SEATTLE-Ask most investors globally what time it is on the property clock for their markets, and they’ll tell you it’s 8:00. That is, the market has passed the trough “hour” of 6:00 and is on its way back up to midnight. However, that doesn’t mean they trust the fundamentals generally, and that’s largely the reason that 70% of global investors surveyed by Colliers International have no plans for cross-border deals in the coming 12 months, although 60% are looking to expand their real estate portfolios in the next year.

“Compared to earlier this year, the tone is better, but there’s still a ton of caution,” Ross Moore, Vancouver-based chief economist for Colliers, tells GlobeSt.com. The firm had polled investors worldwide at the start of the year; the latest survey, conducted during the third quarter and released last month, shows a modest uptick in bullishness compared to the Q1 edition.

The cross-border impetus is stronger in Western Europe than in other regions, with 62% of investors intended to do deals outside their native countries. Moore chalks it up to local market conditions in that region.

“There was so much price discrepancy between certain Central and Eastern European countries and Western Europe, that prompted a lot more cross-border investing,” he says. “But that was the only region in which we saw that occurring. Most of the survey respondents indicated they were going to stick closer to home.”

Moore notes that for investors, “it’s all a matter of priorities and we’re certainly seeing that here. You may be an institutional investor and see opportunities outside your home country, but the vast majority of institutional investors are still trying to repair and fix existing problems. It’s pretty hard to go out and make new investments when you have either joint ventures that are falling apart or properties that need to be recapitalized and debt that you can’t refinance.”

He acknowledges that since the survey was conducted in late summer, there’s been a slight letup in the level of caution, but not much. At that time, “There was considerable uncertainty with respect to the recovery and just how sustained and robust it would be,” Moore says. A double-dip recession loomed as a real possibility.

A few months later, “there is now less talk of a double-dip,” Moore says. “I’m not sure that we can say Ben Bernanke came to the rescue,” but the uptick in sentiment did largely coincide with the announcement of a second round of quantitative easing in early November—an event of which most investors would have had little advance knowledge.

That being said, the continued uncertainty is reflected in the survey’s finding that most investors don’t see much movement one way or the other in cap rates over the next several months. “What they saw was two opposing forces,” explains Moore. “You had the capital market side, which was desperate for deals, and when you’ve got Treasuries at 2.3% or 2.4%, and five-year and three-year rates effectively at zero, everybody was piling into real estate. Even at a stabilized cap rate of 5.5% or 6%, that was still pretty good. The view was that cap rates could continue to trend down.”

At the same time, says Moore, “you’ve got leasing markets that were still really stuck in neutral. The numbers have stabilized over the past quarter, but nobody is saying that leasing is robust. We do see the leasing markets and capital markets get out of synch with each other, and the capital markets are almost always well ahead of the leasing markets.”