BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s course through the most testing economic conditions since the global financial crisis is getting bumpier, as data on Wednesday showed stuttering investment flows, tight credit and falling home prices coinciding with a difficult trade outlook.
The final rush of indicators ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday reinforced the view that economic growth will slowdown further in the first three months of 2012, a trend that gathered momentum at the end of 2011 and resulted in the slackest quarter of expansion in 2- years.
Pro-growth government policies applied so far should help avoid an outright hard landing, but the risk remains that the scale of the slowdown engineered domestically in the once-rocketing real estate sector and the size of the drop-off in external demand from debt-ridden Europe have been underestimated.
“Headline GDP growth shows a soft landing definitely, but if you look at some of the underlying sectors — particularly real estate investment — we see lots of vulnerabilities. It could be a pretty rough ride,” said Ren Xianfang, senior China analyst at IHS Global Insight in Beijing.
“By the final quarter of last year I think the government started to lose its grip on the pace of the slowdown and that’s largely because of the external shock,” she added.
That shock has come in the form of both slower exports growth — which ended December at roughly a third of the year-on-year level seen in January — and capital outflows, which ended the year with the first quarterly outflow since 1998, calculations by Nomura analysts show.
Still, while trade and capital flows including foreign direct investment might be sagging, they are doing so from record highs.
Even so, the Ministry of Commerce warned in a regular news conference on Wednesday that the near-term outlook was difficult and that only a modest growth in trade was anticipated in the first quarter.
REAL ESTATE SCRUTINY
A number of indicators this week showed China’s economic growth weakened in the fourth quarter, but it is the real estate sector that economists are scrutinising most carefully to assess the scale of the domestic slowdown.
With Europe in danger of slipping into a recession and U.S. growth looking lacklustre, China’s role in the global economy is magnified — particularly its ability to generate domestic demand that could absorb exports from struggling developed nations.
Real estate is the backbone of China’s domestic growth story. Property investment was worth 13 percent of total output in 2011 and it links some 40 major industrial sectors.
Data on Wednesday showed China’s new home prices fell for the third straight month in December and may drop further as Beijing sticks to its campaign to bring housing costs back to levels that the government considers reasonable.
That followed data on Tuesday showing annual growth in China’s real estate investment slowed in December to its weakest pace in a year.
“Today’s report is consistent with the unambiguously deteriorating trends seen in property sales, construction, starts, and investments. The data just turned from bad to worse,” Yao Wei, China economist at Societe Generale in Hong Kong wrote in a note to clients.
“The economy as a whole has not felt much chill yet, but H1 2012 is going to be difficult not just for property developers. Contraction in sales and sharp deceleration in investments will send shockwaves along the industry chain, which is expected to drag overall growth below the 8 percent mark in H1,” she said.
Intriguingly, tight monetary conditions revealed by the central bank’s total social financing aggregate — the measure it developed to offer a clearer picture of money supply than simple M2 — underline credit constraints in the real economy.
Total social financing fell to 12.8 trillion yuan (1 trillion pounds) in 2011 from 13.9 trillion in 2010, even as an estimated 350 billion yuan was injected into the financial system after November’s cut of 50 basis points to the ratio of deposits banks must hold as reserves.
BATTLE OF THE BUBBLE
China tightened policy to deflate the twin bubbles created in real estate and local government borrowing by the 4 trillion yuan stimulus package launched in 2008 to help the country through the global financial crisis.
The battle to bring those bubbles back under control is still being fought, even as the government faces another downturn that delivered a fourth successive quarter of slowing growth in October to December.
That battle is a key factor uniting economists in the view that even though China’s economy will decelerate further in the months ahead, a cut to policy lending rates by the People’s Bank of China is not on the cards.
“China started a deflating cycle last year and it will be very dangerous, very risky for them to end it prematurely because if they end it too early it will be an even larger macro economic risk for China going forward,” said Ren of IHS.
