آفاق للعلوم (Sep 2023)
The impact of covid-19 pandemic on the real estate industry
Abstract
This paper studies the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on the real estate market. In order to examine this impact, we will use the event study methodology to examine how the stock prices of real estate companies behaved following the covid-19 outbreak. This can be done by examining the abnormal returns (ARs) and the Cumulative Abnormal Returns (CARs) and the Cumulative Average Abnormal Returns (CAARs). The sample that will be used to conduct the study contains 5 major real estate companies; Segro plc, Land Securities plc, Unite Group plc, British Land Company plc, Derwent London plc. The event window will be 58 days following the outbreak of the covid-19. The findings show negative short term CAARs, in which the CARs of the companies ranged from -0.79% to -4.10%, then followed by a small recovery with the CARs ranging from 2.34% to 3.29%. After that, significant negative CAARs were reported followed by another recovery with the CARs within the range of [-10.35, -21.32%] and [5.99%, 8.12%] respectively. These findings indicate that the covid-19 pandemic had a small short-term negative impact followed by a bigger impact in the next few weeks, then the real estate stock prices stabilise after that returning to he pre-covid levels.
