Second-Half Investment Rebound Seen

ATLANTA-A 37% majority of commercial real estate investors and developers surveyed by Jones Lang LaSalle foresee their investment activity rebounding in the second half of this year. JLL released its spring survey results during the Urban Land Institute’s Spring Council Forum, being held Wednesday through Friday at the Georgia World Congress Center.

The survey of ULI attendees covers all five primary commercial sectors—retail, office, multifamily, industrial and hotels. Less than a third of respondents indicated that they plan to reduce investment spending through the last six months of 2009.

“Our capital markets teams in the primary international markets are reporting increasingly positive signs that pricing floors are being reached, with a corresponding uptick in transaction volumes,” Michael Zietsman, managing director of JLL’s Capital Markets Group, said in releasing the survey results. “This should bode well for the United States where the bid/ask gap still remains wide.

“Buyers have set pricing levels that are unappealing to most sellers, but it’s only a question of time before sellers move down and buyers move up to create a more efficient market,” Zietsman continued. “We’ve seen this in the London market and I suspect that we are six to eight months behind.”

A lack of liquidity and continued constriction in the availability of debt remains high on the minds of most in commercial real estate, with a vast majority claiming that as the one factor that will most influence the development and investment activity in the coming year, JLL stated in the survey results. While most survey respondents predict performance in all sectors to decline this year, pockets of opportunity appear to exist in the multifamily and industrial sectors.