Up to 200 basis points of bank reserve cuts are expected in 2012 by analysts polled recently by Reuters, as that helps keep money supply growth stable in the face of capital outflows.
Beijing is likely to stick to what Premier Wen Jiabao has called “fine-tuning” of economic policy settings to counter the downturn for now, rather than adopting more aggressive measures such as a interest rate cuts.
That leaves the main area of uncertainty for economists the question of how sharp the slowdown in GDP growth will be in the first quarter of 2012. Many expect the next 12 months to be the most sluggish growth for China in a decade.
The most bearish call in the latest Reuters poll is Deutsche Bank’s 7.3 percent. That’s too steep for many and an unfathomable call to the likes of Ting Lu, Hong Kong-based China economist at Bank of America/Merrill Lynch.
A fall to there from 8.9 percent in the fourth quarter implies a decline wiping some 6 percentage points off growth at an annualised rate that would leave the economy expanding at barely 3 percent.
“That’s just not going to happen,” Lu said. “I think the chance of growth slowing to below 8 percent in the first quarter is very low. Calls below that are just too pessimistic. There’s a slowdown yes, but not that dramatic.”
(Additional reporting by Zhou Xin and Langi Chiang; Editing by Neil Fullick)
http://tourism9.com/ http://vkins.com/
2012年1月19日星期四
2012年1月17日星期二
S&P downgrades euro zone rescue fund
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – U.S. rating agency Standard & Poor’s cut its credit rating of the euro zone’s EFSF rescue fund on Monday, and Greece was under pressure to break a deadlock in debt swap talks if it is to avoid an unruly default.
French Finance Minister Francois Baroin said there was no need to shore up the European Financial Stability Facility after S&P downgraded it by one notch to AA+ from triple-A, echoing the view of Germany, the only major euro zone member to retain a top-notch credit rating.
S&P said in a statement the decision was all but inevitable following identical cuts three days earlier to the creditworthiness of France and Austria, two of the EFSF’s guarantors.
“We consider that credit enhancements that would offset what we view as the now-reduced creditworthiness of the EFSF’s guarantors and securities backing the EFSF’s issues are currently not in place,” the agency said in a statement.
“We have therefore lowered to AA+ the issuer credit rating of the EFSF, as well as the issue ratings on its long-term debt securities.”
Financial markets, which had fallen after the mass downgrades of euro zone members on Friday, showed little reaction to the latest blow — which had been expected — and Japan, a major buyer of EFSF bonds, said they remained an “attractive” investment.
A growing number of experts, including a Standard & Poor’s official, warned that a Greek default was on the cards, after Greece’s talks with creditors broke down on Friday.
Greece was under growing pressure to secure a last-ditch agreement with its private creditors to accept voluntary losses on their holdings of Greek bonds.
Athens risks going bankrupt when 14.5 billion euros of bond redemptions fall due in late March. Without a private sector bond swap involving a voluntary writedown, a 130 billion euro second international bailout for Greece could fall apart.
The talks with creditor banks broke down because of different views on what interest rate is acceptable, the head of the group leading private sector talks said.
Charles Dallara, managing director of the Institute of International Financial, said the banks were “very surprised” at the stance taken by some officials representing both governments and multilateral institutions, without naming them.
The EFSF was set up by the 17 governments that share the European single currency in May 2010 and has so far been used to provide emergency loans to Ireland and Portugal. It is also expected to contribute to a second bailout of Greece.
The fund has an effective lending capacity of 440 billion euros, which depends on guarantees, mainly from the euro zone’s AAA countries, only four of which now remain: Germany, Luxembourg, Finland and the Netherlands.
LENDING CAPACITY UNAFFECTED
In a statement, the EFSF said the downgrade would not affect its lending capacity, and emphasized that its short-term rating remained at S&P’s top level.
