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The purpose of this paper is to examine developers’ optimal development timing when developers are heterogeneous and have different marginal costs in a real estate development market.

This study uses a multiple-player game theoretic real option model and provides tractable results of asymmetric development strategies from a two-stochastic-variable model. Anecdotal evidence and market observations are presented.

Stronger developers (with low marginal costs) exercise real estate development options earlier than weaker developers (with high marginal costs). However, the interval time between developments by stronger and weaker developers decreases in rental volatilities. Real estate with a high positive externality are developed earlier than real estate with a low or negative externality.

Weaker and smaller developers are advised to undertake projects having positive externalities from vicinities. Government agencies are recommended to use tools of zoning and urban planning to prioritise developments introducing positive externalities and to facilitate the growth of weaker and smaller developers. This may subsequently help reduce incentive for land banking and oversupply in real estate space market.

This research is probably the first to explicitly incorporate developers’ heterogeneous strength in real estate development timing options with multiple developers in a competitive market. It sheds additional insights into the understanding of potential problems of development cascades, under the interactive effects between exogenous policy changes and endogenous response from asymmetric developers.

This paper aims to test the predictability of the three asset classes, namely direct property, bond and property stocks in Singapore.

Using the generalized method of moment (GMM) estimation methodology, the authors first estimate the excess returns of assets on five instrumental variables and a constant term. Next the common risk factors are tested in three parts involving different portfolio of sample assets.

The empirical results shows that there are at most three common risk factors that can be used to predict the excess returns of six asset classes, that include four direct property assets, bonds and property stocks. The results also indicate that there are separate common risk premia that are priced in property stock and direct property markets, which indirectly reject the hypothesis that the two property markets are integrated.

The empirical results that reject the market integration between property and property stock markets imply that there are significant diversification benefits for holding both assets in investors' portfolios. The two property assets capture different risk premia in the markets.

The GMM specifications that include five instrumental variables may not fully capture all risk information. Omission of other variables is, however, traded‐off against the parsimony of the model specification. More independent variables could be included in the future studies, and more asset classes could also be added to the tests.

The study provides alternative evidence to the test of market integration between property and property stocks in Singapore. It also verifies the earlier study in the USA that property and stock market effects could be separately priced by the market.

Asset‐backed securitization (ABS) is an interesting financial innovation whereby debt instruments backed by cash flows generated from income‐producing assets are issued for investment purposes in the capital markets. This study examines the characteristics of ABS transactions in Singapore and evaluates whether proper governance mechanisms have been developed to protect ABS investors. We examined the unique features of the Visor case, such as rental guarantee, large block ownerships of junior bonds, credit enhancement, embedded options, managerial relationships between the SPV and servicers, and critically evaluated the effects of these characteristics on the governance of ABS. Rules on separation of banks' participation in ABS and the accountant's requirement of “clean sale” that affect the ABS structure were also discussed. We also develop a simple information asymmetric model to evaluate the pecking order choice of two different financing methods: collateralized loans and ABS.

This paper sets out to empirically test the office space choice decision of firms currently occupying offices in Suntec City, Singapore.

Empirical data on office space determinants of occupiers in Suntec City office towers were collected via a mailed questionnaire from March to June 2004. Based on a consolidated sample list of 342 firms, 61 responses from the occupiers, which represent a response rate of 17.8 percent, were received.

Based on the survey results on office space preference of occupiers in Suntec City, the mean score statistics show that image and prestige of an office location and accessibility by public transport are the two most highly ranked factors by the firms.

The selection of Suntec City as a sample case study may help to control the heterogeneity of building factor, but it will also limit the generalization of the findings. However, the results provide support to the deliberate strategies by the management to create a pro‐business environment and also to connect the space through deliberate network effects. The second limitation is the uneven distribution of sample firms by size in the survey.

In many office space choice studies, building and accessibility factors were invariably found to be significant determinants of office location. In this study, non‐location and network connectivity factors were included in the empirical tests, and they were found to be significant in influencing office space decision of selected clusters of firms in a building.

The lack of transaction data has been identified as one of the major obstacles for the empirical evaluation of real option. Quigg’s study in 1993 was one of the first to empirically estimate the premium for the option of waiting to develop using data from 2,700 land sales in Seattle. This study modified Quigg’s methodology and applied it to estimate the premium for the option of waiting to develop based on a sample of data from 2,286 property transactions in the UK collected over a 14‐year sample period from 1984 to 1997. Based on a one‐factor contingent claim valuation model, we found that the average premiums for the timing options were 28.78 percent for office sector, 25.75 percent for industrial sector and 16.06 percent for retail sector. We also tested the robustness of the theoretical‐based land value estimates in explaining the market‐based land values. The regression results showed a statistically significant relationship in logarithm form between the market‐based residual land value and the model‐based land values (with embedded timing option), with R² of 0.75, 0.79 and 0.82 for office, industrial and the retail sectors respectively.

