LOS ANGELES—At the annual Milken Institute GlobalConference last week, Lew Feldman,partner and Los Angeles chair of Goodwin Procter,led a group of industry experts through a discussion of the world'smost ripe investment markets. The experts on Feldman's panel, Wherein the World Are Real Estate Opportunities, includedWilliam Kahane, CEO of RCSCapital; William McMorrow, chairman andCEO of Kennedy Wilson; JonathanPollack, global head of commercial real estate and head ofrisk for structured finance at Deutsche Bank;Henry Silverman, global head of real estate andinfrastructure at Guggenheim Partners; andSam Zell, chairman, Equity GroupInvestments.

To kick off the discussion, Feldman showed the ranking marketsin the world. New York City topped the list with $47.2 billion incommercial real estate volume, followed by Londonand Tokyo, which have $44 billion and $31.8 billion in commercialreal estate volume. Los Angeles ranks fourth on the list, showing acommercial real estate volume of $27.4 billion, followed by severalother US gateway cities, including Washington D.C., San Franciscoand Chicago.

In terms of global investment opportunities, many of the expertson the panel were looking at emerging markets,which, overall, have a projected GDP growth of4.9% in 2014 and 5.4% in 2015. Comparatively, the US GDP growthpredictions were 2.8% in 2014 and 3.0% in 2015, while Europe, whichis coming out of a recession, shows an estimated GDP growth of 1.2%in 2014 and 1.5% in 2015. The top emerging market for real estateopportunities, according to Zell, is Colombia. “Colombia isdramatically benefitting from the free trade agreement with theU.S. We're also significantly impacted by the change in the capitalmarkets in Colombia,” he said on the panel. Focusing on LatinAmerica, Zell also noted that Brazil is a market his company islooking at due to shrinking growth, limited capital and lowcompetition.