In today’s global marketplace, real estate is coming of age as an asset class, alongside stocks and bonds. It also corresponds to a period in which real estate returns generally exceeded those of stocks and bonds, with real estate offering stable returns in a period of stock market weakness and volatility. Investors have been asking themselves, “Why International?”. They normally look at various factors and have allocated their investment funds based on returns or diversification of their portfolios. Investors (from both the United States and Asia Pacific) have a wealth of opportunities available in their domestic markets and thus investing in foreign assets has been largely discretionary.
The continuous search for diversification and returns, coupled with changes in the global real estate markets in the past couple of years, suggest that the opportunity cost associated with not investing internationally have increased. As a result, investors from Asia Pacific are increasingly keen to diversify their real estate holdings into expanding overseas prospects, the first ports of call being the United States and the rest of Asia, though these two regions have very different investment profiles.
