The Stylised Facts of the UK Commercial Building Cycles

In the present study we undertake a statistical analysis of the cyclical properties of certain economic, financial, and real property-market variables and attempt to establish the stylised facts in relation to the office, industrial, and retail property cycle in the United Kingdom. We build upon the methodology which has been adopted in modern business-cycle research to confirm the cyclical regularities of aggregate variables and business fluctuations across countries and over time. The results of this study establish for certain variables the presence of relative cyclical movements over the phases of the property cycles which conform to theoretical intuition. They also identify cyclical irregularities across property sectors, which the existing property-cycle literature would need to address.