Retailers are now tidying up after the peak Christmas/New Year shopping season and clearance sales but retail property buyers are still out in force across Europe.

January saw the launch of a multibillion-euro fund and closes for four funds.

The Investment Intentions Survey 2016 from INREV, ANREV and PREA shows that investors expect to commit a minimum of €48 billion to real estate globally this year, a 13 percent increase on 2015.

Among commercial real estate investors, Germany is talked about as having seven top markets — the A cities — and a multitude of smaller B, C and D cities that cannot be termed secondary or regional but that often play off one or other of the top cities. Everyone is in agreement on the identity of these top cities — in alphabetical order: Berlin, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich and Stuttgart. Where people are less certain is on the ranking of the top seven.

European hotel investment in 2015 burst through the €20 billion mark for the first time in the history of the asset class, demonstrating the increasing appreciation of hotel real estate as an institutionally-accepted and progressively mainstream investment class across the continent.

It may come as a shock to many to know that the majority of European sustainability ratings currently in place are fundamentally unable to measure the operational sustainability performance of a building.

Until April 2015, longer-duration government bond yields in the developed world had been in a secular decline. During 1981, yields on benchmark 10-year UK and US government bonds (known as gilts and Treasuries, respectively) reached highs of some 15 percent, French OATs some 17.5 percent, and German Bunds some 10 percent.

Do you like facts? Some people swear by them. In fact, some people find it impossible to move without first assembling a comprehensive array of unimpeachable “facts” pointing at certainty.