Two groups of financial institutions are reviving the idea of trading derivatives linked to UK real-estate prices, five years after the first attempt to do this ended in disaster.
Last November, Barclays de Zoete Wedd (BZW) began selling property index forwards (PIFs). These are over-the-counter instruments based on an annual index of UK institutional property holdings compiled by Independent Property Databank (IPD), a property research company.
PIFs allow investors to bet on the real-estate market without having to buy an intermediate security such as property unit trusts or property itself. BZW is making a market in the contracts, which run until the end of 1997 or 1998, and Barclays Bank is sole counterparty. PIFs have been developed from a property security that BZW developed earlier: property index certificates, cash instruments that pays a stream of income linked to the IPD annual index.
In a separate development, a consortium of investment management companies, real estate companies and banks are developing a screen-based property derivatives trading system. Called the real estate index market (Reim) and appearing on Reuters, the market will open in summer 1997. It will be a matched-bargain system offering forward contracts similar to BZW's PIFs, but based on the smaller IPD monthly and sector-based indices.