European real estate associations announce the 2018 research award winner
1
Oct
2018
Industry associations and the sponsors, the European Association for Investors in Non-listed Real Estate Vehicles (INREV), the Investment Property Forum (IPF) and the Society of Property Researchers (SPR), have awarded the 2018 Nick Tyrrell Research Prize to joint authors Dr Frank Ametefe and Dr Steven Devaney, both of the Henley Business School, University of Reading, with Professor Simon Stevenson of the University of Washington, for their paper, ‘Optimal Composition of Hybrid/Blended Real Estate Portfolios’.
The paper considers an optimum mix of liquid, publicly traded assets that may be added to a property fund portfolio to provide the enhanced liquidity required by institutional investors such as UK defined contribution pension funds which use these funds to gain exposure to real estate as an asset class. The performance and liquidity of various investments has become an issue of concern among investors, especially as the ability of investors to exit these funds has frequently been compromised in periods following market shocks. The research indicates that applying formal optimisation techniques leads to a considerable improvement in the ability of the returns of blended real estate products to track the underlying benchmark property index even with significant addition of liquid, publicly traded assets.
Dr Paul McNamara, Chair of the Judging Panel commented, “This is a well-written paper where the methodology and results are well explained. It is highly relevant to members of organisations that sponsor this Prize. The paper addresses a perennial topic for fund managers in a discerning manner with respect to the methodology chosen and positions itself well against prior studies in this area. The paper was selected from a total of 14 submissions from across the globe and the Judging Panel was delighted to be able to award the 2018 Prize to this paper”.
Accepting the award, corresponding author, Dr Frank Ametefe said, “We are delighted to have been awarded the Nick Tyrrell Research Prize. Our work was motivated by practical concerns and issues facing open-ended real estate funds who need to hold a proportion of liquid assets, but who wish to minimise tracking error and/or loss of returns from doing so. We hope that the work will be of interest to investors, fund managers and the academic community alike”.
The authors have been invited to present their paper at a special industry seminar in London in February/March 2019 – date to be confirmed.
Submissions for 2019 Prize
The Nick Tyrrell Research Prize is awarded annually to innovative and high-quality, applied research in real estate investment. The deadline for the 2019 Prize is 31 May 2019 and all submissions should be made through the secretariat for the Prize, Dr Paul Kennedy and Rita Gosrani at [email protected].