UK: The OpRe conference was held in London last week and attracted a wide range of professionals from asset classes across the hospitality and living sectors.
Investors, lenders, owners, operators and service providers were in attendance at the Shaw Theatre on London’s Euston Road. Some key takeaways from the event were:
• Russell Petrie, head of student at EQT Exeter set the scene early in the day with a pragmatic summary of the investment landscape, albeit with light at the end of the tunnel. “Institutional investor sentiment to real estate in general is lukewarm, but the living and resi sector is the most attractive element of real estate. There are government bonds which are currently yielding better than PBSA so it’s a tough sell!”
• Urban Splash founder Tom Bloxham, who is leading a push in to the BTR sector for the company, sees a huge opportunity there for investors: “The residential rental business is the single biggest in the UK, but only three per cent of it is institutionally owned and practically none of it is branded.”
• In a session called ‘Linking property returns to operational business success’, Lauren Okada, managing director real estate, at Brookfield Asset Management said there is “a lot of merit in keeping opco and propco in one platform”, adding that “building an operational business alongside developing assets is sometimes necessary if there isn’t an appropriate platform already in the market”.
• In a fascinating presentation on the uses for AI in the real estate industry, Dr Niko Szumilo, director of the Bartlett Real Estate Institute, said: “AI has been around a long time. The maths behind it has been around since the 1950s.” He went on to outline some applications for generative AI in real estate, which he said will eventually be as commonplace as cell phones and the internet. “AI enables us to spend more time on the ‘what’ and the ‘why’, and less on the ‘how’ – as the ‘how’ is what AI does for us,” he said.
• In a session called ‘Battle of the Brokers’, featured four individuals making the investment case for a specific asset class – Simon Johnson of CBRE for pubs, Alex Matthews of Harris associates for BTR, Tom Scaife of Knight Frank for later living, and Jo Winchester of Gerald Eve for coliving. During his presentation Matthews showed an intriguing slide revealing that despite European and US investors proving keen on UK BTR, there has been no Middle Eastern or APAC capital yet to be deployed in the space. Oh, and in a show of hands, the audience voted for later living as the most attractive asset class, in case you were wondering.
