How Do Foreign Real Estate Investors Form Local Networks Within and Across Cities?

This paper examines foreign investments across regional real estate markets. It typifies how foreign investors form transaction networks within a decentralized market structure with entry barriers. It further investigates the impacts of investor networks on real estate market performance indicators at the regional level. Network analysis and a panel Vector Autoregression (VAR) model uses commercial real estate transaction data from fifteen English cities and regions over 15 years. The results reveal that indicators of connectedness and investor diversity in the networks have significant impacts on the ease of transacting with notable spatial patterns. The findings also highlight significant implications for investors’ network connections and regional urban market stability.