Real estate roundtable: Global positioning

Some of the planet’s biggest investors discuss strategies for extracting maximum performance from real estate as the pandemic continues.

As the picture of a market shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic continues to emerge, Macquarie Asset Management and private real estate markets publication PERE co-hosted some of the world’s leading real estate investors for a special roundtable. The agenda for discussion was to identify the priorities for the big pools of capital at this point in the pandemic, as they face growing challenges in their existing portfolios, and to confer on how best to drive returns in a market that is becoming ever more complex to navigate.

Brett Robson, Global Head of Real Estate at Macquarie Asset Management, kicks off the roundtable by observing that while transaction volumes have declined globally since the onset of the pandemic, it has nonetheless been surprising how much business has been conducted. He attributes the market’s resilience to the growth and globalisation of capital.

“The big investors have gotten bigger and more sophisticated, and therefore they have had the resources, scale, knowledge and partners in place to enable them to respond through the pandemic,” he says.