Evaluating the investment attributes and performance of property companies

Abstract

This study utilises style analysis to examine the effective asset mix of UK property companies, using both an unadjusted data set and one adjusted for leverage and general stock market sentiment. The findings illustrate that the style benchmarks are largely spilt between mid and small cap stocks and government bonds, while when the adjusted data set is examined, the role of fixed‐income securities is enhanced together with that of Treasury Bills and the direct property market. The resulting style portfolios are then used to assess the investment performance of the property companies. The results reveal that there is a high degree of consistency in terms of the performance ranking obtained, across both alternative performance measures and between the original and adjusted samples. However, very few of the performance statistics are found to be statistically significant at conventional levels.