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My name is Simon Redman, Managing Director at Invesco Real Estate. Welcome.
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Today we'll be taking a deeper dive into the world of real estate investment by bringing to you what we think are currently the most relevant investment opportunities and topics.
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We'll discuss what we see as one of the most compelling real estate opportunities worldwide, investing in high quality European real estate now to take advantage of investing at prices up to 50% lower than two years ago, and with the objective of delivering returns of 15 to 20%.
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Joining me today to provide some specific examples and insight is Kevin Grundy, Head of funds and Invesco Real Estate Europe, and who leads our team seeking value add and opportunistic investments.
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While there are tremendous opportunities it's also possible to make mistakes and it's essential to understand and navigate what these are, to avoid some of the pitfalls.
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We hear a lot about higher interest rates, moderating G d P growth and banks being conservative, which for many is concerning.
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It's exactly this uncertainty that allows us to unearth compelling investment opportunities without the levels of competition that were a year or so ago.
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Kevin, welcome. So perhaps you'd give us a little bit of that insight.
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Thanks, Simon. It's, um, it's a question I get asked a lot.
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I've been investing in value add real estate for more than 20 years now, and I think this is one of the most exciting times for the market. Um, and, and the reason is that we're in the middle of a repricing clearly, but the reason behind the repricing has actually only a little bit to do with the underlying real estate, and really it's being driven by an external factor, which is interest rates.
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So if, if we were sitting in a university lecture right now, our professor would be telling us about how the rise in the risk-free rate means that when you discount the cash flows you get from real estate, they're worth less today than they were maybe a year or two ago. But real estate is, is kind of a simpler business than that. And what everybody in the industry is really talking about is the fact that it costs so much to borrow.
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So we are a leveraged asset class people borrow to buy real estate, and it, it's just too expensive now compared to where yields were a year or two ago. So what needs to happen is the pricing needs to drop to a yield that is attractive enough for people to want to buy. I'll give, I'll give you an example of how this works in practice. So, uh, last year we sold a logistics property in Germany for a yield of about 3%, and the borrower in that case would have borrowed at a fixed rate, fixed interest rate of 0% plus a margin. If we were selling that exact same property today, the borrower's fixed rate would be 3% plus a margin. So that's a shift of more than 300 basis points when you add it all up. And that means that the pricing that we sold at the 3% is more like 5% today. It has nothing to do with the underlying real estate and everything to do with the interest rate environment.
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So, Kevin, that makes sense to me.
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But our investors taking advantage of these opportunities today.
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We think they should, but unfortunately, many of them can't. What we think people should be doing is carefully playing offense here, trying to take advantage of what will be effectively bargain prices.
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But the problem for a lot of investors is that they are stuck playing defense with existing legacy portfolios. So there are two sides to the coin here. If you're buying something at a discount and you're in a market with disruption and you're a buyer, it's a great advantage. If you're a seller, it's a headache.
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And unfortunately, a lot of people are in the selling position right now or are somehow constrained.
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So, you know, if you are going to be a first mover back into the market now, how do you know, how do you know that you're gonna get great value from this?
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You know, could prices still fall? Could value still fall?
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Yeah, so the first thing is not to believe that you can time the market.
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You have to accept that upfront. Nobody can do it. And then you, you try to peel it back to real estate fundamentals. So if you're an environment where it feels like there are a lot of cheap deals available, cheap shouldn't be good enough, you know, it should only work if there's an underlying exceptional real estate story.
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So the way we like to look at these things is, um, to break that back to things like replacement cost. You know, that that's something that 20 years ago, 10 years ago was very commonplace, people doing that kind of analysis, and it just stopped as the market was rising and everyone was making money.
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You gotta come back to that. Um, you wanna discount to replacement cost.
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You also wanna run sensitivity analyses on rents and yields.
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In fact, I go so far as to say, not only should you not assume that you won't time the market perfectly, you should assume that you're gonna time the market quite poorly and build in a buffer in your returns in order to be able to deliver even if you get it wrong in the market.
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So I, I like the sound of that. Um, but re real estate's a a tangible asset class, you know, you can touch it and feel it.
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Do you have any live examples or recent examples that you can provide us with to give this, you know, some sort of evidence to, to what you're thinking?
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I've got a couple of examples that that might help. Um, one of them is more to do with, um, taking advantage of a motivated, uh, seller environment. Um, and the second one has more to do with structure, and we should definitely take some time to talk about structure. I think that's important in this market. Um, but the first one, in terms of a motivated vendor. So at the end of last year, we acquired a city center office property in the middle of Amsterdam.
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Um, it's a grade A property, nothing wrong with the asset, but because of the turmoil in the equity and fixed in income markets, the owner of the real estate needed to sell to balance their portfolio.
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So we did a very quick transaction in December, closed the deal in four weeks, market that summer. It had failed in its initial process. So a third off you might say, how do you know that asking price was the right price?
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And that's where we come back to replacement cost as an analysis. So, um, the, our estimate of the replacement cost for that building was about twice what we acquired the physical property for. So fundamental value, um, before people think we're crazy for buying offices, because I know it's out of favor in many parts of the world, Amsterdam, where the museums are, you know, right in the middle of everything.
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Um, it's a grade A building, it's highly sustainable, really important, we should come back to that. Um, and also in that particular market, robust tenant demand in the city center and the vacancy rate is about 3.5%. So the fundamentals really stack up. This is a, a more recent example that we're working on right now, and it's in, uh, central Europe. It's in the logistics sector, which has been really the darling of real estate for for many years. This is a, uh, a developer who has a great project, strong developer has already signed a pre-lease with a fantastic tenant that and you're talking about structuring deals and how to put them together at the moment. Mm-hmm. Um, but I'm sure what you do is not just solely opportunistic, it's not just deals that happen. Uh, and you mentioned sustainability earlier.
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Yeah.
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And are there particular themes that you follow above and beyond just being opportunistic?
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Yeah, so two parts of what we do, we certainly look for the individual opportunities, but there is a discipline to it, and there are themes that we are that we're trying to follow. Um, it, it might interest people to know that the very start of a value add or an
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So everything we're looking at right now is with a sustainability lens to it.
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Um, offices maybe are the one to 0.2 in particular because you almost can't do offices without that kind of brown to green angle to it.
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But sustainability is everywhere. It's with the tenants, it's with the investors.
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And I think you ignore it at your own risk for the next few years.
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Look, this sounds all incredibly compelling, um, but you know, why isn't everyone doing it now? Why isn't everyone investing now?
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Yeah, so Europe is a, um, is an opaque market generally speaking. And in, in the individual countries, rely entirely on a local presence within our business.
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We like to partner with best in class operating partners. So you get the benefit of all of the relationships of our offices, plus the relationships of the partners that come back time and again to work with us.
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So Kevin, thanks ever so much for that insight.
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If I were to summarize the repricing of real estate markets provide some really compelling opportunities to invest today at pricing much lower than it was two years ago. And by choosing the right sectors, we see some strong rental growth and performance opportunities.
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Thank you for listening. And if you'd like any more insights, please do get in touch with your local Invesco contact.