodology it examines the influence on office rents in 22 European cities of national economic conditions, market size and measures of economic growth and change in the city economy over the period 1982-94. The results demonstrate the significance of national real GDP changes and real interest rates in explaining European real office rental movements. In contrast, market size and city growth effects appear to have an insignificant impact on office rents.

Property cycles in the UK: an empirical investigation of the stylized facts

Applies the methodology adopted in contemporary business cycle research on establishing the stylized facts of aggregate output fluctuations, in the context of the office, industrial and retail building cycle. The objective of the study is to identify the degree to which cyclical regularities, which are in conformity with theoretical modelling, are identified across property sectors. Undertakes a statistical analysis of the cyclical properties of certain variables in relation to the building cycle in the respective commercial property sectors. The variables considered capture real economic conditions and trends in both the property and investment markets. The findings illustrate that certain variables display a cyclical pattern in relation to the property cycles which is in accordance with theoretical intuition. They also show that either other variables do not display any cyclical relationship to the commercial building cycles or the relationship does not conform to the predictions of the existing theoret...

Identifying short‐term leading indicators for real estate rental performance

This paper looks at the application of economic and financial series in forecasting IPD monthly rental series. The approach follows that employed in classical business cycle work that seeks to decompose series into trend, cyclical and noise components and is the first time that it has been applied to IPD monthly data. Trend extraction is obtained by means of the Hodrick‐Prescott filter. Several potential indicator series are investigated together with their lead characteristics. The short‐term forecasts of these series are compared with naive methods and a composite indicator. The results show the naive methods, especially the Holt‐Winters method, and certain leading indicator series produce satisfactory short‐term forecasts, but the success is both sector and time‐dependent. This suggests that it is a worthwhile endeavour in identifying potential leading indicator series. The methodology presented in this paper should be seen as complementing existing approaches that employ standard econometric procedures in modelling rental growth.

Testing for bubbles in indirect property price cycles

Speculative bubbles are generated when investors include the expectation of the future price in their information set. Under these conditions, the actual market price of the security, that is set according to demand and supply, will be a function of the future price and vice versa. In the presence of speculative bubbles, positive expected bubble returns will lead to increased demand and will thus force prices to diverge from their fundamental value. This paper investigates whether the prices of UK equity-traded property stocks over the past 15 years contain evidence of a speculative bubble. The analysis draws upon the methodologies adopted in various studies examining price bubbles in the general stock market. Fundamental values are generated using two models: the dividend discount and the Gordon growth. Variance bounds tests are then applied to test for bubbles in the UK property asset prices. Finally, cointegration analysis is conducted to provide further evidence on the presence of bubbles. Evidence of the existence of bubbles is found, although these appear to be transitory and concentrated in the mid-to-late 1990s.

International evidence on the predictability of returns to securitized real estate assets: econometric models versus neural networks

The performance of various statistical models and commonly used financial indicators for forecasting securitised real estate returns are examined for five European countries: the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Italy. Within a VAR framework, it is demonstrated that the gilt-equity yield ratio is in most cases a better predictor of securitized returns than the term structure or the dividend yield. In particular, investors should consider in their real estate return models the predictability of the gilt-equity yield ratio in Belgium, the Netherlands and France, and the term structure of interest rates in France. Predictions obtained from the VAR and univariate time-series models are compared with the predictions of an artificial neural network model. It is found that, whilst no single model is universally superior across all series, accuracy measures and horizons considered, the neural network model is generally able to offer the most accurate predictions for 1-month horizons. For quarterly and half-yearly forecasts, the random walk with a drift is the most successful for the UK, Belgian and Dutch returns and the neural network for French and Italian returns. Although this study underscores market context and forecast horizon as parameters relevant to the choice of the forecast model, it strongly indicates that analysts should exploit the potential of neural networks and assess more fully their forecast performance against more traditional models.