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Office markets and particularly international financial centres over the past decade have experienced rapid financialisation, developments and indeed changes in the post-global financial crisis (GFC) landscape. Importantly, the volume and types of international capital flows have witnessed more foreign actors and vehicles entering into the investment landscape with the concentration of investment intensifying within key financial centres. This paper examines the interaction of international real estate capital flows in the London, New York and Tokyo office markets between 2007 and 2017.

Using Real Capital Analytics (RCA) data comprising over 5,700 office property transactions equating to $563bn between 2007 and 2017, the direct global capital flows into the London, New York and Tokyo office markets are assessed using an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach. Further, Granger causality tests are examined to analyse the short-run interaction of international real estate capital flows into these three major office markets.

By assessing the relativity of internal to external investments in these three central business district (CBD) office markets, differences in market dynamics are highlighted. The London office market is shown to be highly dependent on international flows and the USA, the foremost source of cross-border investment on the global stage. The cointegration and causality analysis indicate that cross-border real estate investment flows in these markets (and financial centres) show both long- and short-run relationships and suggest that the London office market remains more distinct and the most reliant on international capital flows with a wider geographical spread of investment activities and investor types. In the case of New York and Tokyo, these markets appear to be driven by more domestic investment activity and capital seemingly due to subtle factors pertaining to investor home bias, risk aversion and diversification strategies between the markets in the aftermath of the GFC.

Given the importance of the CBD offices in London, New York and Tokyo as an asset class for institutional investors, this paper provides some insights as to their level of connection and the interaction of the international capital flows into these three major cities.

The London office market is a major destination of international real estate capital and arguably the epicentre of international real estate investment over the past decade. However, the increase in global uncertainties in recent years due to socio-economic and political trends highlights the need for more insights into the behaviour of international real estate capital flows. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the influence of the global and domestic environment on international real estate investment activities within the London office market over the period 2007–2017.

This study adopts an auto-regressive distributed lag approach using the real capital analytics (RCA) international real estate investment data. The RCA data analyses quarterly cross-border investment transactions within the central London office market for the period 2007–2017.

The study provides insights on the critical differences in the influence of the domestic and global environment on cross-border investment activities in this office market, specifically highlighting the significance of the influence of the global environment in the long run. In the short run, the influence of factors reflective of both the domestic and international environment are important indicating that international capital flows into the London office market is contextualised by the interaction of different factors.

The authors provide a holistic study of the influence of both the domestic and international environment on cross-border investment activities in the London office market, providing more insights on the behaviour of global real estate capital flows.

According to normative‐rational investment decision models, investors who seek office buildings should select markets which show high employment numbers in office related sectors such as Finance, Insurance, Real Estate (FIRE) and Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS). This view is challenged by behavioural studies, which find that the investors' willingness for analysis and the structure of their decision‐making processes in practice notably limit such an influence. Looking at German office markets, the purpose of this paper is to explore to what extent the aforementioned connection between employment structure and market selection holds.

Qualitative interviews with German investment experts are analysed in a manner that differentiates between investor types. Behavioural economics form a theoretical basis to identify investor type specific attitudes towards investment markets and the resulting market selection processes. The findings are tested by logistic regressions which connect the spatial structure of office investments with employment data.

A sector‐specific employment structure does not have a direct but an indirect influence on the market selection. The existing theoretical contradiction is resolved by this indirect influence. Investor type specific risk profiles and business models determine varying spatial patterns of market selection.

The study shows that attitudes towards markets, business logics and decision processes differ between insurance companies and open‐ended funds. Researchers should be aware that empirical results may not always be valid for all institutional investors. In some cases a differentiating research design according to investor type may be necessary.

The study identifies a set of minimum requirements with regard to building and market characteristics open‐ended funds use for filtering in German secondary/regional markets. Market selection by these funds and insurance companies correlates with relative employment in FIRE‐ and KIBS‐branches.

