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This paper aims to explain the main difficulties in the Spanish residential rental market becoming a true alternative to home ownership.

Currently, the Spanish rental market only meets temporary housing needs; it is very atomized and lacks professionalism. It does not provide an adequate legal framework to fulfil the parties’ aspirations (i.e. stability, affordability and flexibility for tenants; profitability, security and guarantees to landlords). The analysis of this proposition and the resulting proposal are based on six years of research, which started with the TENLAW European project.

Overcoming these constrains is essential to double the rate of residential leases in Spain and get closer to the European average, thus achieving a true diversification of housing tenures and avoiding future housing bubbles.

The paper makes a series of recommendations to legislators and policymakers to draft an adequate legal framework aimed at increasing the housing rental market share. This is based on the experience of mature tenancy markets in Europe, such as the German, Swiss and Austrian ones.

The new proposed legal framework will help to transform the tenancy model in Spain into a functional one, making it more stable, affordable and flexible, while increasing safety and profitability for landlords. The model is also applicable, on a more general level, to all Mediterranean European countries.

Rethinking the regulation of tenancies, in a context of housing crisis and unaffordability (still a reality in many European and worldwide countries) has valuable potential for making this type of tenure more popular and for avoiding future housing bubbles.

This paper aims to analyse the risk and excess returns of the Spanish real estate investment trusts (S-REITs) using various methods, though focusing primarily on the Fama-French three-factor (FF3) model, over the period from 2007Q3 to 2017Q2.

The autoregressive distributed lag model is used for the empirical analysis to test long-term stable relationships between variables.

The findings indicate that the FF3 model is suitable for the S-REITs market, better explaining the S-REITs’ returns variation than the traditional single-index capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and the Carhart four-factor model. The empirical evidence is reasonably consistent with the FF3 model; the values for the market, size and value are highly statistically significant over the analysis period, with 68.7% variation in S-REITs’ returns explained by the model. In the long run, the market factor has less explanatory power than the size and value factors; the positive long-term multiplier of the size factor indicates that small S-REIT companies have higher returns, along with higher risk, while the negative multiplier of the value indicator suggests that S-REITs portfolios prefer to allocate growth REITs with low book-to-market ratios. The empirical findings from a modified FF3 model, which additionally incorporates Spain’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate, two consumer price index (CPI) macro-factors and three dummy variables, indicates that GDP growth rate and CPI also affect S-REITs’ yields, while investment funds with capital calls have a small influence on S-REITs’ returns.

The regression results of the standard and extended FF3 model can help researchers understand S-REITs’ risk and return through a general stock pattern. Potential investors are given more information to consider the new Spanish investment vehicle before making a decision.

The paper uses standard techniques but applies them for the first time to the S-REIT market.

Spanish real estate investment trusts (REITs) emerged as an important and rapidly expanding property investment vehicle, against the backdrop of improving Spain macro-economic fundamentals and commercial property market. This sees Spanish REITs being the 3rd largest REIT market in Europe, offering access to important Iberian and European property assets, with the added benefits of transparency, governance and liquidity. The purpose of this paper is to assess the significance, risk-adjusted performance and portfolio diversification benefits of Spanish REITs in a mixed-asset portfolio over August 2014–February 2018.

Using monthly total returns, the risk-adjusted performance and portfolio diversification potential of Spanish REITs over August 2014–February 2018 are assessed. Asset allocation diagrams are used to assess the role of Spanish REITs in a mixed-asset portfolio.

Spanish REITs delivered strong risk-adjusted returns compared to stocks over August 2014–February 2018, but with limited portfolio diversification benefits. Compared to bonds, Spanish REITs offered competitive risk-adjusted returns and excellent diversification benefits. Importantly, this sees Spanish REITs as strongly contributing to the Spanish mixed-asset portfolio across the portfolio risk spectrum.

The 2012 Spanish REIT regulatory changes have been pivotal in providing a supportive environment for Spanish REITs’ growth. Spanish REITs are now a significant market in a European context. The results highlight the major role of Spanish REITs in a Spanish mixed-asset portfolio. The strong risk-adjusted performance of Spanish REITs compared to stocks sees Spanish REITs contributing to the mixed-asset portfolio across the portfolio risk spectrum. This is particularly important, as an increasing number of investors have utilised Spanish REITs to obtain their property exposure in a liquid format in recent years.

