REITs(Real Estate Investment Trusts) are collective investment institutions that collect funds from investors to invest in real estate or real estate related equity and redistribute the profits generated from it. Recently, with the successful launch o...
REITs(Real Estate Investment Trusts) are collective investment institutions that collect funds from investors to invest in real estate or real estate related equity and redistribute the profits generated from it. Recently, with the successful launch of listed REITs such as Shinhan Alpha REIT and Lotte REIT, investors' perception of indirect real estate investment has changed considerably and positively. Real estate investment can be divided into direct investment and indirect investment. Indirect investment is a method in which investors manage funds through the company, such as real estate funds or listed REITs. This study presented the advantages of indirect investment in previous studies, along with the theory of indirect investment, portfolio theory, and average variation model, which are three preference theories of real estate funds. These models allow investors and REITs managers to diversify risk and own products by combining a variety of assets to suit their investment propensity and purpose. However, preference theory of listed REITs has few prior studies, and this study borrows psychological supportive concepts of investment in human behavioral sociology, social psychology, and business administration. The first concept of psychological support is persistence. Real estate fund products are automatically dismantled as their assets are sold over time. However, listed REITs, like regular companies, are intended for permanence, so they can naturally take the form of multiple buildings per a REITs. In other words, REITs are able to make continuous and stable circulation investment through paid-in capital increase based on trust and commitment. The second psychological support effect is liquidity (or easiness). Liquidity has a strong advantage of diversifying risk, as investors can easily cash. The two psychological support theories presented in this study can be intuitively understood from TAM(Technology Acceptance Model) and Keynes' theory of liquidity preference. This study collected data from six listed REITs, along with daily stock price data for several years for 20 real estate fund products handled by seven domestic management companies. This study defined five independent variables such as the number of subscription applicants, the ratio of institutional investors, the expiration status of the product, the experience of paid-in capital increase, and the situation of multiple assets. In addition, this study defined exogenous variables as total assets, current assets, debt ratio, and KOSPI index as control variables. However, the return on equity(ROE) is omitted from the variable because it has similarity to the dependent variable and may cause endogenous problems of causality.
This study assumed three hypotheses. Hypothesis 1 indicates that direct and indirect investments in real estate have different effects on the rate of return. In this study, Hypothesis 2 was defined as follows. When comparing listed REITs and real estate funds, it was assumed that the effect of the two product groups on the returns was different. This study divided the third hypothesis into two. H3a shows that the effect of real estate funds and listed REITs on the rate of return varies depending on the period of product life. For H3b, real estate funds and listed REITs have different impacts on the rate of return depending on the turnover of products. For statistical testing of all four hypotheses, this study used time series analysis and covariance analysis. the results are as follow. First, this study qualitatively proved that indirect investment has a positive effect in terms of profit compared to direct investment. Second, this study proved that the effect on the rate of return of listed REITs through the time series analysis of the VAR model has a more positive effect than the effect of the real estate fund. Third, this study proved that the difference in the operation method by product group does not have a significant effect on the return rate in the early stages, whereas the effect of the two product groups on the return rate differs in the latter period due to the effect of the adjusted stock price. In addition, the product group existing in the section with high turnover, such as listed REITs, showed that the change in profit was relatively significant. As a result, this study found that listed REITs with high turnover (or high liquidity) had higher returns than real estate funds. This study not only revealed that the third hypothesis using covariance analysis could be a stronger evidence for the second hypothesis through time series analysis, but also revealed that the cause was in the persistence and liquidity of listed REITs. This is a sufficient requirement to satisfy both the practical implications and academic contributions of this study.