DWS analyzes the APAC real estate debt market

Compared to the U.S. market, APAC market share of private/debt investors remains small but is growing rapidly, according to DWS.

During the past 10 years, the APAC CRE lending market has been dominated by traditional local banks. The size of the market remains nascent but fast-growing compared to the more mature U.S. and Europe private-debt markets. In particular, three developed markets in the Asia Pacific region — Japan, South Korea and Australia — saw continuous growth in CRE lending along with the rapid growth of the CRE transaction volume. Japan remains the largest among the three key markets, while the non-recourse loan or asset-level financing market remains relatively small as prominent developers in Japan tend to prefer cheaper options like corporate finance. South Korea and Australia primarily depend on asset-level financing, which has grown two to four times during the past 10 years. As the APAC region also has seen similar successive rate hikes since 2022, and