Do Foreign Investors Perform Better Than Domestic Investors? Evidence from Commercial Real Estate Equity Investment in Emerging Market

Financial globalization has enabled investors to allocate some of their portfolio assets to foreign countries and alternative assets. This environment has also created an increase in investment in international real estate especially in the emerging markets. In this study, we investigate whether foreign real estate investors outperform domestic investors after controlling for property specific characteristics. Using property level transaction data of Korea from 2003 to 2016, we also examine the characteristics of commercial real estate investment associated with the probability of an acquirer being a foreign investor versus a domestic investor. The binary and multinomial probability models are used to test our research hypothesis and the structural equation model is applied to find the determinants of the internal rate of return. The result reveals foreign investors perform better than domestic investors in a holding period analysis. Furthermore, the findings support that foreign direct and indirect real estate investments are statistically significant to the age of the building, corporate bond and exchange rates, growth domestic product growth, and the equity market movement in the domestic market.