By now it’s broadly accepted that the investment market today is doing much better than a year ago. We’re hearing that more properties are put on the market for sale, albeit at a painstakingly slow pace; financing is becoming more available, for the right deals; and sellers are getting slightly more realistic on pricing.
Given the shift in market dynamic, the editors at Real Estate Forum decided to survey our readers to get a sense of how they view the investment environment and the acquisition opportunities over the next year. Most started off the rebound on the same page—56.1% of respondents said their companies altered their investment parameters and scaled back during the recession, while another 26.6% said they held to their traditional parameters. And a decent percentage, 17.3%, said they took advantage of recessionary conditions and became more aggressive, grabbing opportunity as they found it.
Yet today, even those who retrenched during the downturn are planning or embarking on aggressive, yet selective, acquisition strategies. Many more potential buyers are in the market, looking at opportunities. But there remain some issues, namely, the availability of financing and quality product for sale. All in all, however, the industry professionals who responded to Forum’s Investor Survey were feeling good about the market.
Broken down, the majority of the 250 or so respondents to the survey, conducted in September, were owner/investors (37.3%), commercial real estate brokers/service providers (24.6%), were employed in finance/investment banking/lending services (11.9%) and development firms (9.8%). Others were with life company/institutional investor/asset manager/pension funds (3.7%), asset management firms (3.3%) or private equity firms (2%), while the rest were a variety of corporate space users, mortgage banking intermediaries, public and private REITs, sponsors or other real estate firms. Nine in 10 of those polled were male, and 63% had more than 20 years of industry experience. And while 28.9% were with national companies, 19.7% concentrated on the West Coast, 12.6% on the Southeast, 10.9% on the Southwest, 9.6% on the Midwest, 8.4% on the Northeast, 4.6% on the Mid-Atlantic and 5.4% operated internationally.
See the full survey results in the digital edition of Forum.
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