EDITORS LETTER: Show me the money

Welcome to this month’s issue of PERE, where we cut to the chase by tackling the central question to which everyone wants an answer: Which investors have the most cash in the game? A slightly more refined version would be to say we have examined the panacea of global institutional investors and have published our ranking of them in terms of how much private real estate they own. The resulting 2013 Global Investor 30 ranking inside our special supplement accompanies your regular monthly magazine, and my thanks goes to PERE’s in-house Research & Analytics team as well as our sponsor, Australia’s Macquarie Capital, for collecting and assessing the data.

Inside that supplement, by the way, you will find more than numbers alone, as Erik Kolb explains in his introduction. Furthermore, if you have been hearing from investors recently that they are keen on bumping up their allocation to real assets, you certainly are not alone. Indeed, demand is building so much so that consultants are reacting, in a trend likely to play out for years to come.

Turning now to the main issue of PERE, the theme of ‘investors’ continues. Katherine Bucaccio has been investigating institutional allocations to the asset class and there are some encouraging signs, especially from US entities for managers of value-added and opportunistic funds, as you will discover for yourself from page 32 onwards. Meanwhile, for a temperature check on Asia’s investors, check out our feature on Asia-based institutional capital penned by Hong Kong correspondent Michelle Phillips, starting on page 36. 

Not forgetting the actual markets, Evelyn Lee provides you with the latest snapshot of North America following our US roundtable hosted at the Times Square offices of law firm Goodwin Procter. Given America has just had a brush with disaster after playing a rather high-stakes game of Russian roulette with its economy, the six participants unsurprisingly focused a lot on dissecting the macroeconomic trends affecting the domestic market. For their views on US real estate, turn to page 40.

As per custom, there also is an abundance of other material inside the issue. Take it as you find it, but basically the industry needs investors with a) cash, b) a reasonable allocation to real estate and c) some appetite for risk. Judging from this month’s PERE package, those three conditions do exist, so happy hunting.

Enjoy the read,

Robin Marriott
Editor, PERE
robin.m@peimedia.com