Real Estate Investment Trusts Stocks Research Articles

REIT stock dividends: the policy and intra‐industry wealth effects

PurposeDuring the height of the financial/credit crisis of 2008, the US Internal Revenue Service issued temporary guidance that permits REITs (real estate investment trusts) to retain cash and pay “effective stock dividends” through 2009 to meet their income distribution requirement. The purpose of this study is to investigate the policy implications of this guidance on shareholders' wealth and the intra‐industry effects for non‐event, rival REITs when event REITs announced elective stock dividends.Design/methodology/approachThis study identified the announcements of the Revenue Procedures 2008‐68 and 2009‐15 and subsequent six equity REITs announcing the distribution of effective stock dividends in the first quarter of 2009. To assess their implications, this study adopted the event study methodology and multivariate regressions to examine the REIT price reactions and their distribution to the Revenue Procedure announcements and to the elective stock dividend announcements, respectively.FindingsThe Revenue Procedure announcements have positive wealth effects on the entire REIT market and REITs with higher leverage enjoy larger abnormal returns. During firm stock dividend announcement windows, non‐event, rival REITs have higher positive price reactions when the event firm and the non‐event firm are not alike and their returns have a low correlation coefficient, when the event firm has a large negative abnormal price reaction, and when the event firm pays cash/stock dividends in the mixture of 40 percent:60 percent, instead of 10 percent:90percent.Practical implicationsThe results will help REIT investors to make better decisions. This study produces important implications for investors to pick REITs which are likely to experience higher returns at periods of turmoil when announcements about dividend policy changes are expected.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study looking into intra‐industry effects of REIT dividend announcements and the policy implications of the elective REIT stock dividends permitted by the US Internal Revenue Service. The results of this study show that the informational signals associated with these announcement events are rich and have intra‐industry implications on REIT share prices.

International Real Estate Review

In this paper, we apply the method for removing the upward bias in returns in equally-weighted return indexes developed by Fisher, Weaver, and Webb (2010) to real estate investment trust (REIT) stocks in the US. While we find significant bias in this index, two trends are evident: first, there is less overall bias than in non-REIT stocks, and second, the bias of REIT stocks has declined over time. These trends are consistent with growing listings of REIT stocks on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), as well as with increasingly higher stock prices. They also support the hypothesis that there have been significant improvements in the market micro-structure environment of REIT stocks since the early 1970s. We further apply our methodology to REIT stocks listed in the two countries with the largest number of REITs outside the US: Germany and Australia. The results support the hypothesized relationship between index bias and market micro-structure environment.

Introduction to Special Issue of JREFE on REITs

This paper is an introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics (JREFE) devoted to papers on Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). The papers were especially written for a conference sponsored by the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts. The papers deal with the theoretical and empirical aspects of REIT underwriting behavior, corporate governance, asset pricing, takeovers and going-private transactions, capital-market based financing, changes in monetary policy and changes in REIT stock prices, and risk-bearing and liquidity.

Information Uncertainty and the Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift Anomaly: Insights from REITs

This is the first study to examine the post-earnings-announcement drift anomaly in a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) context. The efficient markets hypothesis suggests that unexpected earnings should be fully incorporated into asset prices soon after being publicly announced. We hypothesize that publicly announced earnings signals may be more certain for REITs due to the presence of a parallel (private) asset market, suggesting less drift for REIT stocks. However, we find a large REIT drift component that is both statistically and economically significant. Furthermore, while the initial earnings surprise response is more muted for REITs, we find that the magnitude of the drift is significantly larger for REITs than for ordinary common stocks (NonREITs). Thus, information does not appear to move between the private and public asset markets in such a way as to render REIT earnings signals more certain than NonREIT earnings signals.

Removing Biases in Computed Returns: An Analysis of Bias in Equally-Weighted Return Indexes of REITs

In this paper, we apply the method for removing the upward bias in returns in equally-weighted return indexes developed by Fisher, Weaver, and Webb (2010) to real estate investment trust (REIT) stocks in the US. While we find significant bias in this index, two trends are evident: first, there is less overall bias than in non-REIT stocks, and second, the bias of REIT stocks has declined over time. These trends are consistent with growing listings of REIT stocks on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), as well as with increasingly higher stock prices. They also support the hypothesis that there have been significant improvements in the market micro-structure environment of REIT stocks since the early 1970s. We further apply our methodology to REIT stocks listed in the two countries with the largest number of REITs outside the US: Germany and Australia. The results support the hypothesized relationship between index bias and market microstructure environment.

