NEW YORK CITY-Ask three of commercial real estate’s heaviest hitters what the view looks like from 10,000 feet, and they’re of two minds. Domestically, Sam Zell, William Mack and Steven Roth see storm clouds looming that will erupt soon unless the federal government addresses the nation’s multi-trillion-dollar debt load and the threat of the US dollar losing its standing as the world’s reserve currency. Overseas, though, Zell and Mack like the prospects for making deals.

“We are seeing opportunities outside the US that are not even close to what we have here,” said Zell, chairman of Equity Group Investments LLC and numerous publicly traded companies, during the Thursday afternoon panel that wrapped up this year’s REIT Symposium sponsored by New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate. Brazil, Zell asserted, is “the greatest market in the world,” while Zell has also seen success in Colombia and feels that Turkey has potential.

Chairman of AREA Property Partners and chairman of the board of Mack-Cali Realty Corp., Mack advised, “A young person today has to have a worldwide outlook. The opportunities in real estate are not necessarily going to be in the US.”

For example, Mack said, AREA is realizing a 45% return on a retail property in the Ukraine. However, he added, “You go to some of these countries and you take your chances.” Zell made a similar point, albeit in blunter language. Asked by moderator Adam Emmerich, partner with law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, whether his company was looking at overseas markets, Vornado Realty Trust chairman Roth offered a succinct response: “No.”

Growth expectations in mature markets need to be tempered by comparison to emerging countries, the panelists warned. Mack noted that the attitude toward home ownership in the US has changed, partly due to the increased difficulty buyers face in getting residential mortgages. “Slowly the homes will come off the market, slowly we will have a recovery and ultimately we will have a smaller homebuilding industry,” he said.

Given that “real estate is, always has been, and always will be about supply and demand,” Zell questioned whether the limited prospect of significant construction in the US was necessarily a bad thing. “How much real estate do we really need?” he asked, citing overbuilding in retail and other sectors.

On the demand side, though, Roth said he takes encouragement from a graph depicting New York City’s office rental market over the past three recessions. Rents declined by an average of 25% during the market troughs, and then rose at three times the rate of decline. “I believe that is predictive of what is going to happen.”

Roth also drew an analogy of rising sale prices to a quote from hockey giant Wayne Gretzky, who once observed, “Good players skate to where the puck is, but great players skate to where the puck is going to be.” The smart players in real estate, he said, are skating to where the puck will be: although prices are rising ahead of rents, the rents eventually will follow.

However, Zell noted that this appreciation appears to be limited to a handful of markets, with much of the country remaining stagnant. “I don’t think you can have a healthy real estate market if only New York and Washington are growing,” he said.