Risk, one of the themes featured in this month’s edition of Institutional Real Estate Americas, has been defined as the product of the fact more things can happen than will happen.

Precisely what will be happening in the relatively near future is one of the hottest topics on the minds of investors lately, as evidenced by its consistent reappearance on the list of topics suggested by our Editorial Advisory Board members for their annual board meetings.

Where are we in the cycle? Is it too late to be investing? Should we be slowing down or stopping our investment activity entirely? And even if we should, can we really afford to do that, without placing our diversification, asset-allocation and portfolio-rebalancing strategies at risk?

The panel of economists who just finished making their comments at this year’s PREA Annual Institutional Investor Real Estate Conference at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco couldn’t seem to come to full agreemen