According to data gathered in the latest monitor, Germany and Spain exhibit the strongest investment market momentum at present. Consequently, both prime and secondary assets are expected to post solid gains over the next twelve months.

TUI AG, Europe’s largest tour operator, said demand for summer vacations in Turkey tumbled about 40 percent following a suicide bombing at a tourist attraction in Istanbul last month.

Mid-2016 bookings for the popular travel destination fell as families that flocked to Turkey’s Mediterranean beaches seek alternatives after the bombing in January killed 11 Germans, TUI’s largest customer group. Customers are instead planning holidays in Spain, contributing to a 13 percent jump in average revenue per bed at TUI’s Riu hotel chain and leading to a capacity squeeze in the country, Chief Executive Officer Fritz Joussen told journalists on a conference call.

The number of attractive investment opportunities in European commercial property has receded as yields have fallen and more markets have become fully priced.

Cushman & Wakefield's European Fair Value Index identifies Europe’s most attractive office, retail and industrial markets for prime commercial property investment on a five-year hold period. The report shows that with Eurozone interest rates unlikely to rise until 2018, prime property yields in core Eurozone markets look likely to stay stagnant until 2017/18.

Interdealer broker Tullett Prebon and Synrex Ltd have formed a joint venture to develop a new institutional all-to-all real estate trading portal for the issuance and secondary trading of indirect real estate risk across a range of instruments.

The joint venture between Synrex and Tullett Prebon will be called tpsynrex Ltd.
 
The web-based trading portal aims to offer real estate investors a new level of trading efficiency and liquidity, enabling them to trade risk directly, but anonymously. Liquidity will be concentrated in a series of quarterly web based auctions on the tpsynrex platform.

Rockspring Property Investment Managers LLP (“Rockspring”) announces that it has acquired a substantial speculative development site on the Los Gavilanes estate in Getafe, Madrid on behalf of a separate account client. The site will be developed as part of a major logistics warehousing project. 

Private closed-end real estate funds have again returned record amounts of capital back to investors; funds distributed USD138 billion to investors in 2013, USD187 billion in 2014, and a further USD103 billion in the first half of 2015.

That’s according to Preqin’s 2016 Global Real Estate Report, which reveals that buoyed by rising real estate valuations, the industry has seen 22 consecutive quarters of increase in net asset value (NAV) up to Q2 2015, the latest available data. Private real estate funds generated returns of 15 per cent in the year to June 2015, and 16 per cent per annum in the three years to June 2015.

Neinver and Colony Logistics have purchased a new portfolio of logistics properties through a joint venture between the two companies. Its portfolio is thus adding 23 logistics and cross-docking facilities in various parts of Spain, totalling around 151,500 m².  

Acquired from Zaphir Logistics Properties for €87 million, the facilities are spread across 19 Spanish provinces. Half the properties are in Madrid or Barcelona. Banco Santander and Crédit Agricole financed the purchase.

Syndicated lending to real estate in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) of €40.0bn in the second half of 2015, together with upward revisions for H1, drove annual volumes of €74.7bn, completing the second full year of data, as compiled by Dealogic.

The annual volume is estimated to be the highest syndicated real estate loan volumes since the global financial crisis and reflects a 58% year-on-year increase compared to full-year 2014 when €32.9bn of volume was reported.

European legacy loan de-leveraging is forecast to smash 2015’s record annual disposals of almost €105bn with sales to top €130bn this year, in a punchy prediction by Deloitte as part of its comprehensive market review and outlook.

Deloitte has identified €44.5bn live and pending loan portfolio sales across 51 deals, which reflects approximately one-third of its bumper 2016 prediction, the vast majority of which it expects to see close this year.

European commercial real estate (CRE) investment activity was greater in 2015 than in any other year.

European investment activity totalled EUR70 billion in Q4 2015, a 24 per cent increase on Q3 2015, which helped push the full year total to EUR246 billion, the highest level on record, and surpassing the previous peak of EUR230 billion in 2007. 

“Of the major markets, Germany posted volumes of EUR53 billion in 2015, a 41 per cent increase on 2014 levels. The peripheral markets of Italy (+ 67 per cent to EUR8 billion) and Spain (+ 36 per cent to EUR11 billion) also registered strong year on year growth.

