London is top city for real estate investing

LONDON: London ranks as the top city for foreign real estate investment opportunity, beating out last year’s winner, New York, according to a survey released yesterday by the Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate.

The survey found that San Francisco was the third favourite city for foreign investors, with Houston and Los Angeles coming in fourth and fifth, respectively.

The US remains the most “stable and secure” country for investment by a wide margin of more than 50 percentage points over second place country Germany. This is the widest margin since 2006.

The US remains the country providing the best opportunity for capital appreciation. It also leads the ranking for planned real estate acquisitions in 2014, with nearly 50% of respondents projecting a modest increase in their US portfolio size and 20% projecting a “major” increase.

“Foreign investors’ continued and growing interest in the US real estate markets reflects fully functioning capital markets for both debt and equity that provide access to a broad range of investment opportunities,” said the association’s chairman, Steven Hason, who is also the managing director and co-head of Americas Real Estate for APG Asset Management US Inc. — Reuters


This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on January 07, 2013.