The Role of Managerial Stock Option Programs in Governance: Evidence from REIT Stock Repurchases

This article examines the role of stock option programs and executive holdings of stock options in real estate investment trust (REIT) governance. We study the issue by analyzing how the market reaction to a stock repurchase announcement varies as a function of the individual REIT's governance structure. In particular, we examine how executive and employee stock option holdings influence the market reaction to a firm's announcement of a stock repurchase. Using a sample of REIT repurchase announcements, we find that the market reacts more favorably to announcements by firms where executives have larger option holdings and the chief executive officer is not entrenched. Our results with respect to the roles of stock option holdings of executives and nonexecutives differ from those reported for a cross-section of non-REIT firms. While we find evidence supporting the importance of executive stock options in aligning the incentives of management and reinforcing the positive signaling associated with a repurchase announcement, we find little evidence that the market views REIT repurchases as being used primarily to fund option exercise. We attribute these findings to greater dependence by REIT investors on internal governance mechanisms (such as stock option programs) as a result of regulatory restrictions that limit external monitoring such as hostile takeovers.

REIT Open-Market Stock Repurchases and Profitability

This study examines whether the announcement of real estate investment trust (REIT) open-market stock repurchase programs contain information content about future operating performance over the period 1990–2001. We find no evidence that REIT stock buybacks are positively related to the operating performance. In fact, the operating performance of our sample REIT firms peak at the repurchase announcement year and deteriorate in the years following the announcement of share repurchases. Nevertheless, the sample REITs show higher levels of post-repurchase operating performance when compared to those of the pre-repurchase period. Additionally, our regression analysis shows that changes in future operating performance can explain the positive announcement effect.

Updating expectations: An analysis of post-9/11 returns

This study analyzes how three groups of market participants—insiders, analysts, and all other investors—revised their expectations on New York Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in response to the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001. Our analysis reveals that, on the day when markets reopened, REITs with significant exposure to the New York area outperformed a broad REIT office index by 4.1 % . However, we find that, according to several metrics of real market behavior, this anticipated superior performance of New York office properties did not materialize. Further analysis of market participants’ activity in office REIT stocks indicates that insiders were the first to lower their expectations (e.g., 99.9 % of their trades in REITs with New York exposure were sales in the month following 9/11), followed by analysts (the vast majority of them revised downward their expectations of NY REIT performance in the first weeks of November 2001, albeit heterogeneously so), and finally market prices adjusted to reflect the underlying real market behavior; indeed, abnormal REIT returns had disappeared by mid-November 2001. These dynamics are consistent with theories arguing that the cross-sectional correlation of insiders and analysts’ information is an important determinant of trading and pricing patterns in semi-strong efficient market settings.

REIT Stock Repurchases: Completion Rates, Long-Run Returns, and the Straddle Hypothesis

This study of real estate investment trusts (REITs) analyzes three possible explanations for the stock price reaction to a repurchase announcement and the subsequent repurchase behavior of managers under each hypothesis. Two of the hypotheses, the signaling hypothesis and the exchange option hypothesis, are established in the existing literature; the third hypothesis is a modification of the exchange option hypothesis. The exchange option hypothesis is extended to allow for additional flexibility in management decisions. This extended exchange option hypothesis is termed the “straddle” hypothesis because it provides management with both a call and put option. The empirical analyses show the straddle hypothesis is a more robust explanation of changes in shares outstanding in the post-announcement period than the alternative explanations.

Extrapolation Theory and the Pricing of REIT Stocks

This paper is the winner of the best paper on Real Estate Investment Trusts award (sponsored by the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts (NAREIT)] presented at the 2005 American Real Estate Society Annual Meeting.This study evaluates the investment prospects of value stocks in the real estate investment trust (REIT) market. Value stocks are defined as those that carry low prices relative to their earnings, dividends, book assets, or other measures of fundamental value. The empirical results show that from 1990 onwards, value REITs provide superior returns without exposing investors to higher risks. The evidence is consistent with the extrapolation theory, which attributes the mispricing to investors over extrapolating past corporate results into the future. Interestingly, the findings reveal that such extrapolation is asymmetric in the REIT market. While value REITs are underpriced in accordance with the extrapolation theory, no evidence is found that growth REITs are overpriced. The value anomaly also exhibited several temporal traits. Firstly, the value premium varies over time. Secondly, the magnitude of the premium is inversely associated with the market performance. Finally, the value anomaly is not evident in the pricing of REITs in the 1980s.

The Conditional Performance of REIT Stock Repurchases

This paper uses a conditional performance measure to test whether real estate investment trust (REIT) managers announcing stock repurchases have private information about their firms' prospects. We use stock price to condition for public information and measure the managers' implied private information by the covariance between repurchase size and subsequent stock payoffs (or operating performance). Results show that managers have private information but mostly with respect to long-term as opposed to near-term payoffs. We also find that repurchase size is positively related to a stock's idiosyncratic return volatility, perhaps because noisy stocks deviate farther from fundamental value, offering informed managers larger profit potential.

