At the end of January, we had our annual Visions, Insights & Perspectives (VIP) – North America conference at Laguna Niguel in Southern California. As in the past, the conference was well attended and, we had the pleasure of interacting with leading institutional investors and top-notch asset managers.

As in 2012, a portion of the conference was dedicated to Asia. I had the opportunity to interview, on stage, an asset manager with more than 20 years’ experience acquiring and managing properties in Asian markets for leading international and US investors. Here are some of the highlights of our discussion.

Despite a recent slowdown in growth and a change of leadership in China — the second largest economy and a manufacturing powerhouse for the rest of the world — the new leadership appears committed to economic expansion and urgently-needed reforms. Fluctuations in GDP growth and property markets gyrations are unavoidable attributes of a rapidly growing econo