Determinants of Real Estate FDI on the Swedish Market

Abstract: Foreign direct investments, FDI, have been increasing a lot the latest years and a significant part of the total investments made are allocated to the real es-tate industry. This paper is investigating the impact of several di˙erent macro variables on foreign direct investment allocated to real estate at the Swedish market. The objective of the thesis is to investigate what factors that a˙ects the inflow of FDI, i.e. are there any factors that can be used as indicators for an attractive market seen from a foreign investor perspective? This is done by regression analysis on a data set containing monthly data with 146 observa-tions, where the levels of foreign direct investments is the dependent variable and the di˙erent factors are the independent variables. The variables used in the regression are chosen based on earlier findings regarding their impact on FDI, but applied on a developed country. The variables are di˙erent ma-jor macroeconomic variables such as lagged transaction volume, stock market performance, inflation, currency level, interest rate and unemployment. The findings of the regression are that both lagged transaction volume and level of unemployment are significant variables on a 1% and 5% level respectively. The results suggest that investors tend to invest in hot markets and follow each other, plausibly that smaller investors shadows pioneers on the specific market. Level of unemployment was found significant with a negative sign, meaning that when unemployment levels are decreasing, the transaction volume will increase. Seeing decreasing unemployment as a factor for a prospering country, it is plausible that the parameter has an impact on the real estate transaction volume. Variables not found support for are stock performance, inflation, currency levels and interest rate.