Every year in the first couple of weeks of July, REFIRE pays a visit to most of the larger property advisory groups who have been busy collating their figures on German investment and leasing activity over the prior six months. Over the years we’ve become familiar with the different methods of definition by each of the brokers as to what constitutes, for example, Frankfurt’s figures for the purpose of comparison with other brokers’ figures. This helps to explain discrepancies between one broker and another when they talk of total figures.

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3. Three cheers for ZIA, the German Property Federation

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1. Total property investment slumps by 14% in Germany in first half
2. JLL’s Quint sees Germany benefiting as larger economies are favoured
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Given its powerful reach as a provider of finance for residential property, we always read with interest research provided by the Landesbauspar- kassen LBS, Germany’s largest building society and one of its largest mortgage lenders. Its latest prognosis is that German house prices are set to rise at a moderate 2%-3.5% this year, with low supply and rising demand driven by extremely favourable interest rates. 

In its survey, LBS, part of the savings bank network, found that demand for German housing is gaining in strength and breadth. “With declining supply, prices are inevitably climbing further, though still at a moderate pace,” said board director Hartwig Hamm. The trend is especially pronounced for apartment prices and in south-western Germany. Hamm sees no price bubble emerging, however. “Almost all sectors show property prices on the same level as 10 years ago,” he said. Only new apartments, an asset class particularly interesting for foreign investors, have seen 10% price growth in some loca- tions over the last 10 years.

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2. EPRA to the rescue as German government amends GOEF rules
3. The nagging problem of German office vacancy rates

If there is one day in the real estate calendar that we will be sure not to miss in future, it is the annual gathering of the ZIA, or German Property Federation, the regulatory and economic lobby group for policy in the property sector.

Last week, the movers and the shakers in the German real estate industry gathered in a converted industrial gasworks building and several renovated outhouses in Berlin, in what has become a rather chic meeting point for conferences and seminars. Given the blazing sunshine outside and the natural heat generated by several hundred people in a rusty gasometer converted into a studio, jackets were abandoned, ties loosened, and everyone got on with the business of connecting – which is why most of us were there in the first place.

Well, not quite. The event was punctuated by several presentations, along with group and podium discussions, all focused on the general themes of sustainability and Germany’s energy policy.  The so-called Energiewende, or Energy Transition, has surged to the top of the German ruling coalition’s agenda since the decision after Fukushima to abandon nuclear power irrevocably. No less than three government ministers attended the event, along with ex-foreign minister Joschka Fischer, to lend weight to the seriousness with which Germany is tackling the energy issue, and in recognition of the role the real estate industry has to play in embracing the challenging energy goals set for 2050.

There was added piquancy in the appearance of Peter Altmaier, the new government Minister for the Environment, on his first official outing since being appointed minister, following the brutal sacking by Angela Merkel of his predecessor Norbert Röttgen the week before.  Röttgen paid a heavy price for dragging Frau Merkel and her CDU party to a ritual slaughter in the North Rhine-Westphalian elections a week earlier. Germany was shocked by Frau Merkel’s lack of even the barest attempt to allow her fallen minister to save face and resign. She wielded her machete, and dispatched him to oblivion. With elections approaching next year, we think she’ll be dispensing with a lot more of her traditional niceties over the coming months as well. She has a lot on her plate.

Meanwhile, back at the gasworks, we had occasion to ponder on the growth of the ZIA since its establishment in 2006 as a lobbying group, with aspirations to bundle the myriad industry associations in Germany under one united front, to exercise influence in Berlin and Brussels, and to legitimately represent the interests of the real estate industry at government level with a clout that had previously been lacking, or was too fragmented to safeguard its interests. The real estate industry in Germany employs more than four million people directly or indirectly, and has a greater economic impact than the chemical, pharmaceutical and automotive industries combined. The organisation has come a long way in that time.

From fairly humble beginnings in 2006, the ZIA is now without doubt the unifying force for the disparate threads in the industry to make their voices heard. This is obvious from its growing membership, but more visibly, from the sheer numbers of captains of industry, leading real estate personalities, and industry insiders from across all real estate sectors who were present at the day-and-evening long event. Barring the Expo Real in Munich every October, we can think of no other gathering which attracts such a star-studded turnout – with one of our journalistic colleagues describing it as worth three days at the MIPIM in Cannes, in terms of ease of access and an atmosphere of approachability. We agree with him wholeheartedly.

