Did we do it? Did commercial real estate transaction activity across Europe last year hit a new record? Unsurprisingly, six days into the new year the full-year 2015 numbers have yet to be announced and will probably differ between the various brokers and consultants that do the number-crunching. It is possible that the previous 2007 investment volume record was broken last year; it is equally possible that it was not.

Whatever the 2015 outturn, an immediate question is, where do we go from here? After 2007, things went downhill fast, for the reasons that we know about; overdone, overleveraged, overpaid and, for some, done over. Everyone says that it’s different this time; they also say that, if they had a euro, pound or dollar for every time they said that, they wouldn’t need to be working in real estate any more. It may be different this time, in that the economic and market parameters are not the same as last time, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t still be caugh