The Deka Immobilien Real Estate Country Risk Indicator as an Investment Guide for Emerging Markets

In times of still ongoing further yield compression, real estate investors increasingly shift away from core investment strategies to more risk exposed value added or even opportunistic investment style approaches. This strategy often implies looking to emerging markets for buying opportunities. The recent experiences with German Open Ended Funds however show that a consistent portfolio management, supported by a top-down strategy, and an appropriate risk assessment and management is crucial. A problem in this context is that real estate performance indicators are often not available for developing markets or that information is noisy, biased and inconsistent. Therefore, investors have to rely partly on alternative assessments of real estate performance and risk. We have developed a quantitative tool (DIRECS), which collects and connects different macroeconomic and political indicators and condenses them, to country specific real estate risk indicator for over 100 countries. The tool also allows a combination of the risk indicators with income forecasts according to different investment risk styles. In this way, we generate a ranking of countries, specific to different risk-earnings-preferences. The paper describes the methodology (principal component analysis) used to construct the indicators. Some interesting lessons for real estate investors can be drawn. As an example, only few Central European Countries at the moment compensate adequately for their risk.