An empirical study of real estate stock return behavior on the Nordic markets : – A 2003-2013 study

Sammanfattning: The financial crisis has made the stock markets a very turbulent place. Investors have therefore begun searching for stable and profitable investments. Nordic real estate has for decades steadily increased in value and the stocks of real estate companies are said to be less risky than the market. This has led to a view of them being a safe haven for risk adverse investors. Very few empirical studies have been done on how these supposedly safe stocks actually behave in the Nordic countries. The purpose of this study is hence to investigate how these real estate companies stocks perform. The method employed is deductive and quantitative.One part of the research is to test whether or not the stocks are more profitable than the overall market. Additionally, motivated by previous research on market efficiency, this paper looks into if any predictable patterns for the real estate stocks returns can be found. In other words, if historical returns can be used to predict future returns. Thirdly this research paper looks into how risky the real estate stocks are compared to the market. For the last part of research, an examination on whether the usage of CAPM as a return calculator is appropriate for real estate stocks in the Nordic countries. The statistical tool SPSS and Microsoft Excel has been used to examine the relationships between the variables. The paper has used time series regression to find beta values and alpha values for risk assessments and tests of CAPM, and autocorrelation tests to determine market efficiency, or more precisely random walk.The research is are done on all real estate stocks on the Swedish, Finnish, Danish and Norwegian markets, a total of 31, over a time period of 10 years, between 2003 and 2013 on daily, weekly and monthly data. The result of the first part was that the real estate stock returns in general were not more profitable than the overall market. This research also found significant predictability of future returns through historical data on a daily basis, and some signs on a weekly basis while no predictability on a monthly basis. The result of the third part of the research is that the risk levels for the real estate stocks are different and in general much lower than the market risk. Lastly the test of CAPM shows no significant difference between the expected returns and the actual observed returns.