While there is undoubtedly trouble ahead, particularly in the banking sector where too many German banks are still playing “extend-and-pretend”, there were grounds last week to draw a cautiously favourable balance from the German real estate market. Investors in commercial property seem to have taken a collective tea-break while new conditions, including financing, fall into alignment.  The prospect of all those core properties belonging to SEB ImmoInvest and CS Euroreal being placed up for sale over the next five years – not to mention all the other assets from smaller open-ended funds which have already started their great wind-downs – is sobering. In fact, they’re all effectively on the market right now, so there really isn’t too much scope for bluffing.New investors in commercial property, particularly office, probably don’t need to rush, while swathes of existing commercial holders will soon be feeling the cold stiletto steel on the back of their necks as the refinancing bottleneck encroaches. How potential providers of capital respond to the new opportunities is likely to be the key theme of the next two years, at least in these pages.

As for the residential sector, we’re not quite sure how to rate a recent report published by the Stuttgart consumer financial provider Wüstenrot & Württembergische (W&W), in which 44% of 1000 people surveyed believe that German residential property is clearly overvalued. Nonetheless, 59% believe it improbable that the market will overheat and subsequently fall in the next two years. Half those surveyed believe prices are likely to rise even more strongly in that period. With rock-bottom interest rates, and despite reservations about valuations, every tenth person surveyed plans to buy a house or an apartment to move into himself, while every fourth person concedes that he’d be prepared to pay more than he’d originally planned.

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1. Total property investment slumps by 14% in Germany in first half
2. EPRA to the rescue as German government amends GOEF rules
3. The nagging problem of German office vacancy rates

If you want to know where the rot really started, one name sticks out above all others in the panoply of alchemists who believed they could create wealth out of paper – and who certainly succeeded in having his audience suspend their disbelief until it all came crashing down around their ears.

Unfortunately John Law is no longer around to soak up our abuse and absorb the ire of the latest generation of Europeans who are now learning to their cost that, in financial terms, if it seems too good to be true, it almost certainly is.

For our continental readers, a new film telling the story of John Law and his extraordinary rise to power in the early eighteenth century is being broadcast for the first time this weekend on the Franco-German television channel Arte. It’s well worth watching.

We were invited to a preview of the film recently in a select group at the Frankfurt School of Finance, attended by the producer, director, scriptwriter, the main actors, and several of the modern business and academic commentators who intervene sporadically throughout the film to interpret Law´s thinking of the time to today’s audience. We even had a former German poker world champion to provide insights into Law’s logical thinking, obsessed as Law was with probabilities and uncertain outcomes.

Law, the man often considered the father of our modern system of paper money, had a curriculum vitae that could merit a trilogy of films – Scottish banker, debonair and gallant nobleman, inveterate gambler, serial adulterer, convicted murderer, market manipulator, vainglorious dandy, irrepressible financial speculator, and misunderstood economic genius. He was all of these things, and worse, if accounts from the time are to be believed. We took an instant liking to the fellow.

Most of the film is concerned with his efforts to salvage France, ravaged economically and financially by the relentless and futile wars waged by Louis XIV by the year 1715. Amazingly, he managed to wipe out France’s crippling national debt within a few years, by issuing paper money from his Banque Royale – money which was largely underpinned by the promise of future riches from the state-owned Mississippi Company in the wealthy overseas territory of Louisiana.

Suddenly, Frenchmen of all ranks on the social spectrum wanted to be paid in paper money, rather than the dwindling stock of chipped and sullied gold and silver coins which had hitherto represented the only means of exchange. The result, naturally enough, was the outbreak of a frenzy of speculative fever throughout France, the likes of which the country had never seen before, nor has since.

The success of Law’s bank, whose paper had always traded at a premium to subsequent forms of paper being issued by other arms of the French state, saw him amass enormous influence and astonishing riches, making him perhaps the wealthiest man in the world at that time. However, the unsated expectations of his adopted countrymen led him to deviate from his previously firmly-held principles about the soundness of money. The floodgates to disaster were opened, and with them the printing presses for the issuance of yet more paper money, on which the now booming French economy came to rely more and more.

