While the retail sector has remained strong, retail property valuations have been affected by capitalisation rate movements as well as liquidity issues. This has provided investors with opportunities to acquire retail properties at attractive price points, which are often well below replacement value.

In my past two columns, I wrote about some of the people who have made major contributions to the development of the Institutional Real Estate, Inc platform since our very beginning in 1987. In this final tribute, here are a few more of the many, many people who have helped guide and support the development of our business over the years.

Institutional Real Estate, Inc hosted its second annual closed-door global real estate roundtable event in Abu Dhabi on 11 April with institutional investors and investment managers, delving into the theme of “New Cycle Opportunities, Risks and Challenges”.

SAMHI Hotels, a branded hotel ownership and asset management platform based in India, and GIC, a global institutional investor based in Singapore, have formed a strategic partnership to create a new upscale-and-higher hotel investment platform in India.

Asia Pacific regional cross-border investment in commercial real estate more than doubled in the first quarter of 2025, rising 116.7 percent year-on-year to US$9.5 billion, according to Knight Frank’s latest Asia-Pacific Capital Markets Insights.

The swift escalation of trade tensions and extremely high levels of policy uncertainty are expected to have a significant impact on global economic activity, notes the International Monetary Fund’s April 2025 World Economic Outlook (WEO), which presents a “reference forecast” based on information available as of 4 April 2025 (including the universal US tariffs on 2 April and initial responses), in lieu of the usual baseline.

Global commercial real estate sentiment has deteriorated significantly this year in the aftermath of the sharp shift in US policy and higher-for-longer interest rates, according to Oxford Economics’ new suite of sentiment indices developed with Penta Group. The indices also suggest sentiment is converging across locations and sectors, after periods of significant divergence in the past few years.