“The downgrade to ‘AA+’ by only one credit agency will not reduce EFSF’s lending capacity of 440 billion euros,” said the fund’s chief executive, Klaus Regling.
“EFSF has sufficient means to fulfill its commitments under current and potential future adjustment programs until the ESM becomes operational in July 2012,” he added.
The ESM — the European Stability Mechanism — is a permanent rescue fund that is expected to have an effective capacity of 500 billion euros, based on paid-in capital of 80 billion euros and callable capital of 620 billion euros.
French Finance Minister Francois Baroin said there was no need to shore up the EFSF despite the S&P rating downgrade.
“The EFSF has kept intact its ability to lend, with enough means and guarantees to fulfill the full range of its present and future commitments,” he said in a statement. “There is therefore no need to act on the EFSF at the moment.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert told reporters: “The government has no reason to believe that the volume of guarantees that the EFSF has now should not be sufficient to fulfill its current obligations.
“We should not forget that it has been decided to significantly move forward the ESM and to have it in place in mid-2012, one year earlier than planned.”
There was also support from Japan, with Finance Minister Jun Azumi saying Tokyo’s trust in EFSF bonds, in which it has so far invested 21 billion euros, had not been shaken.
“Japan has bought them by certain amounts and our stance will not immediately change just because of the downgrade,” Azumi told reporters after a cabinet meeting.
The euro hovered just above a 17-month trough against the dollar early in Asia on Tuesday, but reaction to the S&P downgrade was muted. Trading overnight was subdued as U.S. markets were shut for the Martin Luther King holiday.
The head of Austria’s debt office told Reuters the loss of Vienna’s AAA status had also been priced into the market already, and Austria was able to sell treasury bills on Monday at rates very close to zero.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy brushed off the historic loss of Paris’ top credit rating for the first time since 1975, a blow to his campaign for re-election in May, saying France’s policy would not be dictated by rating agencies.
Contrasting S&P’s move with a statement by rival watchdog Moody’s, which still has France on an Aaa rating, he said: “My deep belief is that it changes nothing. We must reduce the deficit, we must reduce our spending and we must improve the competitiveness of our economy to return to a path of growth.”
LOSERS TO PAY?
Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, whose debt-laden country was downgraded by two notches along with Spain, called last week during a visit to Berlin for the EFSF to be increased to ward off attacks on his country’s bonds.
But a senior politician in Merkel’s conservative CDU party, Michael Meister, said it was the downgraded countries that should increase their guarantees for the fund.
“Germany was not downgraded so our contribution should not be changed. Countries that were affected must contribute more to the guarantees,” Meister told Reuters.
Sources familiar with Greece’s talks with its private creditors said EU paymaster Germany was pressing for new bonds to be given to banks in the planned swap to carry a low coupon of less than four percent that would increase the banks’ effective losses to 75 percent.
The IMF was also weighing on the talks by warning that the Greek economy and the euro zone’s economic outlook have worsened since the bailout package was agreed in October, raising Athens’ funding needs to make its debt sustainable by 2020, they said.
Greece put a brave face on the standoff. “There is a little pause in these discussions,” Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos told CNBC television. “But I am confident they will continue and we will reach an agreement that is mutually acceptable in time.”
(Additional reporting by Lefteris Papadimos in Athens, Steve Slater and Richard Hubbard in London, Jan Strupczewski in Brussels and Fiona Ortiz in Madrid; Writing by Paul Taylor; Editing by Tim Pearce and Alex Richardson)
http://tourism9.cm/ http://vkins.com/
French Finance Minister Francois Baroin said there was no need to shore up the European Financial Stability Facility after S&P downgraded it by one notch to AA+ from triple-A, echoing the view of Germany, the only major euro zone member to retain a top-notch credit rating.
S&P said in a statement the decision was all but inevitable following identical cuts three days earlier to the creditworthiness of France and Austria, two of the EFSF’s guarantors.