New commercial real estate lending in Europe rose by almost 39% to €125bn in 2015, in a 12 month period which saw financing markets continue to fragment across the lending spectrum in pricing and liquidity as the year drew to a close.

In a survey of more than 60 lenders, which reflected lending in 2015 of more than €80bn, the report states that the lending environment across Europe remains positive with the majority of lenders expecting to maintain or expand their activities in 2016.

The European Lending Trends report details the survey responses of more than 60 active European lenders who provided over EUR80 billion of loans in 2015. The survey shows that overall the environment for refinancing remains stable and although the pace of growth for orginations of loans is positive, it is set to be lower in the first half of 2016 compared to the same period 12 months earlier.
 
The UK, France and Germany remain the key markets from a lending perspective with those countries expected to represent 50 per cent of anticipated activity in 2016. There is greater activity expected in the likes of Spain – indicating an increased appetite for risk there - as well as the Nordic countries. This is in contrast to Italy where a desire to lend remains weak.

EMEA attracts more inward investment from overseas capital than any other global market, according to analysis undertaken by Savills. In total, EMEA real estate markets received $183 billion of capital funding during 2015, 63% of which originated from overseas.  

With cross-border capital now responsible for eight of every 18 real estate transactions in the region, EMEA has proved to be significantly more attractive to international investors than other markets, which have typically seen funding for just one in every ten deals coming from a cross-border source. North America was the biggest source of investment, spending $75 billion in EMEA in 2015, compared to domestic and Asian investors who invested $68 billion and $24 billion respectively. 

AEW Europe has bought its European retail property fund’s first Spanish asset, investing in central Madrid.

The investment manager made a forward purchase agreement on the Calle Serrano asset from a joint venture with Rockspring Property Investment Managers. 

The asset is due for completion in 2017.

A central benefit of the real estate asset class is the potential to generate alpha from effective portfolio and asset management. But navigating through the current environment poses investment challenges. Strong recent performance has contributed to a surge of capital toward the asset class. The growing scale and importance of real estate as an asset class has been accompanied by a desire for greater scrutiny of the actual exposure, from investors, regulators and managers.

This scrutiny is part of broader moves for greater transparency, as well as increasing concerns over the pricing of real estate across most markets. It is in this context that “benchmarking” is coming to represent a powerful tool in helping provide this scrutiny and, as such, a central activity to help manage risk and return within the investment process. Moreover, real estate benchmarking can function as a crucial nexus between the shifting winds of a global marketplace and the on-the-ground local decisions that drive performance. It is a simple, but powerful framework for strengthening decision-making through the investment process.

Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia -Spain's wealthiest region with a GNP at 20%-, is one of Europe's leading destinations alongside Paris, London, Berlin and Rome. Nonetheless, recent political changes are affecting the future of tourism in Barcelona, whether they are local – the new mayor, former Indignado, wanted to regulate tourism – or regional, with the victory of the independence party which casts uncertainty over the idea of maintaining Catalonia in the country.

Internos Global Investors has aquired the NH Madrid Suecia in Spain for €45 million (€354,000 per room) from Explotadora de Hoteles EDTL SL. The four-star, 127-room hotel, close to Banco de España Metro Station in central Madrid, will continue be operated by NH Hotel Group under a long lease.

The Spanish economy maintained the pace of growth in the fourth quarter, pointing to further momentum for the Iberian nation’s recovery.

Gross domestic product increased 0.8 percent in the three months through December, unchanged from the previous quarter, the Madrid-based National Statistics Office said Friday in a preliminary release. Economists had forecast a 0.8 percent expansion, according to the median of 16 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey. 

From a year earlier, GDP expanded 3.5 percent, beating estimates calling for growth of 3.4 percent. Overall the economy grew 3.2 percent in 2015. The Spanish government targeted growth of 3.3 percent.

Liquidity in real estate finance markets has tightening in the early weeks of the New Year, as banks react to renewed Chinese equity market volatility with caution.

Events in world equity fixed income and commodity markets in recent weeks have far reaching consequences for the health of the European economy while the scale of the impact on real estate market is still unclear.

Blackstone raised a record $26.5bn (€24.5bn) for real estate last year.

The investment manager said it had $93.9bn of assets under management at the end of 2015.

Total assets under management for the firm’s core plus strategy reached $11bn, two years after launching the business. 

Blackstone said that over the past two years, real estate has returned over $40bn of capital to investors.