Market critics often cited an apparent lack of relationship between corporate performance and stock prices as the main reason for a poor prediction of stock prices. This study attempts to examine whether prices of 15 sample listed property stocks in Singapore reflect their corporate fundamental values over a ten‐year period from June 1989 to June 1999. Proxies for corporate fundamental values used in our study are earnings per share (EPS), dividends per share (DPS) and net asset values (NAV) of the individual property stocks listed in Singapore. From the Johansen’s cointegration test results, there were long‐run convergence relationships of stock prices with their fundamental values for nine of the 15 sample stocks, which implied some forms of mean reversion process of stock prices towards their fundamental values. For the nine sampled cointegrating stocks, NAV and EPS, particularly in the second‐lag orders, were the most significant fundamental values in explaining the short‐run dynamics of the stock price changes. The error correction mechanism (ECM) was also found to be statistically significant in the long‐run convergence relationships with four sample stock prices. DPSs and lagged changes in stock prices, in comparison, were statistically significant, but in only two of the sample vector ECM relationships. The results imply that institutional investors should pay more attention to the underlying performance of stocks, in particularly the EPS and NAV, in their stock selection process.

Construction and Real Estate NETwork (CORENET) is the flagship information technology (IT) project undertaken collaboratively by various government agencies of Singapore to improve the productivity and performance of the construction and real estate sectors. It is a comprehensive network system consisting of a series of IT systems and services that allows seamless and expedient exchange of information between relevant government agencies and parties involved in the construction and real estate industry. Provides an overview of the concept and services offered by CORENET, and then evaluates how this system could bring about changes to the real estate and construction industry in Singapore. Three areas of IT‐induced revolutions can be expected in the real estate and construction processes, if the CORENET system can be successfully implemented and accepted by users. First, compression of time and process is one of the possible outcomes that can be facilitated via the integrated platform of CORENET. Second, knowledge contents would receive growing attention from the prospective CORENET users. Third, reconfiguration of business concept and scope may take place, which may, as a result, lead to the emergence of a new business model and the creation of ample business opportunities for the CORENET users that possess the first‐mover advantage.

Understanding correlations between stock and direct real estate returns, which is the key factor that determines diversification benefits in a portfolio, helps formulate and implement better investors' asset allocation and risk management strategies. The past studies find that direct real estate returns have a low unconditionally (long‐run) correlation with the returns of equities. However, assuming that such correlation is constant throughout all periods is implausible. The purpose of this study is to test the time‐varying correlations of returns between general stocks and direct real estate.

This study uses the dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) model, which is a simplified version of the multivariate generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model, proposed by Engle to test the time‐varying correlations between stock and direct real estate returns in six markets, which include the USA, the UK, Ireland, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore.

The empirical results show significant time‐varying effects in the conditional covariance between stock returns and direct real estate returns. The results vary across different real estate sub‐sectors, and across different countries. It is observed that the conditional covariance increases in the boom markets, but becomes weaker in the post‐crisis periods. The authors observed significant jumps in the conditional covariance between the two asset markets in Singapore and Hong Kong in the post‐1977 Asian Financial crisis periods and in the post‐2007 US Sub‐prime crisis periods.

The past studies find that direct real estate returns have a low unconditionally (long‐run) correlation with the returns of equities. However, assuming that such correlation is constant throughout all periods is implausible. This study fills in the gap by using the dynamic conditional correlation models to allow for time‐varying effects in the correlations between stock and real estate returns.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise a workable strategic asset allocation (SAA) model, given the data paucity problem, and involve an ex ante framework that is distributional free.

The SAA model is developed within a semi‐quantitative and expert‐based framework – the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) – and not a purely time‐series one. It is developed on the basis of consensus by a group of real estate investment experts, who agree on a fixed investment time horizon so that the time factor is disregarded as a variant. The SAA becomes the interface around which a set of tactical bands is imposed, subject to the Markowitz mean‐variance optimisation, and utilizing the total‐return data set of the Jones Lang LaSalle Real Estate Intelligence Service‐Asia. The lower and upper limits of the tactical bands represent the cyclical attractiveness of the various Asian office markets as growth and value‐added markets

The SAA‐AHP model robustly reflects expert judgement among a cohesive group of real estate investment experts, with regard to a Pan‐Asia office market portfolio of eight major Asian cities. Through pair‐wise comparisons and subject to consistency checks in terms of the consistency ratio of <0.10, then the comparative expert assessment of the macro‐economic and the real estate specific factors driving individual Asian real estate markets, would be consistent (i.e. non conflicting). Then the total weighted evaluations of individual markets are derived and deployed as the SAA portfolio mix. This portfolio mix thus becomes the appropriate interface, around which the tactical asset allocation (TAA) is developed within defined tactical bands. These bands must be in line with the underlying Asian real estate market analysis and their cyclical positions. The TAA is obtained through the Markowitz mean‐variance portfolio optimisation, with the objective of locating the optimally efficient TAA on the Markowitz efficient frontier, under a maximising risk‐adjusted‐return Sharpe ratio.

The SAA‐AHP model is reliant on an ex ante assessment of alternative asset allocation strategies on the basis of expert judgement of the macroeconomic environment and the Asian office markets. It is an appropriate SAA alternative to one based on the typical economic‐sized indicators, for example, the urban GDP.