This paper overcomes decision‐theoretical contradictions and gives empirical evidence for the importance of the employment structure on market selection.

Coworking space had been a trajectory in the commercial space operation and management globally. Commercial coworking/tenancy space is confronted with an unexpected shift. This paper aims to examine the peculiarity and investment characteristics of flexible office space and the post-COVID implications on coworking office space practice and investment. This is with a view toward providing investors with an understanding of the dynamics underpinning flexible office space investment in the Nigerian emerging property market.

This study adopted a qualitative research approach. Open-ended interview questions were used to solicit information from nine coworking space operators in the urban property market of Ibadan, Nigeria. The structured interview data were analyzed using Atlas.ti – a computer-aided qualitative data analysis software.

The findings show that the factors influencing demand for flexible office space in the study area include flexibility, affordability, cost-effectiveness, entrepreneurship motivations and opportunity for risk sharing. The results also revealed that coworkers are predominantly mobile individuals who require a workstation away from their homes or a traditional office setup. Management challenges include deficient infrastructure, low level of awareness, stealing and high cost of operations. The impact of COVID-19 includes a drop in patronage, rent refunds, changes in working pattern and job loss, restriction to online and remote operation, the extra cost of putting prevention measures in place, changes in tenancy contract and drops in return on investment.

This study has implications for investors in commercial space occupation and leases in comparable developing economies.

The novelty of this paper lies in its relevance with the emergent behavioral changes, orchestrated from the novel COVID-19, which compels reevaluation of workplace practices and investment for economic improvement, especially as it relates to commercial real estate investment.

This paper aims to explain the rules recently adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission under the provisions of the Dodd‐Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act relating to the increased asset threshold for federal registration as an investment adviser, the new exemptions from investment adviser registration (including the exclusion of “family offices” from the definition of an investment adviser), the enhanced reporting obligations imposed on registered and certain exempt advisers, and the definition of a “qualified client” for purposes of applying the performance fee rule under the Investment Advisers Act.

This paper summarizes the principal content of the Rules and explains their application to investment advisers, focusing in particular on analyzing the impact of the Rules on US and non‐US advisers to private funds.

The Rules clarify important aspects of the Dodd‐Frank amendments to the Investment Advisers Act and expand the scope of certain registration exemptions as they relate to foreign advisers. The Rules also expand significantly the family office exclusion from investment adviser status.

The paper provides expert guidance from experienced financial services lawyers.

Shanghai is the most important economic centre in China. It also has the nation's largest modern office market in terms of floorspace and investment values. However, as with office markets in other cities and countries, the Shanghai market displays rental volatility. This paper aims to examine this issue.

Rental volatility is examined by econometrically constructing a long‐run equilibrium relationship between rent and underlying demand and supply side factors. In order to establish the validity of this model, it is tested for the presence of a cointegrating vector. From this a short‐run dynamic adjustment model is constructed. This is an error correction mechanism that links the short‐ and long‐run models. The impact of office vacancies, foreign direct investment, and changes in the real interest rate on the office market are explicitly considered.

The results indicate that both demand (as represented by gross domestic product (GDP)) and supply (stock) are significant determinants of rents. Space demand is found to be both price and income elastic. In the short‐run model the error correction term is significant and correctly signed. In comparison to other office markets, the Shanghai market adjusts rather slowly. Foreign direct investment is found to have a positive impact on long‐run rents and the vacancy rate is found to impact on short‐term rental adjustment.

The Shanghai office market is the most important in China. However, it has displayed significant rental volatility. This paper is the first to examine explicitly the rental adjustment process in this office market. The results suggest a market that is performing as expected by economic theory but which nevertheless displays relatively slow adjustment to market imbalances.

This paper aims to identify different organisation modes for international property investments and analyse the rationales for selecting each mode.

The paper reports the findings of an interview study conducted among international investors in the Finnish property market.

