This month’s cover story focuses on technology and real estate with a nod to one of my favourite groups, Pink Floyd. Describing how new methods of multi-channel retailing, logistics and other “new” modalities will affect tenancy is all part of Steve Bergsman’s piece and offers some interesting perspectives on how this will all play out.
The commercial real estate market is in the midst of a global resurgence. In the United Kingdom, the sector was one of the top-performing asset classes last year and across Europe transactions rose 13 percent in 2014 to €213 billion — the highest annual total since 2007.
According to Cushman & Wakefield, the strong investment activity of 2014 in the core central European markets of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania continued into Q1 2015, with €1.3 billion invested.
25 years after the two Germanies were formally reunified, it is still possible in Berlin, just, to know whether you are in what was West Berlin or East Berlin. Much has changed in the city but the telltale signs are still there.
This month two opportunistic funds were launched, totalling €1.4 billion in fundraising targets.
TIAA Henderson Real Estate has sold its 50 percent share in Warburg-Henderson Kapitalanlagegesellschaft für Immobilien mbH to HIH Hamburgische Immobilien Handlung.
For the first time in two years, non-listed real estate funds in Asia Pacific have outperformed the United States and Europe, according to the latest Global Real Estate Fund Index.
If one looks at the history of technology and investment in real estate, it would unfold in a structure not much different than that of a classic, three-act play. The drama of the story, if not the tragedy, is introduced in Act One; the response to the onset of the drama unfolds in Act Two; and we behold the bright and sunny future in Act Three.
Student accommodation has been put alongside hotels, healthcare, nursing homes and self-storage facilities as a niche property investment sector but the easy investment reality is that it is primarily about matching limited supply to rampant demand.
The continental European real estate market is gaining ground on the United Kingdom and other markets that have been quicker to recover in this cycle. The start of the recovery in capital values on the continent, coupled with cyclical opportunities to add value through asset management, has drawn investors back to Europe.
Will Poland, and especially Warsaw, remain the favourite in central and eastern Europe also in the future?
It is common practice for large residential units in the United Kingdom to be marketed “off-plan” to the overseas market. Typically, buyers from China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, the Middle East and Russia welcome this approach.