The Size and Structure of the Global Real Estate Investment Universe

IPD has conducted research on the size of the real estate investment market for individual countries for more than 7 years, identifying the size of the domestically owned direct real estate assets within each market. This work has traditionally been carried out by employing a bottom up methodology identifying all professionally managed real estate holdings using IPD’s own confidential databank and publicly available sources on a country by country basis, concentrating on domestically owned stock.During the latter half of 2013 and into 2014 this work has been refined and extended. Firstly we have attempted to include the growing amount of real estate owned by overseas investors within each market. This foreign ownership is now a key element of many investment markets and represents a significant proportion of key markets such as New York, London & Paris.Secondly we have extended the geographic scope of the research to include more Asian markets than previously tackled plus some other emerging real estate investment markets such as Brazil. Thirdly, real estate sector estimates have been carried out across every country which is an enhancement on the all property national market estimates calculated in the past. Fourthly ownership type has been identified to allow us to better understand which types of vehicle are predominant within each market. Debt to equity ratios have also been examined at a top level to see whether we can learn anything about differing leverage ratios across countries.The IPD market size will be compared to macro-economic figures and assumptions being carried by other organisations. This piece of research gives interesting insight into the size and structure of more than thirty of the most transparent real estate investment markets globally.