Il puzzle dei fondi immobiliari quotati italiani: evidenze dalle prime OPA sul segmento MTF di Borsa Italiana

The observation of the Italian Funds Market shows that the real estate closed-end funds trade at an average discount on the Net Asset Value (NAV). This paper enters the wide international debate about closed-end fund puzzle. As regards to the Italian market, anecdotical and empirical surveys stress that the main reasons of this phenomenon are referred to the structural characteristics of the market (the scarce outstanding shares of the Italian real estate funds market, the poor liquidity of the secondary market, the low interest in dealing shown by institutional investors, etc), to the peculiarities of real estate funds (the holding discount, the low disclosure on corporate governance of management companies, etc) and to the features of the underlying real estate assets (the fairness of the independent expert evaluations, the real estate systematic risk, etc). This paper argues these assumptions in the light of the recent takeover bids on the Italian real estate funds market: the one on Tecla Fund and Berenice Fund managed by Pirelli RE SGR and the one on Beta Fund managed by Fimit SGR. Working out an empirical research on a database of the whole segment of the Italian real estate funds, this paper observes the discount tendency during the takeover bid periods and puts in evidence some specific signals shown by the market.