“We consider that credit enhancements that would offset what we view as the now-reduced creditworthiness of the EFSF’s guarantors and securities backing the EFSF’s issues are currently not in place,” the agency said in a statement.
“We have therefore lowered to AA+ the issuer credit rating of the EFSF, as well as the issue ratings on its long-term debt securities.”
Financial markets, which had fallen after the mass downgrades of euro zone members on Friday, showed little reaction to the latest blow — which had been expected — and Japan, a major buyer of EFSF bonds, said they remained an “attractive” investment.
A growing number of experts, including a Standard & Poor’s official, warned that a Greek default was on the cards, after Greece’s talks with creditors broke down on Friday.
Greece was under growing pressure to secure a last-ditch agreement with its private creditors to accept voluntary losses on their holdings of Greek bonds.
Athens risks going bankrupt when 14.5 billion euros of bond redemptions fall due in late March. Without a private sector bond swap involving a voluntary writedown, a 130 billion euro second international bailout for Greece could fall apart.
The talks with creditor banks broke down because of different views on what interest rate is acceptable, the head of the group leading private sector talks said.
Charles Dallara, managing director of the Institute of International Financial, said the banks were “very surprised” at the stance taken by some officials representing both governments and multilateral institutions, without naming them.
The EFSF was set up by the 17 governments that share the European single currency in May 2010 and has so far been used to provide emergency loans to Ireland and Portugal. It is also expected to contribute to a second bailout of Greece.
The fund has an effective lending capacity of 440 billion euros, which depends on guarantees, mainly from the euro zone’s AAA countries, only four of which now remain: Germany, Luxembourg, Finland and the Netherlands.
LENDING CAPACITY UNAFFECTED
In a statement, the EFSF said the downgrade would not affect its lending capacity, and emphasized that its short-term rating remained at S&P’s top level.
“The downgrade to ‘AA+’ by only one credit agency will not reduce EFSF’s lending capacity of 440 billion euros,” said the fund’s chief executive, Klaus Regling.
“EFSF has sufficient means to fulfill its commitments under current and potential future adjustment programs until the ESM becomes operational in July 2012,” he added.
The ESM — the European Stability Mechanism — is a permanent rescue fund that is expected to have an effective capacity of 500 billion euros, based on paid-in capital of 80 billion euros and callable capital of 620 billion euros.
French Finance Minister Francois Baroin said there was no need to shore up the EFSF despite the S&P rating downgrade.
“The EFSF has kept intact its ability to lend, with enough means and guarantees to fulfill the full range of its present and future commitments,” he said in a statement. “There is therefore no need to act on the EFSF at the moment.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert told reporters: “The government has no reason to believe that the volume of guarantees that the EFSF has now should not be sufficient to fulfill its current obligations.
“We should not forget that it has been decided to significantly move forward the ESM and to have it in place in mid-2012, one year earlier than planned.”
There was also support from Japan, with Finance Minister Jun Azumi saying Tokyo’s trust in EFSF bonds, in which it has so far invested 21 billion euros, had not been shaken.
“Japan has bought them by certain amounts and our stance will not immediately change just because of the downgrade,” Azumi told reporters after a cabinet meeting.
The euro hovered just above a 17-month trough against the dollar early in Asia on Tuesday, but reaction to the S&P downgrade was muted. Trading overnight was subdued as U.S. markets were shut for the Martin Luther King holiday.
The head of Austria’s debt office told Reuters the loss of Vienna’s AAA status had also been priced into the market already, and Austria was able to sell treasury bills on Monday at rates very close to zero.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy brushed off the historic loss of Paris’ top credit rating for the first time since 1975, a blow to his campaign for re-election in May, saying France’s policy would not be dictated by rating agencies.
Contrasting S&P’s move with a statement by rival watchdog Moody’s, which still has France on an Aaa rating, he said: “My deep belief is that it changes nothing. We must reduce the deficit, we must reduce our spending and we must improve the competitiveness of our economy to return to a path of growth.”
