MSCI head of real estate economics Jim Costello (right) and LaSalle Investment Management global strategist Jacques Gordon, speaking at the Global Property Market conference in Toronto.. (Steve McLean RENX)
This year’s Global Property Market conference opened with presentations which looked both forward and back . . . reviewing the major trends of 2022 and offering an investment outlook for 2023.
MSCI is a New York City-headquartered provider of decision support tools and services for the global investment community and Costello has 30 years of experience analyzing the relationships between real estate and economics.
LaSalle is a global real estate money manager with more than $81 billion in assets under management.
Gordon has been responsible for the macro strategy and micro research used to guide all investment decisions in 30 countries, but will soon take a new role as executive in residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Real Estate.
Jim Costello, MSCI
Costello said the real estate industry has enjoyed a period of tremendous returns globally and in Canada, but that dropped significantly in Q3 and major challenges remain ahead.
The global volume of real estate deals valued at more than $10 million is down from last year, when there was an enormous flow of capital into the sector. It is still, however, at an elevated level compared to historic deal flows.
“It was just a lot of folks hungry for yield in a period when interest rates were exceptionally low,” Costello said. “But as rates reset, there are going to be challenges for some of those investments.”
Many of the deals being done were larger as smaller assets that were traditionally purchased by investors with limited pools of capital behind them stopped moving earlier.
Liquidity fell in 97 of 155 global markets in the third quarter and Costello doesn’t see it picking up again for a while.
New York City was the most liquid market in the world from 2017 to 2020, but the Australian city of Sydney now holds that title.
Larger gaps have been created between buyer and seller price expectations. Costello said price corrections are needed to drive U.S office liquidity.
He believes sellers need to cut their price expectations by 15 per cent to get deals done and that number could increase.
Deal activity was down in Q3 in every asset class and the most popular markets have also changed.
Instead of traditional front-runners New York City and London, Los Angeles and Dallas have become the top global markets owing to their large number of logistics facilities and apartment buildings — two asset classes investors continue to chase.
Alternative real estate sectors — including self-storage, data centres, medical office, research and development, manufactured housing, student housing and seniors housing — have been gaining ground on more traditional asset classes.
Jacques Gordon, LaSalle Investment Management
Gordon said there were four inflection points affecting global economies and real estate in the transition from 2022 to 2023 and beyond. Things are moving:
• from interest rates being lower for longer to higher rates with a heavier drag on cash flows;
• from a COVID rebound to a global stall;
• from upward price pressure to downward price pressure; and
• from fossil fuel-driven economies to renewable energy-driven economies.
“Most of us are in private equity real estate,” Gordon said in talking about interest rates. “Whether we’re debt or equity players, we’re putting money to work for multiple years at a time.
“When you do that, you realize that we’re going to have to endure this period of, probably, 12 to 18 months of higher inflation and higher interest rates, but this too shall pass.”
Gordon said the COVID-19 pandemic “blasted a hole in the global economy” in 2020, but last year there was a “supercharged rebound with governments just blasting out surplus money.”
However, gross domestic product (GDP) numbers in countries around the world have been well below expectations in 2022.
Oxford Economics’ GDP forecasts for next year aren’t good, with several countries (including Canada) expected to have negative growth.
Real estate experienced major upward price pressure through 2021 and the first part of 2022, but now investors are having to deal with downward price pressure and declining transaction volumes in the sector.
Gordon said the depth of buyer pools has retreated across property types and, although deals can still get done, there are fewer bids for properties and sellers often don’t want to accept them.
Office vacancy rates are on the rise. JLL figures show a global vacancy rate of 14.5 per cent, with Europe at 7.2 per cent, Asia Pacific at 14.1 per cent and the U.S. at 19.1 per cent in the third quarter.
Coal, oil and gas comprise 77 per cent of the global primary energy mix, but Gordon said the future of energy looks nothing like its past.
He believes it’s going to take a lot of hard work to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels and shift toward more environmentally friendly energy.
“We in this room can commit to a net-zero-carbon world, but we need the rest of the world to come with us,” Gordon said. “Otherwise, we won’t get there.”
TORONTO – One expert predicts Ottawa‘s changes to mortgage rules will help spur demand among potential homebuyers but says policies aimed at driving new supply are needed to address the “core issues” facing the market.
The federal government’s changes, set to come into force mid-December, include a higher price cap for insured mortgages to allow more people to qualify for a mortgage with less than a 20 per cent down payment.
The government will also expand its 30-year mortgage amortization to include first-time homebuyers buying any type of home, as well as anybody buying a newly built home.
CIBC Capital Markets deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal calls it a “significant” move likely to accelerate the recovery of the housing market, a process already underway as interest rates have begun to fall.
However, he says in a note that policymakers should aim to “prevent that from becoming too much of a good thing” through policies geared toward the supply side.
Tal says the main issue is the lack of supply available to respond to Canada’s rapidly increasing population, particularly in major cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17,2024.
OTTAWA – The Canadian Real Estate Association says the number of homes sold in August fell compared with a year ago as the market remained largely stuck in a holding pattern despite borrowing costs beginning to come down.
The association says the number of homes sold in August fell 2.1 per cent compared with the same month last year.
On a seasonally adjusted month-over-month basis, national home sales edged up 1.3 per cent from July.
CREA senior economist Shaun Cathcart says that with forecasts of lower interest rates throughout the rest of this year and into 2025, “it makes sense that prospective buyers might continue to hold off for improved affordability, especially since prices are still well behaved in most of the country.”
The national average sale price for August amounted to $649,100, a 0.1 per cent increase compared with a year earlier.
The number of newly listed properties was up 1.1 per cent month-over-month.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
MONTREAL – Two Quebec real estate brokers are facing fines and years-long suspensions for submitting bogus offers on homes to drive up prices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Christine Girouard has been suspended for 14 years and her business partner, Jonathan Dauphinais-Fortin, has been suspended for nine years after Quebec’s authority of real estate brokerage found they used fake bids to get buyers to raise their offers.
Girouard is a well-known broker who previously starred on a Quebec reality show that follows top real estate agents in the province.
She is facing a fine of $50,000, while Dauphinais-Fortin has been fined $10,000.
The two brokers were suspended in May 2023 after La Presse published an article about their practices.
One buyer ended up paying $40,000 more than his initial offer in 2022 after Girouard and Dauphinais-Fortin concocted a second bid on the house he wanted to buy.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
