Price Discovery Likely to Continue as Rate Hikes Persist

Price discovery battles between buyers and sellers of commercial real estate are likely to continue amid interest rate uncertainty — but hope is on the horizon, according to one global brokerage chief executive.

“The real estate industry relies on predictability, so rising interest rates are not such a big issue, as long as they’re rising as predicted,” Christian Ulbrich, CEO at JLL, told CNBC last week from Davos. “That wasn’t the case in ’22. They were rising really fast and on top of that, the spreads were widening as well. So that came as a bit of a shock to the industry, and that’s why transaction volumes declined massively and we are currently in a price discovery phase.”