Working Paper #538
Entrepreneurial Return and Risk in Commercial Real Estate
David Rosenberg · Ajay Badlani
Commercial Brokerage Investing Macroeconomics
Traditional analyses of commercial real estate returns and risks fail to reflect the experience of the typical real estate entrepreneur in two ways. First, one-dimensional risk assessments provide an incomplete picture of event risk in the commercial property markets. Second, the returns reported by the industry benchmarks, which exclude the effects of leverage, are different from the returns experienced by commercial real estate investors, who rely on significant amounts of debt to fund their projects. These shortcomings are particularly significant, given the historical cyclicality of the commercial property markets.