The extent to which a real estate investment trust’s (REIT’s) physical growth is related to market valuation and performance is examined. Using a sample of U.S. equity REITs over the 1995-2020 period, we measure a REIT’s growth as the growth of its total area in square feet (or its number...

The rapid growth of REITs over the last two decades raises and old debate on the existence of scale economies. Out of the 874 growth incidents recorded by individual REITs between 1992 and 2012, we observe that 44.5% of them are sub-optimal, that is they resulted in the acquiring REITs operating...