LOSERS TO PAY?
Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, whose debt-laden country was downgraded by two notches along with Spain, called last week during a visit to Berlin for the EFSF to be increased to ward off attacks on his country’s bonds.
But a senior politician in Merkel’s conservative CDU party, Michael Meister, said it was the downgraded countries that should increase their guarantees for the fund.
“Germany was not downgraded so our contribution should not be changed. Countries that were affected must contribute more to the guarantees,” Meister told Reuters.
Sources familiar with Greece’s talks with its private creditors said EU paymaster Germany was pressing for new bonds to be given to banks in the planned swap to carry a low coupon of less than four percent that would increase the banks’ effective losses to 75 percent.
The IMF was also weighing on the talks by warning that the Greek economy and the euro zone’s economic outlook have worsened since the bailout package was agreed in October, raising Athens’ funding needs to make its debt sustainable by 2020, they said.
Greece put a brave face on the standoff. “There is a little pause in these discussions,” Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos told CNBC television. “But I am confident they will continue and we will reach an agreement that is mutually acceptable in time.”
(Additional reporting by Lefteris Papadimos in Athens, Steve Slater and Richard Hubbard in London, Jan Strupczewski in Brussels and Fiona Ortiz in Madrid; Writing by Paul Taylor; Editing by Tim Pearce and Alex Richardson)
http://tourism9.cm/ http://vkins.com/
2012年1月9日星期一
William P. Carey, Leader in Commercial Real Estate, Dies at 81
William P. Carey, who played a leading role in the early use of the commercial real estate transaction known as the sale-leaseback as he built a fortune in investment management, died on Jan. 2 in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 81 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was cardiac arrest, his brother and only immediate survivor, Francis, said.
Mr. Carey was the founder in 1973 of W. P. Carey & Company, an investment management firm in New York with about $12 billion in assets around the world, among them nearly 1,000 retail and industrial sites totaling about 120 million square feet.
In the early 1980s the company closed transactions that were considered innovative in their use of the sale-leaseback model. The sale-leaseback is a form of financing in which a company sells its property for cash while remaining as a tenant under a long-term lease it signs with the buyer. It is often used by companies that are having trouble obtaining traditional financing.
In 1982, to finance its leveraged buyout of Gibson Greeting Cards, the Wesray Corporation, the investment company headed by William E. Simon, a former Treasury secretary, sold three Gibson manufacturing and warehouse buildings to Carey & Company.
Of the many sale-leaseback deals the company has arranged in the last 38 years, a prominent one came in 2009 when it bought 21 floors of the 52-story headquarters of The New York Times on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan for $225 million. The Times, which entered into the transaction to pay down debt, has the option to buy back the space in the 10th year of a 15-year lease.
Mr. Carey, a leading philanthropist as well, donated more than $100 million of his wealth through the W. P. Carey Foundation, which he established in 1988. The gifts primarily went to promote business education.
The foundation gave $50 million to the Arizona State University School of Business in 2002. Five years later, it donated $50 million to Johns Hopkins University to create the James Carey Business School, named for Mr. Carey’s great-great-great-grandfather, a shipper in Baltimore in the early 1800s.
Last year, the foundation established a $30 million endowment for the Francis King Carey School of Law at the University of Maryland, named for Mr. Carey’s grandfather, a graduate of the school.
William Polk Carey was born in Baltimore on May 11, 1930, to Francis and Marjorie Armstrong Carey. Business acumen came early to him. As a boy, he sold soda on the streets near his home and ink he made in his basement.
Mr. Carey graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1953 with a degree in economics. After serving in the Air Force for two years, he worked at a car dealership owned by a relative in New Jersey. At 28, he owned a company in Plainfield, N.J., that leased foreign cars. It was there he learned the basics of the sale-leaseback.
Mr. Carey’s middle name, Polk, is an acknowledgment that he was a descendant of the 11th president of the United States, James K. Polk.
