Sponsor briefing on a variety of issues, including the results of our 2024 Global Institutional Investor Sentiment Survey

Yesterday we conducted two briefings for the Sponsors of our publications – one for Sponsors in the Asia Pacific region and another for Sponsors in the European region. (Last Thursday we conducted a briefing for our Sponsors in the Americas region). The purpose of these briefings is to give our sponsors a market intelligence information advantage; more than 100 representatives from our sponsoring firms around the globe tuned into these presentations.

Tom Parker, our EVP and Publisher, opened each session by briefing our sponsors about many of the things we’ve been doing to help educate and inform investors around the globe while helping them connect with those investors and each other.

Then, each of our editors for each publication briefed our sponsors on the three most important developments they had been covering in 2023, as well as where they expect to be focusing the editorial content of their publications in 2024.

Our Managing Directors next talked about all the things they’ve been doing to expand our network of investors, both to increase our influence and to enable our sponsors to widen and deepen their own connections and relationships with those investors.

Then, Tom and I spent some time tying this all together, followed by the presentation of the results of our 2024 Global Investor Sentiment Survey – the longest running survey of institutional real estate investors in the marketplace. (It’s also the most detailed and generates the most responses of any other survey in the marketplace, with more than 175 responses from investors in the Americas and elsewhere around the globe who collectively control more than $9 trillion in total assets and more than $900 billion in real estate assets).

Our sponsors were briefed on investors’ return expectations for real estate and the other asset classes in their portfolio, and for each of the different strategies imbedded in those portfolios, from core to opportunistic, equity to debt and from ?private to public market real estate securities.

We also presented data illustrating how investors felt their real estate portfolios have been performing vis a vis the benchmarks they’ve been using, as well as their relative satisfaction with real estate when compared with other asset classes, and within the different risk spectrums and capital stack.

We then turned to changes in asset allocation plans and anticipated as well as past capital allocation trends – including which geographic regions, risk strategies and property types were most (and least) attractive to investors moving into 2024.

Next,, we focused on differences between investors in different regions with respect to their policies regarding ESG, responsible investing and DEI related issues.

Then, we summarized the investment options these investors would like to see introduced into the markets, the greatest challenges facing those investors in managing their portfolios, and where investors see the greatest opportunities in the markets today.

Armed with this information, our sponsors were given a distinct head start over those competitors who are not sponsoring our publications, enabling them to start planning now with respect to the kinds of products that are likely to attract the most investor interest in 2024, and how best to fine tune their interactions with investors along with their marketing and capital fund-raising strategies to appeal to current investor sentiment, interests, outlooks and investment plans.

Thanks to the following team mates for joining Tom Parker and I in planning and delivering this briefing:? Loretta Clodfelter, editorial director, Andrea Zander, editor, Institutional Real Estate Americas, Marek Handzel, editor for our Institutional Real Estate Europe publication, Jennifer Molloy, editor for our Institutional Real Estate Asia Pacific publication, Kali Persall, editor for our Institutional Investing in Infrastructure publication, and Mike Consol, editor of our Real Asset Adviser publication, as well as our managing directors for each of these publications: Chase McWhorter (Americas), Reno Sio (Asia Pacific), Kelly Armanios (Europe), Jorge Fernandez (Institutional Investing in Infrastructure), and Ed O’Farrell (Real Assets Adviser).

During his part of the briefing, Ed talked about how he has been focusing on developing the definitive list of key decision makers at Wirehouse, Independent Broker Dealer and Registered Investment Advisory firms who are responsible for approving investment programs for recommendation to their firms’ individual investor clients, creating a distinct competitive advantage for those firms seeking to raise capital from the High Net Work and Mass Affluent marketplace – a $90 trillion marketplace in the US market alone. (We tried to buy such a list; we found it doesn’t exist. So we had to invest in developing this list ourselves. To the best of our knowledge, it’s the only list of these kinds of decision makers currently available in the market and having access to it will save our sponsors hours of otherwise wasted time and effort.).

The results of this year’s survey will be summarized in upcoming editions of our publications, and a detailed report containing all of the data tables, charts and graphs prepared along with an in-depth analysis of the data will be available sometime over the next three months. These reports will be distributed at no cost to our sponsors and investor survey respondents and will be available for purchase at the online store on our website at https://www.irei.com