1st Workshop on mutual funds and Portfolio Management

The real estate fund industry has experienced tremendous growth over the past two decades. Reinforced by the adoption of a more protective directives and an investor-friendly environment, it has been able to drain more liquidity. Nowadays, real estate securities and funds appear to play a major role as an entire asset class available to investors and no longer as a mere support considered separately from other asset classes such as equities and / or bonds. At the end of this decade, it is now time to take stock of the different dimensions affected by their increased integration in portfolio management.

This is the aim of this first workshop. Many questions and issues need new studies and investigations. Firstly, it is necessary to establish a survey, a map and a panorama as complete as possible of the real estate funds characteristics, mainly for the European industry. The relevance of performance measurements and valuation tools can therefore be re-examined by practitioners and academics.

How efficient is the real estate fund market? Which benchmarks have to be included in the valuation models? What are the main drivers of their performance? Which winning strategies for asset selection and portfolio allocation? The industrial organization issues for REITs has also to be re-explored; mainly by a closer looks on relevant methods and practices on liquidity risk management, the impact capital flows, and economies of scale.

Major Themes: We invite academics, professionals and regulators to share their expertise for this event and to submit research papers, survey, case study related to Real estate investment. The workshop will be structured in a round table and parallel sessions. Areas of research may include, but are not limited to :

  • The performance of Real Estate funds
  • Valuation of REITs and other real estate assets.
  • Investment characteristics of REITs
  • The issues of real estate assets in mixed-asset portfolios (returns, volatility, interest rate sensitivity, liquidity,
  • momentum, …)
  • he relationships among listed and unlisted real estate assets including, private equity real estate funds.
  • Industrial organization issues for REITs (e.g. capital structure, economies of scale, geographic focus/diversification,
  • ownership structure, ...

An European perspective is a plus.