Depreciation is a key element of understanding the returns from and price of commercial real estate. Understanding its impact is important for asset allocation models and asset management decisions.  It is a key input into well-constructed pricing models and its impact on indices of commercial...

Much prior research on the structure and performance of UK real estate portfolios has relied on aggregated measures for sector and region. For these groupings to have validity, the performance of individual properties within each group should be similar. This paper analyses a sample of 1,200...

This paper sets out progress during the first eighteen months of doctoral research into the City of London office market. The overall aim of the research is to explore relationships between office rents and the economy in the UK over the last 150 years. To do this, a database of lettings has...

Geographic diversity is a fundamental tenet in portfolio management.  Yet there is evidence from the US that institutional investors prefer to concentrate their real estate investments in favoured and specific areas as primary locations for the properties that occupy their portfolios.  The...

This paper re-examines whether it is more advantageous in terms of risk reduction to diversify by sector or region by comparing the performance of the ‘conventional’ regional classification of the UK with one based on modern socio-economic criteria using a much larger real estate data set...

In two recent papers Byrne and Lee (2006, 2007) examined the geographical concentration of institutional office and retail investment in England and Wales at two points in time; 1998 and 2003. The findings indicate that commercial office portfolios are concentrated in a very few urban areas,...

This paper uses data provided by three major real estate advisory firms to investigate the level and pattern of variation in the measurement of historic real estate rental values for the main European office centres. The paper assesses the extent to which the data providing organizations agree...

This paper examines the regional investment practices of institutional investors in the commercial real estate office market in 1998 and 2003 in England and Wales. Consistent with previous studies in the US the findings show that investors concentrate their holdings in a few (urban) areas and...

Risk diversification is important to all investors. However, commercial real estate investors in the UK tend to concentrate their holdings in relatively few properties; as a consequence they are vulnerable to significant risk of underperforming the overall market or a target rate of return....

[abstract missing - contribution appeared in the programme]