The final straw came with an edict from the state forbidding the holding of gold and precious stones and metals, in a desperate bid to support the value of the vast quantities of paper money in circulation. Those who could, started to smuggle whatever metals they could get their hands on over the borders to England and Holland. To maintain public faith in the glittering future and untold streams of wealth that would be flowing back from the Mississippi Company, the authorities in Paris press-ganged large numbers of the city’s homeless wretches to be paraded with their pikes and shovels day after day through the city’s streets, prior to their alleged imminent departure for the colonies.

But when the council of state finally decreed that the value of paper notes would be gradually depreciated, the jig was up. As the edifice came crashing down, the state desperately tried to issue copper coin to make up for the non-existent gold and silver, and as more and more paper notes were declared worthless, the entire system went into reverse, wiping out vast swathes of the population. Law was lucky to escape with his life as the mob turned on the man they had previously worshipped as a god. He lost everything, and died in penury some years later in Venice.

When asked in the film by his visitor, his one-time colleague on the council of state Montescu, where it all went wrong, a still mystified John Law answers ruefully, “I’d worked everything out, done all the calculations – but I could never measure the greed of humans.”

For our part, we almost felt as if we had been re-reading Nasim Nicholas Taleb and his writings on the outlying risks that are never adequately priced in to estimates of probability. With the European Central Bank pumping money into a banking system that is more than happy to re-lend it for a risk-free profit by buying sovereign bonds, rather than investing it into productive industrial capacity, we don’t know what unforeseen consequence this will have. We’ll soon be finding out.

In the meantime, there’s no shortage of bank lending for German residential real estate, if you’ve got a bit of equity capital. We’ve got our own piece of Louisiana right here, don’t you know. Hurry, hurry, hurry – before that train rides off without you.

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2. When Masters of the Universe resort to Jingle Mail, listen up
3. Whatever happened to that wave of distressed selling?

Back in the 1980’s they used to dub GE chairman Jack Welch “Neutron Jack” for his penchant for eliminating employees while leaving the buildings intact. Germany is currently afflicted by the opposite problem. While unemployment falls to near record lows as the economy powers ahead – with one leading economic forecaster going so far as to even predict full employment as early as 2013 – it’s not jobs that are being eliminated, but buildings.

How can this be? Surely more jobs means more demand for office space, means higher rents, means investors prepared to pay higher prices to buy the buildings? Well, only up to a point, m’lud. Things aren’t really working out like that, much though we would like them to.

Let’s have a look at what’s happening. As we report in several articles in our REFIRE Intelligence Report throughout January, all the professional opinionators – from the consultancy groups such as KPMG and Ernst & Young, the specialist property advisory groups, and the economic think-tanks – are unanimous in their view that demand for German real estate will rise significantly this year, and with it, peak rents and prices in the prime business locations.

Our discussions with the main broker groups leave no doubt also that demand for office space in the largest cities rose sharply in the past six months, with many companies coming down off the fence and showing a surprising willingness to commit to new lease agreements after months of shilly-shallying – in many cases coming in between Christmas and New Year to lock up their new lease agreements or extensions. The bigger brokers, who concentrate on the six or seven largest German cities, will put the increase in rental take-up last year at 20-25% depending on markets measured. Other broker groups, such as the network Deutsche Immobilien Partner (DIP) which cover 14 regional markets, put the take-up at 12%. No matter – all are agreed it went up by a healthy amount.

The time lag, too, of six to nine months delay following a noticeable upswing in the economy before the impact is felt in the real estate economy, is not untypical. Deals are now being done, contracts signed, and from what we hear anecdotally, landlords aren’t having to be quite so generous with their packages of bon-bons to entice the tenant to sign on the dotted line. In short, the uptrend is real, and there’s no reason to think that a further rise of 8-10% in German office lease transactions is not achievable this year.

The big problem is the stubbornly high level of office vacancy rates which, from an investor’s point of view, continue to weigh down on the market and act as a damper on achievable yields. Ominously, real estate research group BulwienGesa reckon in their latest market outlook that the bulk of new jobs created will in any event bypass the office sector, which it sees as rising by 0.9%, at most.