The Long‐Run Performance of REIT Stock Repurchases

This study investigates the long‐horizon performance of open‐market stock repurchases for real estate investment trusts (REITs). We develop a new methodology to model the autocorrelation of monthly returns into long‐horizon buy‐and‐hold abnormal return estimators. Serial correlation can introduce bias (autocorrelation bias) because the bid‐ask bounce may affect monthly returns for sample firms and non‐sample firms in a different fashion. Previous long‐horizon event studies have overlooked this source of bias. There is compelling evidence that the market underreacts to the stock repurchase announcements. The evidence holds for different measures of the variance and the effects of cross‐correlation of abnormal returns. Results are also robust to the traditional buy‐and‐hold abnormal return and the wealth relative estimators. We investigate the nature of the underreaction and find strong support for the undervaluation hypothesis.

REIT Stock Splits and Market Efficiency

An analysis of real estate investment trust (REIT) stock splits is presented. Evaluation of the initial reaction to split REITs supports efficient market pricing where REITs generate statistically significant positive announcement date returns, no statistically significant record date returns, and muted ex-date returns. In the long-term, split REITs do not consistently out perform benchmark portfolios over one-year, two-year, and three-year periods. REITs split subsequent to a substantial run up in stock price and to improve the position of their post split stock price relative to the stock price of the typical REIT.

Why do reits engage in open-market repurchases?

We investigate why real estate investment trusts (REITs) still engage in open-market repurchases given the unique 95 percent payout requirement. We provide evidence that the motivations for REITs to repurchase stocks are different from those of unregulated firms found by the existing literature. Instead of using funds from operations, REITs appear to finance stock repurchases by issuing new debt and/or selling assets and investments. Unlike ordinary corporations, REITs stock repurchases are not motivated by cash distribution, capital structure, and undervalued equity. However, REITs are more likely to buy back stocks when employees own a higher level of stock options. Also, we find that REITs are more likely to buy back stocks when they have a higher institutional ownership and/or inside ownership.

Financing and investing considerations for REITs

As equity markets decline, bonds and REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) become more appealing to investors. Although REITs stocks are equity based their continual return is more bond‐like in nature. This article addresses the analyses process for investing in real estate based equities.

The Riskiness of REITs Surrounding the October 1997 Stock Market Decline

Real estate investment trusts (REITs) are viewed as low risk/low return stocks that exhibit defensive stock characteristics. The stock market decline of October 1997 provides an excellent opportunity to examine the riskiness of REITs during high levels of market uncertainty. We find that the decline in REIT stock values was about one-half as large as the decline of non-REIT stocks. Additionally, market uncertainty on the event day was shown with an increased bid-ask spread for all stocks. On the following day when the market decline was partially reversed, the bid-ask spreads continued to increase for non-REIT stocks, but declined for REIT stocks. This suggests that REITs, like defensive stocks in general, are less prone to significant declines during market-wide disturbances. Also, we order stocks based on the standard deviation measures of risk and show that this risk measure explains the cross-section of returns for non-REITs but is not valid for REITs.

Hotel Real Estate Investment Trusts' Risk Features and Beta Determinants

This study examines the risk features of hotel real estate investment trust (REIT) firms. In particular, it investigates the systematic and unsystematic risk of hotel REIT stocks and the determinants of their systematic risk, or beta. Using the financial data of 19 U.S. hotel REIT firms from 1993 through 1999, the authors found that 84% of the firms'total risk was contributed by firm-specific, unsystematic risk. Systematic risk correlated positively with debt leverage and growth but negatively with firm size. These findings suggest that growth via mergers and acquisitions and less reliance on debt financing may help lower systematic risk and enhance hotel REITs'value.

Institutional Investors’ Preferences for REIT Stocks

This article investigates the determinants of real estate investment trusts (REIT) portfolio investment and institutional REIT ownership using multivariate Tobit regressions. We contend that many institutional investors take larger positions in more liquid assets like REIT stocks, as compared with private real estate equities, because of liquidity considerations. Consistent with this contention, we find that liquidity constraints are significantly related to REIT portfolio investment by institutional investors. We also find that institutional investors have different preferences for REIT stocks than do other investors; they generally prefer larger, more liquid REIT stocks.

Hotel Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs): An Investigation of Market Performance, Risk Features, and Risk Determinants

ABSTRACT This empirical study investigates the long-term (1993–1999) performance of hotel REITs and compares it with five other REITs groups: office/industrial, residential, health care, retail, and diversified REITs. In addition, the study is designed to investigate the risk features of hotel REIT stocks as well as their determinants of systematic risk.

Can Private Real Estate Portfolios Be Rebalanced/Diversified Using Equity REIT Shares?

Executive Summary. The purpose of this study is to determine whether or not private real estate portfolios can be diversified or rebalanced using public real estate (equity real estate investment trust stocks). An examination of resulting efficient frontiers and their corresponding optimal portfolio weights across various levels of expected return reveals that the ability of public real estate to rebalance private real estate only portfolios, using either long or short positions, is very much in doubt. The results found in a mixed-asset setting are more promising, but not convincing. Hence, if institutional investors wish to continue to hold public real estate, they should do so for reasons other than rebalancing or diversifying their private real estate portfolios.