The Real Estate Investment Trust Industry and the Financial Crisis: Modeling Volatility (1985-2016)

Abstract

This work measures the sensitivity of the residual volatility of the risk premiums of various Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) sectors to systemically important economic events between January 2, 1985, and December 30, 2016. To this end, the residual yields of the REITs are calculated and, with them, a GARCH (1,1) model is estimated, with dummy variables that identify eleven sub-periods delimited by systemic events that occurred in the American economy. The volatility of residual yields is found to decrease with the S&P500 risk premium, and increases only for some sectors with increases in Treasury Bond yields (T-Bills). Similarly, residual yield volatility increased in some periods (e.g., after the Black Monday crash, the low-quality mortgage crisis, and the Great Recession), but did not during the period of stock market collapse caused by companies in the “new economy” (known as the dot-com bubble). Knowledge of these stylized facts opens up new risk management possibilities for those investors considering in including these alternative investments in their portfolios.