Be that as it may, there is still more office space coming onto the market than there will be new employees to populate that space. Hence last year the vacancy rate in the 15 largest German office markets rose from 9.4% to 10.1%, according to the DIP. In certain cities, such as Frankfurt, the vacancy rate is above 15% (or even higher, depending on definitions used), which continues to give potential tenants plenty of bargaining ammunition.

The pipeline of new projects coming on stream, of which less than half have now been pre-let, will ensure that high vacancy rates will remain a problem for the next couple of years, at the least. Any extra demand by employers will be absorbed by new available space coming to the market, instead of feeding through in the form of higher rents – apart from the most exclusive properties.

The implications of this for investors in less-than-prime office properties are far-reaching. It will be only too easy to be sidetracked by any sustained German economic upswing which sees tenants migrating to modernised, efficient, sustainable (but not even necessarily state-of-the-art ‘green’) properties in the primest locations, leaving a swathe of functional but outdated office properties just outside the inner city core. Frankfurt is seeing plenty of evidence of this phenomenon right now, causing migraines for investors who bought into a ‘sure thing’ only a few short years ago – and are now faced with major upgrading costs or the slow write-down of what has turned into a withering asset.

Despite the up-beat news coming from the German economy, most of the headlines in German real estate are originating in the margins – such as peak rents, trophy property sales, and new high-profile lease agreements. This segment of the market represents 3-5% at most – with a whole separate universe of property realities existing in the bulk of the market below those exalted levels. As in the investment market for office properties, so too in the market for office rentals – the gulf is widening between the handful of winners, which everyone is chasing, and the rest.

Related posts:

1. EPRA to the rescue as German government amends GOEF rules
2. Unibail-Rodamco arrives as major new German retail player with takeover of mfi
3. Anybody out there NOT looking for prime, core-plus, fully-let, to blue-chip tenant…?

After months of weighing up appropriate reform legislation for Germany’s embattled open-ended real estate funds (GOEF) industry, it looked this week as if Germany’s ruling coalition had managed to find agreement on a new set of rules for the industry, which has been plagued with uncertainty and volatile investor behaviour since October 2008.

Meanwhile, the European Public Real Estate Association EPRA vowed to continue its campaign to “liberate the German market” from what it sees as an unhealthy domination of the sector by the open-ended funds at the expense of the stock-market listed sector.

The drive by Berlin to reform the GOEF sector has been gathering pace over the last two years, but has intensified since May of last year when original proposals emanating from Berlin led to a fresh wave of investor panic leading to fund withdrawals, and ultimately, the announcement of fund liquidation by three groups – Aberdeen Immobilien, Morgan Stanley and the KanAm Group. These funds are currently unwinding their positions and have announced a series of staggered payments over the next three years to their shareholders as assets are progressively sold off. This month saw shareholders in Aberdeen’s Degi Europa receive the first tranche of 20% of their fund’s (albeit shrunken, after heavy write-downs) total value.

A further nine real estate funds remain frozen to investor redemptions, in most cases availing of the maximum period of closure permissible under German law before having to declare whether they will re-open or likewise face liquidation.

The new regulations, which will come into effect in 2013, are designed to protect individual German investors, rather than the institutions who had availed of the funds’ structures to ‘park’ money in funds with short withdrawal notice periods. Increasingly disparate interests between the two groups and the threat of heavy withdrawals by institutions threatened the liquidity of the open-ended funds.

While in the past the funds had set and imposed their own rules on withdrawal, the new regulations will impose a cancellation period for investors of 12 months, with new investors subjected to a holding period of a minimum of two years, sources in Berlin said this week. Further reforms include only allowing investors to withdraw a maximum of €30,000 every six months, while foreign capital (the borrowing ratio) in any property investment would not be permitted to exceed 30% – as against the current 50% permitted by law.

Meanwhile, EPRA CEO Philip Charls made an outspoken plea last week to investors to support his organisation in its drive to boost what it sees as a “grossly undersized” listed real estate sector in Germany, and an unhealthy domination of the real estate sector in Germany by open-ended and Spezialfonds fund managers. These managers have about €90bn of property assets under management (of which about a third are currently frozen to redemptions), along with a further €50bn in an array of Spezialfonds.

