Here are some short thoughts on topics of relevance to real estate investment. You can subscribe (without entering any personal data) by linking this page to your RSS feed.
This year’s festive season books are focussed around decision making and are some of the books that were used as input to our work for the Investment Property Forum entitled “Mitigating behavioural influences on decision-making within the property investment process”.
Read MoreThe analytical metric-of-choice for the private equity real estate industry is the internal rate of return, or IRR. It is a prime example of Charlie Munger’s view that “people calculate too much and think too little” - it requires a computer to run iterations that would take a human a lot of time and no thought whatsoever. And it doesn’t tell you if you are making an investment.
Read MoreNow might be a good time to read Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller’s book, Narrative Economics, published in 2019. In it he argues that “economic fluctuations are substantially driven by contagion of oversimplified and easily transmitted variants of economic narratives”.
Read MoreIt is that time of the year when giving or receiving a book might be on the agenda. Here are some ideas for books that may interest you, or others: Never Bullshit the Client - The Psychology of Money - Patient Capital - Non-consensus Investing - The Art of Statistics.
Read MoreReal estate investors often use interest rates as part of their investment-decision making process. But strange things are happening to interest rates and the use, or not, of negative interest rates has been the focus of much attention.
Read MoreDoes the dominance of large, institutional real estate managers give rise to the potential for systemic risks and can this be capitalised on?
Read MoreDocumentation for private real estate funds is written so that risk is unbundled and limited, e.g. “up to” 60% leverage. With the option to use low levels of risk preserved, why do higher risk capacity funds tend to underperform in a downturn?
Read MoreIf an investor can persistently generate positive alpha, this may well be linked to investment skill. So, what is alpha and how good has the real estate industry been at generating it?
Read MoreIn engineering, noise is a disturbance around a signal and engineers have become good at extracting signals from the noise. It is for real estate investors to become engineers, to try and extract the signal and produce some clarity.
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