Interview with Cornell’s Eva Steiner – REIT Capital Structures

The National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts (NAREIT), the D.C. based association representing REITs and publicly traded real estate investment companies in the United States, recently interviewed Cornell’s own Eva Steiner. Eva is an assistant professor of real estate at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration. Prior to Cornell, Eva taught undergraduate and graduate-level real estate courses at the University of Cambridge, UK.

The interview digs into the findings of a paper, co-authored by Professor Steiner, entitled REIT Capital Structure: The Value of Getting It Right. A selection of Professor Steiner’s research, including a link to download the aforementioned paper, can be found here.

Read an Excerpt from the Interview

“In this article, we studied the performance of a sample of 169 global private equity real estate investment funds across the core, value-add and opportunistic investment style categories over the period 2001 to 2011. With regards to leverage choices, we found that leverage was unable to help funds enhance performance in the long run. Moreover, attempts to time leverage choices to the expected future market environment did not appear to add significantly to fund excess returns. This is in contrast to the REIT findings we just discussed, where timely adjustments to capital structure prior to the financial crisis supported firm performance during the crisis. Of course, the sample periods differed substantially across the two studies.”