The aging global population will drive real estate transaction volumes to surpass $1 trillion worldwide by 2020, up from $700 billion in 2015, according to a new report released by JLL.

Job satisfaction for women in the commercial real estate industry has increased in the past decade, according to CREW Network’s 2015 Benchmark Study Report: Women in Commercial Real Estate. Career satisfaction was even higher for women with more than 20 years of experience.

Total returns for global property funds reached 13.5 percent in 2015, marking the highest return in four years, according to MSCI’s IPD Global Quarterly Property Fund Index. The strong performance was an increase from the 12.0 percent total return the index recorded in 2014.

Early numbers are in for real estate investment funds closing in first quarter 2016, and they look an awful lot like the numbers posted for first quarter 2015, according to preliminary results from Institutional Real Estate, Inc.’s FundTracker database.

Foreign investors have always been active in the United States, but recent years have attracted new players to U.S. gateway cities. The primary differences are the types of investors, with new players such as sovereign wealth funds, and their new investment goals.

Sometimes it seems, for an institutional investor, adding value to a real estate portfolio is as simple as dropping capital into a noncore bucket. Unfortunately, unlike money, investment strategies cannot always be taken at face value.

At the end of 2015, the United States reformed its Foreign Investment in Real Property Tax Act, or FIRPTA, in an effort to encourage investment in U.S. property by international pension plans.

Transportation linkages have significant influence on surrounding land uses and property values. Car-centric Los Angeles is poised to undergo important changes in its transportation infrastructure.

Considering the volume of direct real estate transacted last year and the amount of capital being allocated internationally, institutional investors must somehow gauge the liquidity characteristics of markets when allocating real estate within their portfolios.

Five trends are likely to affect healthcare real estate in 2016 and beyond: healthcare real estate construction will continue to increase; healthcare providers will need to deal with the challenges of “site neutrality”; the industry will continue to see more consolidations; providers will continue to develop new, innovative designs; and more providers will focus on the importance of expert property management.

We first started publishing Institutional Real Estate Americas in its prior incarnation, The Institutional Real Estate Letter, in 1989 to help fill what we saw as a gap in the market — a publication that truly was designed to serve the information needs of U.S. institutional investors who were investing in U.S. markets.