NEW YORK CITY-In theory, Allianz Real Estate has all that it needs to increase its holdings in commercial real estate: plenty of cash, an appetite for acquisitions and a “very good” team of professionals, its chairman and CEO said here Monday morning. “What is lacking are the deals,” said Olivier Piani, who took the reins of Allianz’s global real estate platform just two weeks before the capital markets meltdown in September 2008.

Yet Munich-based Allianz plans to nearly double its real estate assets under management worldwide in the coming years, Bloomberg Television’s Carol Massar told the audience assembled for Monday’s Global Real Estate Conference at the New York Stock Exchange. Piani expressed confidence that this goal—going from approximately $26 billion at the end of 2010 to about $43 billion long-term—was achievable even on the conservative terms of a global insurer. If you’re buying investment-grade properties in core markets and have the tenants in place, “I see no risk in that proposition,” he said.

A big part of what Massar termed a “pretty aggressive” push into commercial real estate is the US, notwithstanding the relative scarcity of buying opportunities. “When you look at the world and say, ‘what’s the other big market aside from Europe,’ it’s the US,” Piani said. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know this.”

Looking at the major cities in Europe and the US, Piani sees market fundamentals that are “actually pretty good.” He asserted that what the sector is currently recovering from was not a real estate crisis per se, but an “overleverage crisis” that impacted all areas of the economy. Allianz's own buying strategy does not involve much in the way of leverage, he pointed out.

At the start of her Q&A with Piani, Massar recalled that she was at the stock exchange on 9/11 and said it was therefore apt that she was back there on Monday, in view of Sunday night’s news that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a firefight. Co-anchor of Bloomberg’s Street Smart series, Massar asked Piani how such “external factors”—and 2011 has brought many of them from all over the world—weigh on commercial real estate. He responded that the effects are short-lived, but added that events such as the death of the terrorist mastermind could create “a change of mood” and provide a psychological boost to the market. The daylong conference was presented by the James A. Graaskamp Center for Real Estate at the Wisconsin School of Business.