Five U.S. cities ranked among world’s most transparent

Five U.S. cities are ranked in the top 10 as the most transparent real estate markets in the world, according to JLL’s 2018 Global Real Estate Transparency Index: City-Level Transparency report. London topped the list as number one, followed by Los Angeles and Sydney.

Also, 14 U.S. cities are listed among the top 25 cities. Overall, the United States is ranked third for transparency among countries. The United Kingdom and Australia rank first and second, respectively. The Asia Pacific region has witnessed the strongest transparency improvements since 2016, with the region continuing to break records in commercial real estate investment volumes.

The GRETI 2018 survey reveals a global real estate market that is becoming gradually more transparent; 85 percent of countries surveyed have registered an improvement since 2016. However, progress is still too slow in an environment where investors and businesses, as well as society at large, are demanding far higher standards and where an emergent proptech industry is fueling expectations of a significant improvement in transparency.

Proptech is already changing the landscape across the transparency spectrum from Sweden to Rwanda. Adoption is greatest in the “Highly Transparent” markets such as the United States, the Netherlands, Canada and Australia, and proptech is also moving the needle in “Semi-Transparent” markets such as China, Dubai, Mexico and Brazil.

Even so, proptech still has to provide sustained breakthroughs, as the real estate industry grapples with structural changes from data capture and business intelligence through to the application of advanced analytics and algorithms. The unintended consequences of new technologies and business models are also raising concerns relating to data access, quality and consistency.

JLL and LaSalle’s Global Real Estate Transparency Index has turned its attention to city-level transparency for the first time in 2018, extending coverage to 158 metropolitan areas globally. Below are the top 10 cities.