INREV reposted this
Spent an extra night in Zurich due to a cancelled flight ✈️ ❄️and had a chance to reflect on this week’s INREV Autumn 🍂 conference and meetings with some major Swiss🇨🇭investors. Thanks to AlphaReal CIO Edward Palmer and European RE PM Gordon Smith for joining me for some positive meetings. The takeaways below are purely my personal opinions, not investment advice, etc, etc, but my takeaways are: • Investors and real estate 🏡 professionals believe we are past the bottom for European 🇪🇺 RE prices in general and a combination of falling ECB rates 📉 and increased bank lending 💶 will be supportive - transaction volumes are picking up, too. • Investors are having to argue hard at their strategic asset allocation committees to maintain their RE allocations - there’s competition from other asset classes and teams for scarce internal capital • While investment professionals, investment directors and heads of real estate are more positive about the asset class, sentiment among end-investors/advisory boards and CIOs is still cautious • Residential RE still popular (affordable/social housing, in particular), views on office still negative - only Tier 1, ESG focused properties views positively And for those wondering why there is a photo of singer, songwriter, one-hit wonder and twitter legend James Blunt - it looks like he stayed at the same hotel I stayed at last night. And he’s currently touring in my home country, Australia. A v funny and entertaining guy.