“He was very proud of that,” Mr. Carey’s great-nephew, William Polk Carey II, said last week. “He liked to hand out those $1 gold coins with engravings of his Uncle Jim. That’s what he called him
http://tourism9.com/
Mr. Carey was the founder in 1973 of W. P. Carey & Company, an investment management firm in New York with about $12 billion in assets around the world, among them nearly 1,000 retail and industrial sites totaling about 120 million square feet.
In the early 1980s the company closed transactions that were considered innovative in their use of the sale-leaseback model. The sale-leaseback is a form of financing in which a company sells its property for cash while remaining as a tenant under a long-term lease it signs with the buyer. It is often used by companies that are having trouble obtaining traditional financing.
In 1982, to finance its leveraged buyout of Gibson Greeting Cards, the Wesray Corporation, the investment company headed by William E. Simon, a former Treasury secretary, sold three Gibson manufacturing and warehouse buildings to Carey & Company.
Of the many sale-leaseback deals the company has arranged in the last 38 years, a prominent one came in 2009 when it bought 21 floors of the 52-story headquarters of The New York Times on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan for $225 million. The Times, which entered into the transaction to pay down debt, has the option to buy back the space in the 10th year of a 15-year lease.
Mr. Carey, a leading philanthropist as well, donated more than $100 million of his wealth through the W. P. Carey Foundation, which he established in 1988. The gifts primarily went to promote business education.
The foundation gave $50 million to the Arizona State University School of Business in 2002. Five years later, it donated $50 million to Johns Hopkins University to create the James Carey Business School, named for Mr. Carey’s great-great-great-grandfather, a shipper in Baltimore in the early 1800s.
Last year, the foundation established a $30 million endowment for the Francis King Carey School of Law at the University of Maryland, named for Mr. Carey’s grandfather, a graduate of the school.
William Polk Carey was born in Baltimore on May 11, 1930, to Francis and Marjorie Armstrong Carey. Business acumen came early to him. As a boy, he sold soda on the streets near his home and ink he made in his basement.
Mr. Carey graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1953 with a degree in economics. After serving in the Air Force for two years, he worked at a car dealership owned by a relative in New Jersey. At 28, he owned a company in Plainfield, N.J., that leased foreign cars. It was there he learned the basics of the sale-leaseback.
Mr. Carey’s middle name, Polk, is an acknowledgment that he was a descendant of the 11th president of the United States, James K. Polk.
“He was very proud of that,” Mr. Carey’s great-nephew, William Polk Carey II, said last week. “He liked to hand out those $1 gold coins with engravings of his Uncle Jim. That’s what he called him
http://tourism9.com/
2012年1月3日星期二
Will Lloyds’ Distressed Property Loan Sales Spark Similar Deals?
At the beginning of December, the Financial Times reported that Lloyds Banking Group had opened discussions with US private equity group Lone Star about selling off GBP 900 million of distressed real estate loans. According to the news provider, the deal would signal the largest such loan disposal by a financial institution in the UK since the difficulties experienced in the property market in 2008. The newspaper suggested this could herald a deluge of similar sales and chairman of Chainbow Roger Southam agrees.
He stated that in 2012 “a lot more problems will come out of the woodwork” for UK banks. As a result, Mr Southam believes other deals like that between Lloyds and Lone Star will definitely be on the cards. “They are going to have to bite the bullet and do the bulk deals that we have seen in this distressed way [as Lloyds have done],” Mr Southam asserted. However, he stressed the biggest difficulty will come in finding buyers for such bundles of assets. “Over the last six months and a little bit before that, yields and the purchase prices would seem very good value, [however], people are not in the marketplace for taking [them] on board,” he explained.
