Diversifying and hedging REIT portfolios with cryptocurrencies: Evidence from global and regional REIT indices

Hedging the financial risk of portfolios of securitized real estate assets is daunting because of the unique nature of the underlying assets and because no direct market exists to trade on property-related derivatives. In this paper, we conduct a global study of the diversification and risk mitigation benefits of cryptocurrencies for REIT stocks. Specifically, we examine the dynamic relationship between Bitcoin and REIT indices obtained from multiple countries and regions of the world. We also explore whether portfolios of REIT stocks that are hedged with Bitcoin futures obtain significant improvement in portfolio risk mitigation and return performance. Furthermore, given that Bitcoin and REIT stocks are prone to large volatility swings, we examine the nature of the tail dependences in the multivariate distributions of our REIT indices universe and Bitcoin using Archimedean copula functions. Lastly, we compare the market risk of Bitcoin-hedged REIT portfolios to the unhedged portfolios of REIT stocks using value-at-risk. We find region-specific benefits from using Bitcoin to hedge REIT exposure. Furthermore, we show that using Bitcoin to dynamically hedged REIT portfolios had minimal impact on the bivariate and multivariate joint distributions of REIT portfolios. We also find evidence of region-specific reductions in the market risk exposure of dynamically hedged REIT portfolios relative to unhedged and naively hedged REIT portfolios. We posit that Bitcoin could improve the mean-variance frontiers of REIT investors in countries with higher market friction and lower global integration.