Measurement and drivers of time to transact UK commercial real estate investments

Steven Devaney and David Scofield

ERES from European Real Estate Society (ERES)

Abstract: Trading commercial real estate involves a process of exchange that is costly and which occurs over an extended and uncertain period of time. This has consequences for the performance and risk of real estate investments as well as the strategies that investors can adopt. Despite this, the vast majority of research on transaction times has occurred for residential rather than commercial real estate. We conduct a study into the time taken to transact commercial real estate investments in the UK, using a sample of 578 transactions over the period 2004 to 2013. We measure average times to transact from both a buyer and seller perspective and we conduct econometric analysis to explain variation in transaction times between assets. The median time for purchase of real estate from introduction through to completion was 104 days and the median time for sale from marketing to completion was 135 days. However, there is considerable variability around these medians and the results from Cox Proportional Hazard models suggest that this is related to market state, type and quality of asset and the type of participants involved in the transaction. Our findings shed light on the drivers of liquidity at an individual asset level and can be used in models that try and quantify the impact of uncertain time on market on real estate investment risk.

JEL-codes: R3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-07-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://eres.architexturez.net/doc/oai-eres-id-eres2015-247 (text/html)
https://eres.architexturez.net/system/files/eres2015_247.content.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arz:wpaper:eres2015_247

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ERES from European Real Estate Society (ERES) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Architexturez Imprints ().