tailieunhanh - UNDERSTANDING THE BARRIERS TO REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT IN DEVELOPING ECONOMIES

Despite ongoing domestic political tension, vulnerabilities in the economy and continued volatility in global financial markets, Turkey remains an attractive longer-term investment market, being the second most populous country in Europe after Germany and the sixth largest European economy. It has a young and growing population of over 70 million – 43% of the Turkish population is under the age of 25 and sizable migration to the country’s cities is taking place. These demographic trends compare favourably against those of aging Europe. In addition, Turkey has increased its real per capita GDP in USD terms by more than 30% over. | ỉ 4 ITĨTỤ IRERS 2010 27 - 29 APRIL KUALA LUMPUR UNDERSTANDING THE BARRIERS TO REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT IN DEVELOPING ECONOMIES Professor Andrew Baum Dr Claudia Murray School of Real Estate and Planning Henley Business School University of Reading United Kingdom e-mail fax 00 44 1491 871682 Abstract The investor s appetite for global investment has accelerated since the mid 1990s. International or cross border property investment has boomed and indirect property investment investing through securities such as REITs and through unlisted funds has become commonplace. International real estate investment through unlisted funds has become the approach of choice and has included core strategies through which capital has been allocated largely to developed markets and opportunity funds which have also allocated capital to developing and emerging markets. In a previous paper presented at IRERS 2008 Baum 2008a related the number of unlisted real estate funds investing in developing economies to simple economic and demographic variables. Using all markets outside north America and Europe as an imperfect proxy for the developing world we showed that the popularity of markets was explained largely by population and GDP per capita but that there were interesting outlier observations - countries receiving much more or much less investment than the model predicted. In this second paper in a series of three we show that academic literature suggests that distortions in international capital flows may be explained by a combination of formal and informal barriers. Through a limited survey of investors we have further refined our understanding of these barriers in the real estate context. This is the first such examination of the inhibitions to a free flow of cross-border real estate capital. In a third paper we will use a more extensive survey of investors and fund managers to examine how these theories explain current practice and will suggest specific reasons for .