Traditionally, it has been widely accepted that the investment in real estates belongs mainly to the realm of large or institutional investors due to the size of the investment. Through the REITs, however, even small investors can easily invest in rea...
Traditionally, it has been widely accepted that the investment in real estates belongs mainly to the realm of large or institutional investors due to the size of the investment. Through the REITs, however, even small investors can easily invest in real estates like mutual funds regardless of the size of the real estate. In that sense, the REITs are very useful assets which can significantly enhance the diversification of ownership of real estates to the public. While the number of investors having: interests in REITs has increased continuously since the REITS first introduced in 2001 in Korea, it is very difficult for us to find both theoretical and empirical studies about REITS in this country. Thus, the main goal of this research is to comprehensively survey the financial characteristics of REITs for the first time in the viewpoint of returns and risk of REITs in order to help investors invest in real estates as well as to incite subsequent research about REITs in the future. More specifically, we have three major goals in this study as follow: First, we review the concepts and general ideas about CR-REITs and REITs issued by banks, with the help of previous studies. Second, we explore what are the major factors affecting returns of CR-REITs and REITs issued by banks, and we analyze the relations between the relevant factors and the returns on REITs, More concretely, we try to know in what way the factors affect the returns of REITs. Third, we investigate the characteristics of the risk of REITs.
To conduct analyses in a deeper way, we gathered data through the Internet sites, such as the sites of Korea Stock Exchange, Bank of Korea, and KIS-DataBase. SPSS was applied to analyze the collected data and such methods as correlation analysis, regression analysis, Wilcoxon test, and risk analysis were employed.
The major findings obtained from this study are as follow:
First, through the correlation analyses among interest rates and between two apartment indices, we found that statistically significant results exist for some banks about the variables, and hence we did not simultaneously use those independent variables having high correlation in order to prevent multi-collinearity problem. Second, the returns of REITs have positive relations with Construction Index, exchange rates, and KOSPI as a market index, and negative relations with interest rates. In addition, we found that time-lag effects exist between returns of REITs and most of the independent variables except apartment indices. Third, we found that the beta coefficients of REITs stocks change over time. And it was also found that the beta coefficients of REITs stocks are generally less than 1. In addition, the unsystematic risks of REITs stocks are much greater than their systematic counterparts. These major findings can be utilized in the investment decisions by investors to maximize their returns on REITs.
Finally, despite of some useful findings in the study, we need to extend the study further to overcome some limitations, such as the insufficient number of samples in listed REITs, the lack of economic rationale of using the economic variables used in the previous studies, and the weakness in statistical robustness for some results.