An indication of the strength of Asian investors’ appetite for American and European commercial real estate, look no further than the latest string of deals completed by Mapletree Investments, the property arm of Temasek, Singapore’s state investment fund. Mapletree has acquired four purpose-built student accommodation assets in several regional cities in England, closed its first US office fund and bought two portfolios of logistics properties across major cities in America.
The Asia-Pacific region’s own commercial property markets have continued to attract significant investment, initially because of the appeal of a region that handled the crisis more effectively than Western economies, but mainly because of global investors’ need to allocate more capital to Asian real estate. Less attention has been paid to the equally strong recovery in Asian outbound property investment, which increased 36 per cent year on year in the first half of 2021, to US$15.5 billion. Leading Asian cross-border investors – in particular, Singaporean buyers who overtook their mainland Chinese peers in 2018 as the dominant source of Asian outbound capital – are among the savviest institutional investors globally, betting on secular trends in the global economy and building platforms through partnerships with property owners and asset managers in different countries.