Real Estate Asset Management For Institutional Investors

The dissertation at hand analyzes the organization structure and remuneration structure of direct real estate asset management services for institutional investors in Germany, both theoretically and empirically. Real estate asset management is a widely used term in literature and practice, but different definitions and approaches go along with this term. These varying definitions and organizational structures for real estate asset management services result in increased costs for investors as a comparison with real estate asset management-services can be classified as difficult. On the other hand and due to the importance of the market volume, real estate asset management-services and especially the outsourcing of real estate asset management services and yield optimization have become increasingly important within the last years. Therefore, the dissertation at hand firstly theoretically integrates this discipline within the institutional and managerial structures of real estate and organizes real estate asset management with its strategic and operative tasks. Within the conducted theoretical analyses, 36 key variables were distracted and classified, describing real estate asset management. Secondly, the dissertation analyses two areas of real estate asset management in depth: the organizational structure for real estate asset management-services and the optimal remuneration/incentive fee for real estate asset management-services. The theoretical background therefore is based on the new institutional economics, especially the Transaction-Cost-Theory and the Principal-Agent-Theory. In a further step, the findings are analyzed empirically within a study conducted in 2009 focusing on the 36 key-variables for real estate asset management-services. Within this empirical part, the dissertation focuses on life insurance companies, pension funds/staff pension funds and pension schemes of the liberal professions for members of professional associations, that own direct real estate valued at more than Ä 26,5 bn (book-value) in total in 2009 and plan ñ as recent surveys confirmed ñ to further increase investments in real estate as real estate is considered as an attractive and valuable asset-class. Therefore, a questionnaire with 15 questions and several sub-questions was sent to all institutions and associations registered in Germany. The questionnaire was split up into 5 parts focusing on general information about the investments in real estate, general insights in the real estate asset management, the organizational structure of real estate asset management, criteria for the outsourcing of real estate asset management tasks and remuneration/incentive structures for real estate asset management tasks. In total, 37% of the relevant institutions answered the questionnaire. They were grouped into 3 different clusters based on the WARD-Method for cluster analyses. Using these three clusters, the different parts of the questionnaire were analyzed, especially the organizational structures and remuneration structures. Finally the empirical results were connected to the theoretical outcomes.