The study identifies four main organisation modes for international property investments, the selection of each mode being dependent of the investors' perception of the informational barriers and local nature of the property market. Most of the interviewed investors also apply the same strategy in other markets they invest in, and thus the selection of the organisation mode seems not to be very dependent on the characteristics of the investment market.

The paper analyses the organisation modes and their selection criteria only in the Finnish market.

The study indicates that informational barriers are still of major concern for the investors entering foreign markets. Thus, activities contributing to lowering these barriers would be beneficial for those markets wanting to attract international property investments.

The study is the first to analyse the organisation modes of international property investors.

This paper seeks to examine the extent of real estate investment concentration in institutional industrial portfolios at these same two points in time.

To examine this issue two datasets are used at two dates, 1998 and 2003. The analysis is confined to England and Wales because of data considerations relating to the availability of comparable data for the rest of the UK. The first dataset relates to floor space and rateable value statistics for the so‐called “bulk classes” of commercial property at Unitary Authority and District (local authority area, LA) level. The more specific institutional real estate investment data for the study come from the IPD analysis “UK Local Markets”. This provides a detailed view of the performance of institutional real estate investment, by sector, in a number of localities across the UK. For the purposes of this study, IPD made data available showing (but with much less detail) other LAs where the number of properties held was greater than zero, but fewer than the four required normally for disclosure. The approach taken is to map the basic data and the results from a standardising measure of spatial concentration – the Location Quotient.

The findings show that industrial investment concentration is between that of retail and offices and is focused on LAs with high levels of manual workers in areas with smaller industrial units. It also shows that during the period studied the structure of the sector changed, with greater emphasis on the distributional (logistic) element, for which location is a principal consideration. Historically, the sector has provided consistently good total returns with low risk, and was the only sector to expand in terms of numbers of institutionally invested units over the study period. While industrial real estate assets generally do not attract as much capital growth as other sectors, especially in boom periods, rents continued to grow in the period under study. Taken together with the relative resilience in the sector's performance seen over successive cycles, it is not surprising that significant institutional enthusiasm was evidenced.

Using data sets that account for the entire “population” of observations at these two dates the paper demonstrates the relationships between economic theory and the market performance of the sector. The comparisons with the other main sectors also show the differences that would be expected between the sectors, emphasising the point that these markets are dynamic and that their structure, form and content can change dramatically even over quite short periods.

The purpose of this paper is to simulate possoble scenarios of São Paulo’s office market recovering. In 2006, a previous paper that dealt with the same issue was published which the authors propose to analyse here. After eight years, the São Paulo office market is starting a new phase within its cycle. Then, the first part of this paper, as in Rocha-Lima and Alencar (2006), describes the economic scenario in which investment decisions are made for developing office buildings in the Brazilian market. Afterward, the authors simulated both the necessary period of time for investments in the São Paulo office market to recover attractiveness and time for the increase in the occupation rate to absorb the current vacant spaces.

These simulations were carried out using simple linear regressions models using the Brazilian gross domestic product (GDP) as explanatory variable to prices and vacancy rates dependent ones.

The authors have found that the vacant space can be fully re-occupied in the beginning of 2021 or mid of 2022, according to the GDP growth rate, and, from this moment on, the demand for new spaces may grow, and, moreover around 2019, investments may become attractive again in this market.

This paper offers an alternative approach for estimating office building scenarios, especially when the database of the market is scarce. It also permits to evaluate an investment strategy for emerging markets within next years, particularly in São Paulo, Brazil.

Reports on a study that examines, by interviews and archival research, the promotional structures which 11 governments in ten countries have put in place to market their economies to foreign investors. Focuses specifically on the various forms through which these governments have conducted their overseas marketing operations. Finds that governments that have been most effective in influencing foreign investors have created overseas offices that “stand alone”, and are unconnected with the governments′ other foreign operations. Also identifies the conditions necessary for a successful overseas investment promotion operation.