We are late in the current cycle, and real estate investors are focusing on the potential risks as much as, if not more than, the rewards on offer, according to investors and investment managers discussing global capital markets at the 2018 ULI Asia Pacific Summit in Hong Kong.
Growing cities such as Hong Kong are at the epicenter of what Richard Florida has dubbed “the new urban crisis,” with the city’s success sending house prices soaring out of reach of the average resident. The author and urbanist, who is director of cities at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto, spoke at the 2018 ULI Asia Pacific Summit in Hong Kong.
If smart cities are to serve their populations, the human element must remain crucial for their designers and developers, attendees at the 2018 ULI Asia Pacific Summit were told. A panel of developers, designers, and planners mulled over the development of the smart city in Asia during the summit, held in Hong Kong.
With the Tokyo Olympics and a Rugby World Cup approaching, Japan’s real estate community is considering how major sports events and venues can drive development, looking at best practices and examples both domestic and from around the world.
While Japanese cities are often known for large-scale development projects, such as Roppongi Hills or Tokyo Midtown, architects and smaller developers are keen to build on a more human scale. At ULI Japan’s fall conference, which took place in Tokyo in November, two discussion panels considered how the Japanese market will develop over the next two decades.
Japan’s investment market is set fair for the future, with “the world’s most favorable borrowing environment” and increasing institutional demand for real estate. A panel of international investors discussed the 20-year outlook at the ULI Japan Fall Conference, which took place in Tokyo in November.
In many ways, ULI’s history in Japan is the history of that nation’s institutional real estate market, setting up shop in 1997, following the first opportunity funds that came to buy nonperforming loans in the 1990s and has grown to the present day, when a new wave of foreign core funds have begun to invest in Asia’s largest real estate market.
The LifeHub@Kunshan complex, just a brief train ride from Shanghai, integrates workforce housing, shopping, entertainment, e-commerce—and local culture.
Delegates at ULI Japan’s recent Spring Conference, held in Tokyo, heard from a number of landlords operating a number of different models for office occupation about how their operations worked and their thoughts on the future.
