Comovements and spillovers in international commercial and residential real estate markets

PurposeThis study aims to know to what extent do the commercial and residential estate markets move together in different economies? Do the shocks originating in one of these markets spillover to the other markets?Design/methodology/approachThe authors apply a modified version of the dynamic factor model to commercial and residential real estate prices in the Euro area, Hong Kong, Singapore and the USA. This modified dynamic factor model decomposes price growth in these two real estate markets into common, spillover and idiosyncratic components.FindingsThe results show significant heterogeneity in the relative importance of different components in the evolution of commercial and residential price growth across different economies. The findings suggest that the spillover from the residential to commercial real estate market dominates the spillover from the commercial to real estate market for all the economies in our sample. The authors also find that the common component accounts for a large fraction of the price movements in the residential markets in the European Union (EU) area and the USA, whereas spillover and common components together explain more than two-thirds of the variations in Hong Kong and Singapore. The results suggest that the role of spillover from one market to another increased significantly during the financial crisis of 2008–2009.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the existing literature on how the transmission of shocks takes place across commercial and residential real estate markets. The transmission of shocks can take place in two directions in the proposed framework. There may be a direct spillover from a shock from one market to another. This corresponds to a shock to the idiosyncratic component affecting the other idiosyncratic component. In this paper, the authors are mainly interested in indirect spillover where the shock would transmit from the idiosyncratic factor to the common factor, and then from the common factor to the other idiosyncratic factor.