21
COVER STORY
roughly EUR 2 billion for institutional in-
vestors such as insurance companies. “Un-
employment is low inGermany; net wages
and consumer spending are rising,” says
Tates. And not all retailers were hit equal-
ly hard by online trade. Tates is especially
convinced that multi-channel sales are the
future: Amazon wants to open around 400
stores in Europe next year.
Logistics markets are also continuing
to show signs of growth. According to
CRBE, the volume of transactions rose
last year by 14 percent to a new record
of EUR 4.5 billion, the forecast for 2017
is more than EUR four billion. “Growing
online trade and outsourcing of process-
ing operations continue to be the main
factors of demand,” says Pink explaining
the market situation. “The strong inflow
of capital, particularly from foreign
er hand, could move up in the ranking.
There’s a lot of money inAsia for which in-
vestment opportunities are being sought,
says Pink. For the regional diversification
of investments in Europe, in addition to
those in the U.K., properties in Germany
are increasingly in demand.
In regard to types of properties, office
and logistics properties as well as shopping
centers are extremely popular with foreign
investors. “They are in principal more de-
manding to manage than office buildings,
but experts specialized in this segment are
able to get a handle on this problem,” says
Pink. What foreign investors like about
shopping centers is that they are often very
large-scale properties and have a broadly
diverse tenant structure.
Prelios Deutschland manages a com-
mercial property portfolio in Germany of
try expert is, nevertheless, quite optimistic
given the market conditions. He believes
that in 2017 an investment turnover in
commercial properties of EUR 45 to 50
billion can be achieved. Savills expert
Pink is slightly more pessimistic: for the
first half of 2017 he expects a transaction
volume of roughly over EUR 20 billion,
which would be slightly over the level of
2016 (EUR 18.7 billion). For the year as a
whole, Pink forecasts investment turnover
of around EUR 45 billion.
EVEN MORE FOREIGN BUYERS IN 2017
Per-
centagewise, the share of foreign buyers,
according to Klein and Pink, in 2017 could
be slightly above the 2016 level. Howev-
er, there could be shifts in the ranking of
countries of origin: The USA could drop,
Asia and especially China, on the oth-
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