Speaking at the EPRA Insight conference in Amsterdam, Charls stressed that there was a proper role for the German open-ended funds industry, but it must not be allowed to strangle the development of a healthy listed sector. The classic open-ended fund product was, he said, “an unclear product and it is quite often sold by misrepresentation to the customer.” The current industry structure made change difficult, he said. “We want to make clear that there is a way to live together to develop a proper listed sector and have the GOEF sector as it is. It is an uphill fight because the grip of distribution – the banks – is very strong. They make a lot of money selling GOEF units, a lot of money in managing them and they have very strong ties with the political system.”

While listed companies have a market capitalisation of about €10bn in Germany, or about 1.6% of the underlying real estate market, this compares unfavourably with the almost 6% represented by the listed sector in France and 4.2% in the UK, and to the European average of about 3%. “This should not be the case for the largest economy in Europe”

Charls rallied his audience by urging them to take all necessary steps to grow the listed German sector – “We are very excited that a lot of investors have already said they will be our allies and will march behind us to try and liberate the German market”.

Whether Charls succeeds in liberating the poor Germans from the intolerable yoke of oppression of the open-ended funds industry, it hasn’t been all fun and games for those hardy souls who’ve remained loyal to the funds sector through its recent troubles. A recent survey of fund managers Commerz Real, Deka Immobilien, RREEF and Union Investment would indicate that the recent upswing in commercial property markets has yet to manifest itself in payouts for sturdy savers. The funds association BVI said that the one-year returns on funds managed by the four surveyed companies ranged from 1.3% on Deka’s Westinvest fund to 3.3% at Commerz Real’s Hausinvest, well down on the usual 4-5% offered by the funds.

The funds offer no great hope of much of a change this year either, given the high liquidity reserves which they’ve felt obliged to hold, given investor nervousness. Union Investment said its funds were between 20% and 34% liquid, while RREEF and Deka also had liquidity ratios of more than 20% in most cases. All the funds are being noticeably coy in issuing statements about fund inflows and outflows, at least until the latest bout of legislation is formally enacted.

Funds association BVI also recently released statistics on the physical make-up of assets held by its open-ended fund membership. The figures show that the open-ended funds own 1,637 properties, with a total letttable area of 26.7m sq.m. and a market value of €87.9bn. Of all properties, 64.1% are less than ten years old, while 78.9% were built after 1995. In terms of usage, 63.3% of the assets were office space, while retail and hospitality (gastronomy) amounted to 20.1%. In terms of lease duration, between 10% and 11% of leases are due for renewal annually up till 2014, while 17.9% are not due for renewal until at least Jan. 1st 2020.

Related posts:

1. Unibail-Rodamco arrives as major new German retail player with takeover of mfi
2. Internos joins small group of KAG (Spezialfonds) licence holders in Germany
3. The importance of a good hedge, when doing God’s work

Frankfurt, May 1st, 2010

Warren Buffett, not surprisingly, is siding with Lloyd Blankfein in Goldman Sachs’ trial before the Senate in the SEC civil suit against the bank. With his company Berkshire Hathaway earning $500m in annual dividends from its $5bn stake in the investment bank, what’s not to like about his partnership with the titans of Wall Street?  Besides, as he said last week at his annual shindig in Nebraska, he would never assume to second-guess what investors on the other side of a trade he was involved in were thinking.  “They could very well be shorting a product, they do not owe us a divulgence of their position more than any reason why we need to explain what we are doing with our position.”

The Sage of Omaha is perhaps being a touch disingenuous, given his stake in the outcome and in the alleged perpetrator.  However, as a trader, he’s fully aware that moral compunctions have no place in the decision as to WHEN to enter or exit the trade.  We suspect that his views might be a little more tempered if he was paying advisory fees to the bank, presumably to act on his behalf, only to have them trade against him.

In the decisive moments of the trial, four key Goldman executives were repeatedly asked the question – Did you have a duty to act in the best interests of your clients?  Three equivocated, refusing to commit to a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’.  Only the fourth, the pivotal witness ‘Fabulous’ Fabrice Tourre, was upfront.  “I do not believe we are acting as investment advisers for our clients”, he stated.  Loud and clear.

Further questioning of more senior executives, including CEO Blankfein, failed to elicit a committed answer to the question, “Do you think Congress should impose a clear fiduciary duty on brokers to act in the best interest of clients?”.  Mumblings, but no response.

