Participants in the 2011 Editorial Advisory Board meeting of The Institutional Real Estate Letter – Asia Pacific had experienced an active investment year during 2011, with a number of investors continuing, starting or planning global real estate investment mandates. Whether investing at home, cross-border or overseas, however, investors and advisers on the board were still grappling with the best strategies to use and issues related to assessing investment risk as they sought to generate needed returns.

The focus for this article is prime-grade office assets in the Australian financial centers of Sydney and Melbourne. We will attempt to cut through the noise and prove that prime-grade assets are genuinely and not artificially cheap.

The central thesis put forward in Economic Observer, the Chinese book that I co-wrote with Arthur Shek, is that the current debt crisis is part of a long-term economic restructuring in the advanced economies as they face various issues –– an expansion of entitlement programs, a growing balance of government debt and the increasingly significant effects of an aging society. The issue of the aging population has dragged down Japan, and it is also a pressing question that the United States is facing.