Investors are still waiting for a recovery in commercial real estate. We outline the state of play in early 2024 and identify potential signposts for an upturn in the asset class.  

Demand for office properties has been in flux. One trend that has accelerated since the onset of the pandemic is the lean toward buildings with smaller floorplates (the leasable area per floor). We examine the patterns of investment.

Student housing continues to evolve as a distinct asset type. The sector outperformed the rest of the U.K. residential sector as well as the retail and office sectors over the three, five and 10 years ending December 2022.

Location and topography were decisive factors behind the impact of physical climate change on real estate portfolios, suggesting that investors may wish to consider climate risk at the individual asset level and not just at market level.

Property investors are increasingly focused on climate change and net-zero commitments. Have investors who “green” their portfolios by acquiring more energy-efficient assets and disposing of higher-emitting ones gained a performance edge? 

When considering climate value-at-risk for real estate portfolios and assessing prospective investments, location and topography need to be understood at the individual asset level — not just the market level.

As U.K. real estate experiences a pricing correction at record pace, it’s natural to make comparisons to the 2008 global financial crisis. We draw on factors in private real estate to better understand current conditions and give us clues to what may happen next.

The yield of U.K. real estate recently fell below that of the 10-year U.K. government bond for the first time since 2007. This evaporation of property’s yield premium led to the MSCI UK Quarterly Property Index’s worst return since 2009. 

Global real estate returns decelerated to 2.9% quarter-on-quarter in local-currency terms in the three months ended June 2022 amid rising inflation and interest rates in most key markets.

Global real estate markets enjoyed their strongest returns since the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) as they bounced back from COVID-19-induced weakness last year.

As 2021 real estate index returns roll in, we’ve seen a broad-based acceleration of returns across nearly all countries and property types. But what can looking beyond the aggregate index returns tell us about the difference between the winners and losers?

What was the precise impact of the COVID-19 crisis on office properties? While the overall vacancy rate at the end of 2020 was lower than the previous cycle’s peak, the percentage of fully leased office buildings reached an all-time low.

Many investors have made bold commitments to transition their real estate portfolios to net-zero carbon emissions and are now developing and implementing plans to achieve this goal. But what could this transition look like in practice for property portfolios?

COVID-19 disrupted real estate across countries and property segments. The biggest initial impacts were felt in retail, leisure and hotels. But more recently, the performance of listed offices has lagged.

Infrastructure investments have not been spared the effects of the pandemic. A closer look across investment types, subsectors and risk levels over time may provide useful perspective as private-capital firms and their investors manage through.

Property investors turned to global gateway cities to diversify portfolios and generate capital growth in the years since the 2008 global financial crisis. We assess whether COVID-19 could jeopardize the relative dominance of these power cities.

Some commercial tenants have stopped paying rent amid COVID-19. Without rental income, property funds are not able to pay distributions to shareholders and borrowers cannot service their debt. We analyzed property-fund data to assess the impact on investors.

Many real estate markets were showing signs of a slowdown even before COVID-19’s negative impact on property portfolios. Has this correction been similar to previous ones? We looked at dispersion of returns, within and across real estate sectors, for the answer.

With real estate now occupying a greater slice of multi-asset-class portfolios, factors such as lease length, may be more systematic drivers of return than previously thought. 

Measuring real estate growth is not a simple exercise; we run through it highlighting some common confusions

When investors buy overseas real estate, they inevitably take on foreign-exchange exposure. The resulting currency-market dislocations resulted in near-term losses for some investors, but also created attractive opportunities for investors to buy real estate exposure in the U.K.