Real Estate

Over the past two decades institutional investors have experienced increased allocation to “alternative” private‐market assets like commercial real estate (CRE). Indeed, CRE comprises an estimated at $23 trillion in total value in the United States alone with roughly $8 trillion considered to be of institutional investment quality. With the growing allocations to CRE, investment professionals increasingly need access to quantitative tools and transparency on par with the other portfolio asset classes.

The Commercial Real Estate Data Alliance (CREDA) is a consortium of academics and industry professionals dedicated to achieving data parity with other major asset classes. Specifically, we believe that improved access to and understanding of available data in commercial real estate is key to fostering higher quality research and interactions between academia and industry, to the benefit of the entire CRE community.

CREDA is currently leading several new research data initiatives:

1. Launching a data merging methodology initiative based on the Unique Building ID (UBID) concept by the Department of Energy. Open source code is available here and a video describing the project is available here.

2. Studying the impact of climate risk on CRE debt underwriting partnering with LightBox, FirstStreet.Org, and UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.

Further details on CREDA’s efforts are available in the report “Commercial Real Estate Data: Towards Parity with Other Asset Classes”. More

Latest Real Estate Research

Catering and Return Manipulation in Private Equity

December 15, 2022

We provide evidence that private equity (PE) fund managers manipulate returns to cater to their investors. Using a large dataset of PE real estate funds, we show PE fund managers overstate returns if they oversee a larger share of their investors' assets, and doing so has a more significant impact on investors' reported returns. More

Leverage in Private Equity Real Estate

March 21, 2022

This paper reviews the scant academic literature on the use of leverage in institutional private equity real estate (PERE) investments and summarize a number of stylized facts. The bulk of available evidence supports the view that leverage, as used by high-risk PERE funds, does not adequately compensate limited partners for the risk that it adds. More

Investment with Social Impact: Evidence from Commercial Real Estate Investment by Public Pension Funds

October 03, 2021

This paper studies whether and how investments by public pension funds result in a different social impact, measured by employment growth, relative to investments by other large investors. Using commercial real estate (CRE) investments as a laboratory, I compare direct pension fund CRE investments to a counterfactual of real estate private equity (REPE) CRE investments. More

Advisory Board

Jeffrey Fisher

Professor Emeritus of Finance & Real Estate, Indiana University; Visiting Professor, Johns Hopkins Carey School of Business

David Geltner

Associate Director of Research, Center for Real Estate; Professor of Real Estate Finance, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

David Ling

McGurn Professor of Real Estate; Director, Master of Science in Real Estate Program, Hough Graduate School of Business, University of Florida

Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

Earle W. Kazis and Benjamin Schore Professor of Real Estate, NYU

Jacob Sagi

Professor of Finance, University of North Carolina, Kenan-Flagler Business School

Rossen Valkanov

Zable Endowed Chair; Professor of Finance; Co-Director, Master of Finance Program, University of California at San Diego

Nancy Wallace

Lisle and Roslyn Payne Chair in Real Estate Capital Markets; Professor and Chair of the Real Estate Group; Co-Chair, Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics, University of California at Berkeley

Affiliates

Brent Ambrose, Penn State University
Tom Arnold, University of Florida
Itzhak (Zahi) Ben-David, Ohio State University
Shaun Bond, University of Cincinnati
Andrea Chegut, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jim Clayton, York University
Bob Connolly, University of Miami
Dragana Cvijanovic, Warwick Business School, the University of Warwick
John Duca, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas & Oberlin College
Mike Eriksen, University of Cincinnati
Elyas Fermand, Santa Clara University
Jeffrey Fisher, Indiana University
Andra Ghent, University of Utah
Arpit Gupta, NYU Stern School of Business
Jonathan Robert Levin Halket, Texas A&M University
Lu Han, University of Toronto
David Hartzell, University of NC - Chapel Hill
Preetesh Kantak, Indiana University
Constantine Kontokosta, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
John Krainer, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Jack Liebersohn, University of California
Crocker Liu, Cornell University
Peng Liu, Cornell University
Lara Loewenstein, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland
Greg MacKinnon, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland
Stanimira Milcheva, University College London
Tobias Mühlhofer, University of Miami
Joseph Nichols, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Joseph Pagliari, University of Chicago
Tomasz (Tomek) Piskorski, Columbia University
Michael Reher, University of California at San Diego
Tim Riddiough, University of Wisconsin
Spenser Robinson, Central Michigan University
Mauricio Rodriguez, Texas Christian University
Jacob Sagi, University of NC - Chapel Hill
Andrew Sanderford, University of Virginia
Eva Steiner, Penn State University
Alexei Tchistyi, Cornell University
Sheridan Titman, University of Texas - Austin
Alexander van de Minne, University of Connecticut
Susan Wachter, University of Pennsylvania