The mall wasn’t really open yet, but that didn’t stop the throngs of Singaporeans (and a few ang moh—foreigners—from PERE) from muscling their way into Vivo City earlier this month. Workers scurried around wiring lights, installing doors and putting the final touches on the building, while the masses freely traipsed through the uncompleted mall/construction site.
3 min read · 01 February 2013
The city of Quito, Ecuador—population approximately two million—is probably not near the top of the list when it comes to international cities attracting private equity real estate investors.
2 min read · 01 February 2013
The handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 was a significant historical, political and economic milestone, to say nothing of its significance as a real estate deal.
2 min read · 01 February 2013
For good or ill, two subjects seem to dominate cocktail hour and dinner party conversations across New York City. The first is new restaurants. The second is real estate. One’s profession probably comes in a distant third.
2 min read · 01 February 2013
Secrets are never shared at a property conference: Everyone wants to keep their proprietary strategies to themselves. Though GRI Europe 2006, held earlier this week in Paris, was no exception, something else was shared, namely a collective anxiety about where to uncover that increasingly rare thing, an attractive yield.
2 min read · 01 February 2013
…to Private Equity Real Estate.com the first and only news site dedicated to opportunistic investing in the global property markets. Brought to you by the team behind Private Equity Real Estate (PERE), the premier publication for this rapidly growing asset class, Private Equity Real Estate.com will provide daily news coverage of the deals, firms and personalities shaping the industry.
3 min read · 01 February 2013
The main message from PERE’s second European Private Equity Real Estate Forum held in London in early June: Work very hard if you want to carry on making money in this asset class. The first half of the current decade will undoubtedly be remembered as a golden age of property investing, but will a 12 percent net annual return on an unlevered basis remain as readily available as it has been? Hardly, warned Matthew Ryall, a member of real estate research and strategy at Merrill Lynch Investment Managers in London who sat on the Forum’s concluding panel. Without active (and clever) asset management, performance will prove elusive.
3 min read · 01 February 2013
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which liberalized trade restrictions among Canada, Mexico and the US, went into effect on January 1, 1994 despite fierce opposition from American labour unions, Mexican farmers, Zapatista revolutionaries and an outspoken US presidential candidate—Texas billionaire Ross Perot infamously remarked that NAFTA would create a “giant sucking sound” as American jobs were lost to cheaper labour south of the border. More than a decade later, it seems those anxieties were misplaced. Domestic workers had much more to fear from the Far East than they ever did from Mexico.
2 min read · 01 February 2013
