This paper differs from previous research by examining the existence of structural breaks in the UK regional house prices as well as in the prices of the different property types (flats, terraced, detached and semi-detached houses) in the UK as a whole, motivated by the uncertainty in the UK housing market and various financial events that may lead to structural changes within the housing market. Our paper enhances the conventional unit root tests by allowing for structural breaks, while including structural break tests strengthens our analysis. Our empirical results support the existence of structural breaks in the mean equation in seven out of thirteen regions of the UK as well as in three out of four property types, and in the variance equation in six regions and three property types. In addition, using a multivariate GARCH approach we examine both the behaviour of variances and covariances of the house price returns over time. Our results have significant implications for appropriate economic policy selection and investment management.

This paper studies house price dynamics of the different property types in Scotland. We find evidence of i) breakpoints around the recent financial crisis in three property types (flats, terraced, semi‐detached) and in the average house prices, ii) volatility clustering in the detached house prices, with the CGARCH being the optimal volatility model, iii) negative impact of the unemployment and interest rates on house prices irrespective of the property type and positive effect of the CPI in the prices of the detached, terraced and average houses. Our results have significant implications for appropriate economic policy selection and investment management.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the US real estate investment trusts (REITs) for the 2000‐2012 period using GARCH models that include the day‐of‐the‐week effect and the stock‐market index as explanatory variables. This technique documents the return and volatility of equity, mortgage and hybrid REITs.Design/methodology/approachThe study starts with a CAPM model and continues with GARCH(1,1), TGARCH(1,1) and EGARCH(1,1) models for each of the REIT subcategories with and without the days of the week as dummy variables.FindingsThe results show that the best‐fitted model is EGARCH except the equity REIT series without the dummy variables that is better described with the GARCH. The stock market has a significant impact on REIT returns but no remarkable significance in respect of the day‐of‐the‐week effect.Practical implicationsThe findings suggest that there is not a significant risk diversification potential between REITs and common stocks. In the scope of the credit crisis which originated in the real estate market it must be taken seriously into consideration that REITs, except of the equity REITs, are more sensitive to bad news.Originality/valueThis paper uses daily returns for each of the three main REIT subcategories opposed to the monthly that are commonly used. We point out the evidence of asymmetric responses, suggesting the leverage effect and differential financial risk depending on the direction of price change movements.

Using daily data for the period February 2006 to July 2013 we examine the return and volatility linkages between the two main United States REIT sub-sectors and global linkages between the Americas, Europe and the Asia Pacific regions using the BEKK-GARCH and the DCC-GARCH models. We find that there is no evidence of any volatility spillovers between the US sub-sectors. By contrast, we find evidence of volatility spillovers between the Asia Pacific and the Americas, the Asia Pacific and Europe but no spillovers between the United States and Europe. Our results suggest that the REIT market is becoming increasingly globalized and that investors need to consider time varying volatility and correlations across different regions of the world when forming their optimal portfolio-allocations.

This study investigates the real estate stock market in Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain from the introduction of the REIT legislation in each country until April 2014. We examine their descriptive statistics and we use various GARCH and asymmetric EGARCH models to their daily returns. The results suggest that the general index of each stock market has a significant impact on real estate stock returns except of the Italian BNS REIT and the Irish GREEN REIT. Except Greece, the general indices tend to report lower standard deviations than the REIT companies. The asymmetry of the volatility response to news seems to be present due to the fact that Italian IGD and BNS, Irish HIBERNIA, Spanish AXIA, MERLIN and PROMORENT along with the Greek Grivalia and TRASTOR report asymmetric transition dynamics for positive and negative shocks.