Real options analysis in real estate investments and developments

Resumen

The analysis of real estate projects poses a great number of challenges. The uniqueness of the characteristics of each of type of real estate means that an assessment must be carefully adapted to each case. One of the most determining aspects is the management flexibility of real estate projects. Their long duration, belonging to a strongly cyclical sector, the important level of investment required and other aspects such as the variation of technical solutions link their success to the management skills and capabilities of managers. In practice, the options available to managers constitute one of the main assets of a project. These real options increase the value of projects through two effects. First, as the theory of real options demonstrates, it is possible to assign an objective value to flexibility, which is added to the value of the project estimated strictly by discounting its cash flows. Second, the presence of more or less flexibility in the project makes it more adaptable, reducing its relative risk with respect to less flexible projects, and consequently reducing the cost of capital required by the investor. The objective of this thesis is to provide a better understanding of both aspects. Regarding the first, the challenge is in adapting the methodology of real options to real cases more common in the daily analysis of a real estate analyst. More than four decades after the first authors described methods for the valuation of real options in real estate, the current reality is that the value of options is almost always still estimated in an intuitive manner. Regarding the second aspect, the effect on the cost of capital, this work focuses on identifying, ordering, quantifying and interrelating the determining factors between management flexibility and the cost of capital required. From the present analysis, it can be inferred that it is possible to quantify the value of the flexibility of a real estate project. Furthermore, this value is sufficiently significant and reliable, and conceptually it can come from different sources. It can also be concluded that in each project there are decisive factors for the investor to decide whether to invest or not, depending on the relationship between the potential return and the inherent flexibility. In both aspects, the skills and capabilities of the manager are crucial, since he is responsible for enhancing the flexibility of a project before and during its course.