Thies Lindenthal
Towards a Realistic Return Estimate for Real Estate
The research is ongoing but had resulted in several publications, working papers and (modestly sized) research grants.
Coming to terms with unquantifiable asset dimensions: Quality, beauty, uniqueness and liquidity risk
Transaction costs in real estate easily reach magnitudes of 3-8%, reduce investment returns, depress trading volumes, increase holding periods and leave markets less efficient, overall. One major contributor to transaction costs are search cost or, more general, market liquidity. The ease at which buildings can be bought or sold depend not only on market conditions but also on their location and quality attributes, which differ wildly across individual assets. Advances in machine learning methods make it possible to utilise unstructured data such as images, to better capture asset characteristics and to model asset liquidity at the asset level.
The Total Return and Risk to Residential Real Estate
This paper estimates the total rate of return to residential real estate investments based on 120,658 hand-collected archival observations of prices, rents, taxes and costs for individual houses in Paris (1809–1942) and Amsterdam (1900–1979).
The annualized real total return, net of costs and taxes, is 4.2% for Paris and 5.0% for Amsterdam, and entirely comes from rental yields. At the property-level, the yield at purchase is an important determinant of the total holding period return, even for longer holding periods. In the short-term, idiosyncratic risk is the dominant component of total risk, but its importance reduces over time.
Title of research: Unique Assets, Quality Uncertainty and Noisy Prices
This projects estimates real estate asset uniqueness along previously not quantifiable dimensions, including shape, size, architecture, perceived beauty, maintenance or shape similarity. This richer picture of individual buildings and their comparability to other properties will improve any estimates of fundamental value. More interestingly, though, it will reveal distributions of transaction values in relation to fundamental value. Since uniqueness of the assets co-determines the availability of information from comparable sales, I hypothesise that uniqueness is also linked to the absolute deviations of sales prices from fundamental values: If little is know about fundamental value, then sales prices will contain more noise.