Real Estate Private Equity is the industry in line with my career goal so writing something on that topic
could bring me a competitive advantage when going through interview rounds. Finally, I will send you some
portals and platforms that can give you access to some more disclosed data on REPE’s performance analyses
and results. One portal that you NEED to use is Preqin for financial data and info on alternative assets in the
market. (you need to a subscription to have access; I I can give my username and passcode —>ask support
for logins. You can also gather data from STATA ; E views; SPSS ; and other types of metrics and statistical
resources. Perhaps you could refer to a distribution analysis (what type of distribution follow the returns on
capital invested? Normal, Skewed, Log, or ..etc ) ; How do you mitigate the risk ? What’s the capital
structure of certain types of risky investments ? Besides, I got inspired by a book that talks about what
attracts people to Cities entitled: “The Triumph of the City (Edward Glaeser)” ; and this book on valuation
“Modern Portfolio Valuation” (by Eric Shapiro); make sure to have enough diversity when you reference,
include enough bibliography as well, books can have very relevant sources of information
Perhaps, I thought I could also include something on the difference (if there is one) between how firms value
and acquire commercial vs residential (single-family) deals; could be interesting since single-family is
getting hot in the REPE world. Maybe It would also be interesting to get a measure of the actual volatility of
a Class A diversified portfolio of multifamily vs office vs retail vs hotels. Or the volatility of suburban
product vs urban core. the data for any reasonable regression analysis is hard to find considering the little
access to some resources that I have as a student.
My research question will tackle: “ The dynamics of private equity real estate funds performance: the factors
that determine the success of strong and adequate value-creating investment strategies across the risk
spectrum from core + to value added to opportunistic. (performance analysis) ; it might needs to be further
narrowed down/more specific. Feel free to make suggestion on which you think you are more comfortable
writing one if you have expertise in a certain field.
-> Need to define what success is in this context ! How well are asset managers equipped to make accurate
predictions ? ; What are the benchmarks for real estate valuation, some well designed mathematical methods
and approaches ? (etc); What type(s) of risk and risk adjusted returns expected ? etc.
Ultimately, if you can gather enough company specific info you could maybe include a small case study ?
(NOT turning the dissertation into a whole case study). I let you judge it by how appropriate you think it can
be to include the latter. (For instance, Check out some PEREs ( Blackstone, Lone Star..) and maybe one or
two REITS. Then make some conclusions.)