This paper is the first published empirical research analysis of the risk-adjusted performance of Spanish REITs, and the role of Spanish REITs in a mixed-asset portfolio. This research enables empirically validated, more informed and practical property investment decision-making regarding the strategic role of Spanish REITs in a portfolio.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between the financialisation dynamics of listed property companies (LPCs) and their participation in the metropolisation dynamics, in ten European countries between 2000 and 2017. The study takes place in a context of globalised real estate markets and modification of traditional urban economics.

The measure of financialisation corresponds to a beta increase, in the sense of the capital asset pricing model, and is corroborated by an informativeness index. LPC-owned properties are classified along two spatial segmentations. Panel models are used to analyse the relation between financial and urban hierarchies (through building arbitrages).

Financialisation is generally associated with a decrease in the number of assets owned, especially in the Netherlands and the UK, whereas non-financialised companies tend to increase their number of assets, especially in “flight-to-quality” countries such as Germany and Switzerland. In the first case, non-urban spaces and small and medium urban areas are arbitraged in favour of urban cores and metropoles. In the second, investments are reallocated towards hinterlands and the lower segments of the urban hierarchy. Over the study period, the parallelism between the financial hierarchy and the urban hierarchy was reinforced. Spain illustrates the risks of this evolution, whereas Sweden and Belgium present specificities.

This paper illustrates how LPCs function as transmitting channels in the new spatial and urban organisation.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the securitization of rental streams, a new investment and finance product introduced in the USA in 2013 that enables fundraising from large residential portfolios owned by major investment funds and investment banking. The securities are made up of non-performance loans as well as real estate portfolios of financial entities.

An academic analysis of the European securitization market is performed, as well as a broad overview of the state of the art of the rental housing market and investment property market. Moreover, a market study of Real Estate Owned (hereinafter, REOs) and Real Estate Debts is carried out to determine both the present framework and future trends. Various financial entities and real estate management companies are examined through interviews and data collection to assess the reality of distressed assets and residential portfolios owned by major investors. It introduced the Broker’s Price Opinion concept, de loan-to-value concept and the London Interbank Offered Rate.

REO-to-rental securitization is a step forward toward the democratization of finance through the globalization of the residential market, improving risk sharing for major and retail investors. The securitization of rental streams in Europe has not taken off, despite several issuances in the USA since 2013 with significant success where first tranches obtained a credit qualification of triple-A from the majority of the main rating agencies.

At the end of 2013, a global investment firm launched an innovative finance and investment vehicle that securitized the cash flows originating from leased residential properties. That issue resulted in considerable success and in the development of a new alternative and innovative financing source for real estate activity. Taking into account that housing is a primary need of our society, there is a strong motivation for improving the residential market, and thus, REO-to-rental securitization could help take a step forward in making the housing market more efficient.

The purpose of this study is to examine the differences between initial public offering (IPO) pricing in the real estate sector and to provide insight into how real estate investment trust (REIT) and real estate operating company (REOC) IPOs perform in a comparative framework.

The sample consists of 107 European REIT and REOC IPOs from nine European countries over the period 2000-2015. The initial returns are examined by creating subsamples based on the two business forms, countries and specific timeframes (before, during and after the global financial crisis). A multiple regression analysis is applied to identify the ex-ante uncertainty factors, IPO and firm characteristics, which may impact on the different underpricing levels of REITs and REOCs.

European property companies are on average significantly underpriced by 4.63 per cent. The results also reveal that REITs provide a significantly lower underpricing of 2.02 per cent than REOCs, with a positive initial return of 5.69 per cent. The causal treatment effect of the legal form of the company and the underpricing is confirmed by propensity score matching. Among the most influential factors for a lower REIT underpricing, besides the REIT-status itself, are the volatility, offer size and market phase of the IPO. During the global financial crisis (GFC) (2008-2010), underpricing exceeds the initial return for the total sample by approximately 70 per cent.

This is the first study investigating differences in the underpricing level of REITs and REOCs in a European setting, including the GFC as an extraordinary market phase. The authors provide evidence that REIT IPOs compared to REOC IPOs “leave less money on the table”.