As 2024 unfolds, the prospects for Asia Pacific commercial real estate are better than at any time since the COVID-19 pandemic seized the global stage in 2019. After the market-warping lockdowns and business restrictions of the pandemic era, property investors in Asia Pacific then faced rounds of inflation-fighting rate hikes by major global and most regional central banks.
Even the two largest Asia Pacific central banks, the Bank of Japan and the People’s Bank of China, moderately joined the global parade of monetary-policy tightening, despite modest inflation rates in both nations.
But with price-hiking in China, the regional economic behemoth was still well below the nation’s 3 percent target on consumer price index, in addition to its already troubled and debt-saddled property markets. As a result, China’s central bank by 2023 was eyeing stimulative measures, not tightening.
Meanwhile, as it has for decades, the Bank of Japan was marching to its own dr