Mr Southam stressed the number of potential buyers for portfolios of distressed real estate and loans is “very, very limited”, so even if the banks are keen to offload these assets and shore up their books, it may be a difficult task to accomplish. He added that if the market becomes inundated by financial establishments hoping to complete deals of this kind, it could be “very detrimental” for the real estate sector as a whole. Bloomberg recently cited data from Standard & Poors, showing that as much as GBP 4.8 billion of loans tied to mortgage-backed securities are due to mature in 2012. The assets behind the loans will therefore have to be sold, or the loans themselves refinanced over the next 12 months, the news provider revealed.
Mr Southam stressed the number of potential buyers for portfolios of distressed real estate and loans is “very, very limited”, so even if the banks are keen to offload these assets and shore up their books, it may be a difficult task to accomplish. He added that if the market becomes inundated by financial establishments hoping to complete deals of this kind, it could be “very detrimental” for the real estate sector as a whole. Bloomberg recently cited data from Standard & Poors, showing that as much as GBP 4.8 billion of loans tied to mortgage-backed securities are due to mature in 2012. The assets behind the loans will therefore have to be sold, or the loans themselves refinanced over the next 12 months, the news provider revealed.
Like us on Facebook
Ed Stansfield, chief property economist at Capital Economics, told the news agency there is a discrepancy between the type of assets being put up for sale and the sort that investors with cash are seeking to acquire. He said the real estate behind the bank loans tends to be “pretty poor quality” and this is not what investors are looking for in the current economic climate. Meanwhile, Sue Munden, analyst at investment bank Seymour Pierce, noted it will be the UK real estate investment trusts that hold higher calibre property that will be able to take advantage of this sentiment. “The good are going to continue getting better and the bad are going to carry on getting worse,” she stated in an interview with Bloomberg.
A further stumbling block for the financial establishments hoping to offload some of their assets could therefore be their quality, with the Financial Times citing data from Savills which revealed that only one-quarter of the estimated GBP 350 billion of the banks’ exposure to the UK’s commercial property sector is comprised of prime real estate, indicating the remainder will not be as attractive to potential investors. In its European Investment Bulletin for summer 2011, Savills stressed that buyers are still averse to anything other than prime property.
The report highlighted the popularity of assets in desirable locations or that fall into the prime bracket, but indicated investors “remain wary of secondary markets due to the lack of transactional evidence, and questions about the timing and strength of the economic and leasing market recovery in some UK markets”. However, the research showed the UK still attracts the greatest level of global investment within Europe, accounting for 34 per cent of the transactions that occurred during the first quarter of 2011.
http://tourism9.com/
Ed Stansfield, chief property economist at Capital Economics, told the news agency there is a discrepancy between the type of assets being put up for sale and the sort that investors with cash are seeking to acquire. He said the real estate behind the bank loans tends to be “pretty poor quality” and this is not what investors are looking for in the current economic climate. Meanwhile, Sue Munden, analyst at investment bank Seymour Pierce, noted it will be the UK real estate investment trusts that hold higher calibre property that will be able to take advantage of this sentiment. “The good are going to continue getting better and the bad are going to carry on getting worse,” she stated in an interview with Bloomberg.
A further stumbling block for the financial establishments hoping to offload some of their assets could therefore be their quality, with the Financial Times citing data from Savills which revealed that only one-quarter of the estimated GBP 350 billion of the banks’ exposure to the UK’s commercial property sector is comprised of prime real estate, indicating the remainder will not be as attractive to potential investors. In its European Investment Bulletin for summer 2011, Savills stressed that buyers are still averse to anything other than prime property.
The report highlighted the popularity of assets in desirable locations or that fall into the prime bracket, but indicated investors “remain wary of secondary markets due to the lack of transactional evidence, and questions about the timing and strength of the economic and leasing market recovery in some UK markets”. However, the research showed the UK still attracts the greatest level of global investment within Europe, accounting for 34 per cent of the transactions that occurred during the first quarter of 2011.
http://tourism9.com/
订阅：
博文 (Atom)