The Transparency of Investing in Brick and Mortar Real Estate
The private commercial real estate investment market will continue to grow.
March 22, 2021 | Jason S. Weissman | Wealth Management
One of the core truths in value investing is the need to understand the risks involved, and that sometimes the risks are far greater than the rewards. Today, however, investors in the public equity markets are blindly making bets on vast future growth without realizing that the rewards must meet the risks. Are those future profits really going to materialize?
As an example, there is much talk today about Tesla, a company characterized by Seth Klarman—one of the world’s foremost value investors and the founder of hedge fund Baupost Group—as “barely profitable,” yet its shares had soared “seemingly beyond all reason.” As reported by the Financial Times, in a private letter to investors in his fund, Klarman placed considerable blame on current central bank policies and government stimulus that convinced investors that risk “has simply vanished”, and that this has left the public equities market unable to fulfil its role as a price discovery mechanism.
Compare this irrational exuberance with the rigorous, and increasingly data-based, underwriting standards for investing in the hard commercial real estate asset class. One of the greatest attractions of investing in brick and mortar real estate is its transparency.
