Real estate private equity : an overview of the industry and analysis of its returns

Abstract

The real estate private equity / opportunity fund sector has experienced tremendous growth as a result of regulatory and market changes. With this growth come the pains and opportunities of restructuring the capitalization of a capital-intensive industry. While the underlying assets of real estate opportunity funds are different than traditional private equity funds, many of the issues facing emerging real estate funds are similar to the issues faced by traditional private equity funds. As the industry continues to grow, many issues facing these opportunity funds will be intensified as the early pioneer funds start to exit their investments and realize returns to the limited partners. As the data analysis in this thesis indicates, the significance of the fund performance has very little correlation to date with any specific property sector as illustrated with the low R-square and t-Stat statistics related to the regression analysis. For the most part, very few consistent patterns have emerged in the industry with the exception of higher volatility in smaller funds and the importance of manager selection when it comes to investing in the right fund as evidenced by the wide range of performance returns within similar initial vintage year categories. The industry is maturing towards greater efficiency and transparency along with the broader private equity industry. It appears likely that alternative investments such as real estate opportunity funds as an investment alternative are here to stay. Not only does private equity align the interests of investor and manager but it also provides superior returns to the investor compared to the traditional fee-manager model that used to predominate property investments. The real estate industry, which represents fifteen percent of the U.S. GNP, is poised for continued growth. Moving forward, real estate private equity is well positioned to grow as well as it complements the public equity markets that help to improve the overall capital structure of the industry.