Thought Leadership

• Lockdowns and social distancing have impacted many tenant businesses, resulting in an unprecedented number of requests for rental relief, stressing real estate rental-income streams.
• For equity investors, income returns have weakened, despite softening asset values. Recent income returns may understate the full potential impact as accrual of deferred rents may mask further shortfalls.
• Lower rental incomes may also stress debt covenants and increase servicing pressures on some loans. In loans that default and are foreclosed upon, falling asset values may also increase potential loss severity.

What’s the effect on investors when commercial tenants can’t pay their rent? For answers, we caught up with Bryan Reid, executive director on MSCI’s real estate solutions research team.

As record-breaking investment flows into real estate, fund managers face increasing complexity and growing investor demands for real time reporting. We talk to Yardi’s Bernie Devine about the trends.

As governments around the world start to ease restrictions on lockdowns, attention inevitably turns to the concept of “returning to work.” However, this viewpoint incorrectly frames the current state of play. Many office-based workers have continued to work through the pandemic and so the focus should actually be on who should go “back to the office?” Of course, the first focus has to be on employee wellbeing and vulnerable employees need to remain safe.  But after that, the situation becomes more blurred,