Nareit's REIT Report Podcast

Avis Devine, associate professor of real estate finance and sustainability at the Schulich School of Business at Toronto’s York University, was a guest on the latest episode of Nareit’s REIT Report.Devine discussed new research, sponsored by Nareit, into the sustainability performance of listed REITs and private real estate as well as their approaches toward sustainability commitments and disclosure, and the relationship between sustainability disclosure and performance among REITs.“Public and private real estate firms make different decisions regarding their sustainability commitments and their disclosure,” Devine said. Using the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB) reporting structure, the research shows that historically REITs have outperformed private funds on sustainability performance. However, that gap has been narrowing in recent years

Todd Kellenberger, REIT client portfolio manager at Principal Asset Management, was a guest on the latest episode of Nareit’s REIT Report podcast.Kellenberger noted that listed REITs currently trade at significant valuation discounts to both equities and private real estate. He pointed out that the earnings price multiple of REITs versus equities today is over two standard deviations away from the long-term mean—"a level that's even cheaper than what we saw during the GFC, particularly for U.S. listed REITs.”Meanwhile, the change in valuations for private real estate have been slower than for listed REITs, given the appraisal-based methodologies and limited price discovery in today's transaction markets, he added.

Marcos Alvarado, president and CIO at Safehold Inc. (NYSE: SAFE), was a guest on the latest episode of Nareit’s REIT Report.Alvarado said Safehold has made a “tremendous” amount of progress in the last six years in terms of portfolio expansion and growth in enterprise value, “but in the greater scheme of what we're looking to accomplish, I think we're still very, very early on…that's what excites us about the future.”

Travis McCready, head of life sciences, Americas markets, JLL, was a guest on the latest episode of the REIT Report.Speaking in conjunction with the release of JLL’s 2023 Life Sciences Industry and Real Estate Perspective, McCready noted that while Boston and San Francisco remain leading life science markets on a national and international level, other markets in the United States are showing signs of growth and vitality.

As part of Building to Zero, an ongoing series of interviews on the decarbonization of the commercial real estate sector, Duane Desiderio, senior vice president and counsel for the Real Estate Roundtable, joined a special episode of Nareit’s REIT Report podcast.Desiderio spoke with Nareit’s Senior Vice President of Environmental Stewardship and Sustainability Jessica Long to discuss recent and upcoming activity related to federal policy that supports real estate owners’ efforts to measure and reduce carbon emissions, disclose climate-related financial risk and opportunity, and comply with local building standards.

Richard Barkham, global chief economist, head of global research and head of Americas research at CBRE, was a guest on the latest episode of the REIT Report podcast.Barkham discussed the state of global cross-border real estate capital flows, which totaled $30.5 billion in the first half of this year. That marked a 52% decline from the same period a year earlier and down 44% compared to an average of the first half periods between 2018 to 2022.Despite being a “pretty weak year really,” the mood of the global real estate investor is “far from despondent,” Barkham said. The mood is “wary and cautious until we get a much clearer signal on the glide path for interest rates, both in the United States and in the global economy.”Notable trends during the first half included an inflow of funds into the U.S. from Singapore and Japan, reflecting the buyout of STORE Capital Corp. by sovereign wealth fund GIC and a $1 billion Japanese investment into New York City office.

Nicole Funari, Nareit vice president for research, was a guest on the latest episode of the Nareit REIT Report.Funari discussed Nareit’s new project that initially involves tracking quarterly investment holdings for the 28 largest actively managed real estate investment funds that focus on REITs from 2010 to the first quarter of 2023.While performance returns offer a broad market perspective on what investors think about REITs, by narrowing the focus to active managers, or “people whose income and livelihoods depends on how well they can read the market for commercial real estate, we really get to capitalize on their unique insights and their expertise in this area,” Funari said.

Nareit Senior Vice President for Research Ed Pierzak joined the latest episode of the REIT Report podcast to talk about some of the key findings from Nareit’s 2023 mid-year report.Pierzak noted that two main factors are at play today—the divergence in public and private real estate valuations, and challenges in the capital markets, particularly around refinancing.The public-private valuation gap really reached its peak in the latter half of 2022, Pierzak said. Progress has been made since then, albeit slowly, he noted. However, whenever such valuation dislocations occur, “they can present opportunities for REIT investors…historically, when we’ve seen these major public and private valuation divergences, we see that REIT total returns have tended to bounce and even surge.”

Gene Rubin, president of management consultancy firm Rivel, joined the latest episode of Nareit’s REIT Report podcast to talk about strategic investor communications and investor engagement in the REIT space.Rivel recently carried out a generalist investor perception study on the REIT industry and Rubin discussed some of the findings that emerged. He noted that the outlook for REITs as an investment class in North America has “improved significantly” since a similar survey was undertaken in 2018. In the previous survey, over half of respondents said they were underweight in REITs, compared to about 40% this time.

Darin Turner, managing director and chief investment officer for Invesco’s listed real assets team, was a guest on the latest edition of the Nareit REIT Report podcast.Turner discussed the scope and growth of the tower REIT industry, its performance history, how the leasing structure works, the impact of 5G, global opportunities and challenges, benefits for the sector from AI and edge computing, and more.Key Takeaways from the interview include:There are approximately 420,000 macro tower and small cell sites across the United States, with REITs owing about 90% of the approximately 150,000 macro tower sites.There hasn’t been any significant new development of macro tower sites in the last decade. New supply is “incredibly limited.”Most of the recent growth for tower REITs has been in international markets, in both emerging and developed markets.