What is your outlook on New York City?
December 14, 2016
Panelists describe their outlook on New York and other gateway cities, looking across geographies, asset classes, and property types.
Transcript
Samantha Davidson: We're all benefiting from some favorable market fundamentals, but when you see slowing growth or just continued modest growth and then coupling that with the challenging capital markets we’re really away from what's been a more beta oriented market for the past few years, and we're really in an alpha position. And so when you look across whether its geographies or asset classes, property types, there really aren't the fat pitches or major themes that I think we were all following. I realized that David and I clearly think about the world similarly because I do think the small size logistics is an interesting space, but one tool that I had mentioned earlier - it's certainly an area that we focus on that I think is worth mentioning and I do think it's a source of outsized returns in real estate today - is actually the secondaries market. And sort of talk about the secondaries market a little bit. It's probably most frequently known as a source of liquidity or portfolio management for limited partners who are looking to rebalance maybe overweight components of their portfolio. But increasingly, it's actually been a tool for GP’s who potentially have, for example, we all know there's about $400,000,000,000 of capital that was raised around the crisis, not only are LP’s looking to continue to downsize that exposure, but GP’s frequently may have a handful of assets in their portfolio. They're reaching the end of their fund life, kind of fatigued. LP’s are not that willing to extend the fund life so that you can actually fully realize those seasoned assets and so as secondary players, we can go in and buy either assets, partial portfolios, full portfolios, trying to provide a liquidity solution for LP’s who would really like to move on, but GP’s who would also like to actually realize the benefit of their investment. And so the returns you’re able to underwrite in this space really do continue to be in the kind of high teens which you end up having to take a good amount of risk in value add investing today to really achieve those returns. And part of that really is the benefit of kind of what's currently a relatively nascent market. It's relatively new. The total transaction volume at this point isn't even quite $10,000,000,000 annually and that is a 40 percent increase over the last three years of what really started off as a quite low base about five years ago. Then you also end up having, just not that many players, so you end up being able to be quite selective in that market. So I think overall in terms of an area that we think makes a lot of sense as a tool for all of the participants in this market, we do think is an area you can generate returns in your portfolio.
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