Characterizing Greenness in Real Estate: A Cross-Sectional Study of REIT Holdings

Advisor: Dr. Sara Boni

Type: Bachelor’s or Master’s Thesis
Start: May/Mid June 2025 (latest)

 

Overview

• Objective: Construct a granular, property-level dataset for German REIT-owned buildings, capturing physical, spatial, and energy-relevant attributes to enable the characterization of building-level sustainability performance.
• Scope: Focus on approximately 200 REIT-held properties in Germany, using multiple data sources such as Capital IQ, Datastream, LIDAR scans, public geospatial platforms, and visual assessments (e.g., Google Images).
• Key Variables: Collect and compute energy-relevant inputs including building type, age, volume, façade/window ratios, location-based climatic conditions, heating source (proxied), and renewable installations (solar panels, heat pumps).
• End Goal: Enable the construction of a property-level energy performance proxy score (“e-score”) that reflects the greenness of each building and can later be used in financial or risk analysis at the REIT or portfolio level.

Requirements

The student should be comfortable working with structured and unstructured data, possess basic spatial data analysis skills (or willingness to learn), and have experience in data cleaning, integration, and statistical programming (preferably in Python, R, or MATLAB). Familiarity with platforms like Capital IQ or Datastream is also beneficial.

Literature

Eichholtz, P., Kok N., and Yonder, E. (2012), Portfolio greenness and the financial performance of REITs. Journal of International Money and Finance, 31(7):1911-1929. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jimonfin.2012.05.014

Downs, D.H. and Zhu, B. (2022), Property market liquidity and REIT liquidity. Real Estate Economics, 50:1462-1491. https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-6229.12381

Contact & Application

If you are interested in writing your thesis on this topic, please indicate this in your application. Please note that this topic can be expanded and/or taken in other directions depending on the student's own interests and ideas.