Much of the emphasis and news coverage for the industry’s growing “green” trend has focused on the development of new buildings. In fact, there’s hardly a new class A commercial office building these days that isn’t labeled “green.”
In September 2006, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) issued FASB Statement No. 157, Fair Value Measurements. Statement 157 establishes a framework for measuring fair value in generally accepted accounting principals (GAAP), clarifies the definition of fair value within that framework and expands disclosures about the use of fair value measurements.
The noncore real estate fund universe is now truly a global universe, with only 41 percent of offerings in 2007 focused on the United States. This is welcome news for many investors who, for almost a decade now, have recognized that developed markets around the world can attractively increase the opportunity set and that emerging markets offer an attractive risk premium in some cases.
Management consulting firm Casey, Quirk & Associates and Merrill Lynch’s Financial Institutions Group recently published an insightful report, The Brave New World: Winning Product Strategies for a Changing Global Market.Geoffrey Dohrmann, editor-in-chief of The Institutional Real Estate Letter, spoke with Yariv Itah, a partner at Casey Quirk and one of the report’s co-authors, to learn more about the report’s findings and their implications for investment managers.