Many in the financial community are not shocked by this.  Whatever the outcome of the Senate’s findings, the Masters of the Universe at Goldman Sachs are likely to escape with a peremptory fine and a sharp rap on the knuckles.  At an average bonus of $1m per employee in the bank’s London offices, most are expected to survive the bruising to the bank’s reputation.  Robust resilience, and all that.  After all, nobody ever said that ‘doing God’s work’, to quote Blankfein, was easy.

What surprises us at REFIRE is the outrage that is greeting the Goldman Sachs disclosures.  Goldman may be the Master Vampire Squid, but in the rarefied world of private equity investing, where the punters pay hefty premiums for blue chip banking names to likewise ‘relentlessly jam their blood funnels into anything that smells like money’, they are not alone.

Take Morgan Stanley, the erstwhile 800- pound gorilla in German property investing.  In 2007, the bank invested €10.5bn in Germany alone, making it by far the country’s biggest property investor.  Several times then and before, REFIRE had listened to and questioned John Carrafiell, Morgan Stanley’s head of real estate worldwide and the man who set up the ill-fated MSREF VI Fund, as he justified paying premium prices for trophy German properties – despite frequently high vacancy rates and vulnerable tenancy agreements.

Last month investors stared aghast at the disaster wrought upon them by their alpha seeking ‘partners’ at Morgan Stanley, who had managed to lose $5.4bn of their $8.8bn equity.  The fund, with its ‘enhanced return strategy’, had buying power of more than $30bn in 2007.  This fund volume includes many of its German trophy acquisitions, now being sold off one after another at a loss, or which have been completely written off, with the keys in the post on their way back to the lender.

This destruction of investor wealth is staggering, even by recent standards.  What on earth could have led these hard-bitten real estate professionals to spend so much above what would be mathematically justifiable, and to barge in waving thick wads of cash where angels truly would have feared to tread?

Well, let’s see.  The Wall Street Journal has uncovered documents that show what Morgan Stanley charged for the ‘promote’, or fees to manage Other Peoples’ Money in the MSREF VI fund.  Just in 2007, these came to $104m in acquisition fees, $22m in fund management fees, $13m in financing fees, $36m in real-estate management fees, and $21m in financial advisory fees.  There’s your alpha returns right there.  For the promoter, of course.  Not the investor.  To no great surprise, the investing public is left wiser, more experienced – and wiped out.

The Morgan Stanley losses, along with those suffered by Goldman Sachs’ Whitehall Funds and RREEF, to name just two others who have taken a financial bath recently, will be written off, along with a certain loss of face.  The banks will recover.  The managers involved, unlikely to be personally out of pocket, have mostly already moved on to manage other funds.  The show will go on. 

Others can (and do) reflect on the positive side of the arrival of all that fresh money.  The German open-ended funds were big beneficiaries of the folies de grandeur indulged in by the living deities.  In a stroke of perfect timing, the funds managed to shift most of their unwanted properties into the hungry maws of the highly leveraged Anglo-Saxons, and were away scot-free, as it were.  (No disrespect – or pun – intended to RBS, who just happens to be left holding the can in both the Goldman Sachs trial and the Morgan Stanley ‘jingle mail’ Pegasus portfolio debacle).

The big German funds are now the new powerhouses, flush with investors’ euros and welcomed across Europe with open arms (and pockets).  For now, nowhere is the welcome likely to be bigger than in Athens (we’re dismissing, as an apocryphal tale, the report of a Berlin taxi driver who recently refused a colleague’s Greek euro coins when paying his fare…)  In fact, we’re betting on gift-bearing Germany’s popularity remaining high for some time to come, as an investment and currency hedge.  Ceteris paribus, we too would be favouring those euros that have some residual Deutschmark genes in their DNA.  But that’s a whole other story…

Related posts:

1. When Masters of the Universe resort to Jingle Mail, listen up
2. When I hear the word “Sustainability”, I reach for my revolver
3. EPRA to the rescue as German government amends GOEF rules

This year’s MIPIM was good fun, as always. Nearly anybody we wanted to talk to was there, and most seemed to have time for a chat. We found the pace of the fair agreeable, and highly hospitable in a manner much less frenetic than in earlier years. We attended a wide range of pre-selected events, had plenty of our own appointments, and there still seemed to be enough time for spontaneous, unplanned gatherings, leading to new faces and ideas. Call it serendipity if you wish  - we always associate it with Cannes, and it was there in plenty this year.

