Real Estate Fund (hereinafter "REF"), a typical vehicle for indirect investment on real estate properties like REITs(Real Estate Investment Trusts), was introduced by the enactment of "Indirect Investment Asset Management Business Act" on 2004. And RE...
Real Estate Fund (hereinafter "REF"), a typical vehicle for indirect investment on real estate properties like REITs(Real Estate Investment Trusts), was introduced by the enactment of "Indirect Investment Asset Management Business Act" on 2004. And REF served as a momentum to increase investment on office real estate market and real estate development businesses. After global financial crisis 2008, there had been lots of endeavor to improve the flexibility and supervisability of the capital market and financial investment businesses. So, in 2009, "Financial Investment Services and Capital Markets Act" (hereinafter "FSCMA") was enacted so it has promoted the expansion of related products and participating institutions.
Due to these changes of capital market environment and related policy and laws, and due to their explosive increasing assets under management, Institutional investors like pension funds and endownments are expanding their investment on real estates abroad not only for vertical diversification but also for geographical diversification of investment portfolios.
In this study, I tried to verify the excellent performance of global mixed-asset portfolio by using objective time series data and find some possibility of developing global mixed-asset portfolio as indirect investment products. The performance of portfolios measured by the Sharpe ratio, suitable to measure the risk-adjusted return of portfolios not diversified well.
In order to achieve this object, first, I derived the global real estate portfolio from the invest returns data of each real estate assets. I used the data from KRERI (Korea Real Estate Research Institute) to represent the investment returns on Office and Retail properties in Korea and used the NCREIF (National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries) Property Index Returns to represent the investment returns on Office and Retail properties in US. As a result, (Off_Kor, Off_US, Retail_Kor, Retail_US) = (60%, 20%, 10%, 10%) was the optimized proportion to make the global real estate optimum portfolio measured by Sharpe ratio. And it could be shown that there is a significant investment diversification effect especially in the aspect of geographical diversification.
And then, I tried to derive the optimum global mixed-asset portfolio by comprising the global real estate portfolio and financial assets like stock and bond in Korea or US. But the portfolio without those financial assets showed the highest Sharpe ratio. From this result, it could be presumed that the risk-adjusted invest return of real estate is overestimated and there are two possible causes. The one is "smoothing effect" of the appraisal data of investment return on real estate assets. And the other is that Sharpe ratio could be more favorable criterion to real estate assets than other financial assets because it is a risk-neutral measure.