Thought Leadership

• Lockdowns and social distancing have impacted many tenant businesses, resulting in an unprecedented number of requests for rental relief, stressing real estate rental-income streams.
• For equity investors, income returns have weakened, despite softening asset values. Recent income returns may understate the full potential impact as accrual of deferred rents may mask further shortfalls.
• Lower rental incomes may also stress debt covenants and increase servicing pressures on some loans. In loans that default and are foreclosed upon, falling asset values may also increase potential loss severity.

What’s the effect on investors when commercial tenants can’t pay their rent? For answers, we caught up with Bryan Reid, executive director on MSCI’s real estate solutions research team.

As record-breaking investment flows into real estate, fund managers face increasing complexity and growing investor demands for real time reporting. We talk to Yardi’s Bernie Devine about the trends.

As governments around the world start to ease restrictions on lockdowns, attention inevitably turns to the concept of “returning to work.” However, this viewpoint incorrectly frames the current state of play. Many office-based workers have continued to work through the pandemic and so the focus should actually be on who should go “back to the office?” Of course, the first focus has to be on employee wellbeing and vulnerable employees need to remain safe.  But after that, the situation becomes more blurred,

As governments around the world start to ease restrictions on lockdowns, attention inevitably turns to the concept of “returning to work.” However, this viewpoint incorrectly frames the current state of play. Many office-based workers have continued to work through the pandemic and so the focus should actually be on who should go “back to the office?” Of course, the first focus has to be on employee wellbeing and vulnerable employees need to remain safe.  But after that, the situation becomes more blurred, not least as social distancing will mean that not all employees can still be accommodated in the available space.  In conjunction with this, companies recognize that some workers can successfully operate remotely at least part of the time. As a result, companies will have to provide more choices and greater flexibility to work away from the office for the foreseeable future.
 

View more from here and Click on Download to view the full report.

We are happy to share our member, MSCI, model: MSCI Real Estate Climate Value-at-Risk (Climate VaR) model that demonstrates how the nature and magnitude of physical risks may differ across assets and portfolios; and highlight the importance of considering.

As the world struggles to contain the COVID-19 outbreak, global travel has practically ground to a halt, impacting retail and travel related industries. Estimates by the United Nations point to the global economy slowing to under 2 per cent in 2020, costing some USD 1 trillion. There has not been any precedent with an equivalent scale of economic disruption in recent times to guide policymakers across the globe. The typical responses to this outbreak across the world thus far involve containment, social distancing, and economic support through fiscal and monetary measures to help cushion the financial fallout. The World Bank, for example, has set aside a USD 14 billion package to help companies and countries in their efforts to fight the spread of COVID-19.

In the past decade, the rise and fall of mainland Chinese investment in global real estate markets has created quite a stir amongst the international real estate community. However, in recent years overseas real estate investment activities of this group of investors has shifted from overseas acquisitions to disposals, with 2019’s total overseas investment volume down 79% since the peak in 2017. 

近十年来，中国内地境外地产投资的起伏，在国际房地产界掀起了不小的波澜。最近两年，境外房地产主流投资活动已 从收购转向处置。2019年，中国内地境外地产总投资额较2017年峰值下降79%。
 

Many business owners (private sector, public sector and public listed) have traditionally owned their real estate. These typically include factory operations coupled with offices and warehouses. While, in some cases, the real estate may have become non-core, in other cases such real estate is essential for the business operations. 

Arising from the need to social distance to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, the question that arises in the minds of many will be the state of the co-working industry in a possible new epoch.