Bernard Madoff, subprime lenders, crumbling Wall Street banks and Enron fraudsters have given investors more than one reason to think twice before they part with their money. Today, trust is not something investment managers can afford to take for granted.
Writing from the nadir of the Allied war effort in 1942, Winston Churchill said: “Now is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” In a similar vein, market observers today are starting to suggest that perhaps the “end of the beginning” is at hand in the struggle to place a floor under the global financial system.
Scott Landress, CEO of Liquid Realty Partners, answers this month’s reader’s question: “What should I know about real estate secondaries, and how can they help my portfolio?”
Real estate secondaries have emerged as a critical component of the real estate private equity asset class, but they remain poorly understood. Deals are confidential, information is sparse and myths abound. With market forces currently generating unprecedented secondary transaction volume, it is high time to set the record straight.
For several years, institutional investors have been making high-return investments a more prominent feature of their real estate portfolios, but now, that strategy might take on further importance as investors look to regain last year’s losses and take advantage of the market dislocation.
In a survey of investment professionals conducted in March 2008, 67 percent called Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) the most innovative investment vehicle of the last two decades, and 60 percent reported that ETFs have fundamentally changed the way they construct investment portfolios. Yet in real estate, ETFs still account for a relatively small share of the investment universe. Ed McRedmond, senior vice president of portfolio strategies with Invesco PowerShares, spoke recently with The Institutional Real Estate Letter – North America about the evolution of ETFs and why institutional investors might want to give them a second look.