Even the entertainment was low-key, in keeping with the buttoned-down tenor of the industry these days. Only the lawyers seemed to have no qualms about making a late-night splash on their harbour-side motor yachts, or in Cannes’ better class of hotel – but then, it’s good to be the winners, whether the market is leveraging up, or trying to negotiate its way out of a lost cause. Somebody has to salvage the MIPIM’s reputation as a glamour event, after all – now that the Russians no longer appear quite so keen to entertain all and sundry, and Europe’s now-nationalised banks have to be seen to be acting suitably chastened.

Back here in Germany, the first quarter has seen the highest level of new investment in two years. Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Munich have leapt out of the starting blocks, trailed by a rather more subdued Frankfurt and Düsseldorf – but the news from all the property brokers is the same cheerful good tidings, amid cau tious talk of even rosier prospects ahead.

A handful of major deals obviously played a big role in the early-year figures, such as Corio’s takeover of fellow Dutch investor Multi’s German retail assets, and the sale of three big Berlin shopping centres. But anecdotal evidence (as well as frontline reports from the big broker groups) suggest renewed interest from UK and US investors in Germany, as well as Asian and Middle Eastern sovereign funds, with first deals from the latter groups imminent. Overheating demand for London property also seems to be diverting attention to the German occupier market, as well as the well-publicised woes of the German retail sector, which may see some prime city-centre properties such as Woolworth and Karstadt soon coming up for grabs.

That’s the good news. However, with the bonhomie of Cannes now but a fading memory, we remain fixated on the commercial property debt problem looming in Europe, particularly in the UK and Germany. These two markets experienced the highest lever age in the final boom years, and together account for nearly 60% of the almost €1 trillion debt outstanding, at least a quarter of which is potentially distressed. Much of it is secured at high LTV’s on poor quality real estate, and nearly half of all the debt on this is maturing by the end of 2012. These are really scary numbers, and frankly, they scare the bejaysus out of us.

We shudder (metaphorically speaking, of course) when we talk to yet another equity-rich investor who is purely focused on core properties in central business districts, with blue-chip tenants of superior provenance, and water-tight long-term lease agreements, etc.…Just how many of these magical properties can there be, at affordable prices? Is this what the entire market has come to consist of, we ask ourselves? The big lending banks have major exposure to secondary offices and shopping centres outside the biggest cities – and with all the potential buyers expressing interest only in the top percentile of the market, it’s clear that asset sales be low this exalted level are going to be difficult without major further impairment. A ten-year unwinding period is still our best assessment of what lies ahead for the markets at large.

Not appealing, we admit. But whatever different approach bank lenders are taking to recouping value in different European countries, whether out-placing loans to a ‘bad bank’, or introducing special servicing to their relationships with asset managers and capital providers, the banks still have to manage the flow of assets back on to the market over the long term. The fall-out will be a large pool of secondary and tertiary quality property that will never recover materially in value. The best course of action for the lender is euthanasia – foreclose, take the hit, and recycle any proceeds back into the business. Will this happen? We hope so, and the sooner the better. We’re obviously not there yet.

It seems clear to us that spending cuts, both by governments and businesses, will shape the landscape in Germany and else where for the coming years, and this will inevitably exert further downward pressure on commercial rents. We think it’s highly likely, too, that the divergence between Ger man and neighbouring markets’ allocation of space per employee will narrow significantly. German office workers may not like having to make do with less than 23 sq.m. per office worker, compared to about 8-10 sq.m in the UK, but we talk to a lot of employers – and we know they are determined to make more efficient use of their office space.

This augurs well for cost improvements, but not for any imminent lowering of the vacancy rates in Germany’s major office centres. For investors, selectivity and market timing will be key. More and more we are seeing liquidity replacing pricing as the main indicator of real estate risk; with plentiful capital still available for investment, but the markets infected by risk phobia. As the markets slowly loosen up, new, smart money is looking to replace older investors in Germany, whose hands are likely to be forced soon enough. There will be winners – but plenty of losers.

Related posts:

1. The nagging problem of German office vacancy rates
2. When I hear the word “Sustainability”, I reach for my revolver
3. JLL’s Quint sees Germany benefiting as larger economies are favoured