In early February, we held our annual Visions, Insights & Perspectives (VIP) conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., USA. The conference attracted more than 360 attendees, one-third of which were investors. On the first day, we had three executive workshops, and I was assigned a task of moderating Building a Global Real Estate Portfolio with Emerging Markets: Brazil, Russia, India, China.

In 2011 we had a similar workshop, but it was limited to China and India. With help from our advisory board, we selected top-notch managers for this workshop who have been investing in these countries for many years, and I would like to share some of the observations from this session.

Economic reforms that were introduced in Brazil during the past several years were pro-growth and resulted in a substantial increase in the middle class. But what really fueled demand for real estate was growth in consumer credit, which allowed people to take out mortgages and buy goods for their hom