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Review of Finance Vol. 24 No. 3 2020

Shuffling through the Bargain Bin: Real-Estate Holdings of Public Firms

Irem Demirci1; Umit G. Gurun2; Erkan Yönder3

1 NOVA School of Business and Economics · 2 University of Texas at Dallas · 3 John Molson School of Business, Concordia University

open access

Abstract

Constructing a novel database on the real-estate holdings of public firms, we show that distressed firms sell their real-estate assets at a discount relative to healthy firms. We find that distress discount in real-estate assets is less pronounced for sellers with less liquidity-constrained industry peers and in machinery-heavy industries. We also document that asset redeployability and the availability of potential buyers are two important property-specific determinants of the distress discount. Additionally, firms’ property portfolios that are less redeployable with less potential buyers exacerbate the negative impact of financial distress on the cost of borrowing.

DOI
10.1093/rof/rfz010
Volume
24
Issue
3
Pages
647-675
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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