Opinion
Hear our experts’ take on the latest developments and trending topics
5 September 2019
We’ve been listening to news of an increasing number of stores announcing closures, citing unviable trading conditions in the face of heated competition from e-commerce and changing preferences of a new demographic. The latest retail giant to report trouble is Forever 21, who as of last week was preparing for a potential Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. The ramifications of these […]
20 August 2019
Business valuation has always relied on the triangulation between three different methodologies: discounted cashflow (DCF), comparable analysis, and some form of dividend valuation approach.
30 July 2019
The importance of forecasts Every well-planned real estate investment decision is underpinned by a series of market and site-specific forecasts. For a construction project, the most important are almost inevitably the projected sales price and schedule, and construction costs, whilst for an investment, it is future rents, eventual sales price, yields, and most probably, financial variables such as interest rates. […]
22 July 2019
Sunil Parmar, Associate Partner of the Project and Building Consultancy department at Cavendish Maxwell, explains the common yet significant risks associated with Reinstatement Cost Assessments (RCAs), otherwise known as insurance valuations for properties.
30 June 2019
Real estate markets and demographics What drives real estate prices – sheer numbers or economic weight? Intuitively, all other things being equal, consistently higher rates of growth of resident population in a region or country will drive up real estate prices by comparison to its neighbours and competitors. The IMF once even advanced a rule that a 0.25% rise in […]
10 June 2019
Effective market research, the lynchpin of successful real estate development and investment, is impossible without reliable data; without it, developers and investors face significantly higher risks.
6 May 2019
Under new International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) 9, all GCC banks compliant with the standards are required to break down investment portfolios into pre-defined stages. Accordingly, Stage 2 – referred to as underperforming, where credit risk has increased significantly since initial recognition – warns stakeholders to account for expected credit losses, especially since the classification could lead to business troubles […]
30 April 2019
Why does it matter? Real estate indices generally exhibit a much smoother and less volatile evolution than listed real estate return performance. This is explained by three data measurement issues: the impact of property valuations rather than actual transactions, the aggregation bias of combining results over time, and the effect of financial leverage in listed entities which increases the volatility […]
28 March 2019
New sectoralism implies that the traditional real estate sectors, including residential and industrial, are no longer fit for purpose in the majority of international markets.
6 March 2019
Healthy macroeconomics: What ought to distinguish an economic from a purely market perspective on real estate is as close a focus as possible on why market variables are performing the way they are, as a guide to how much they are likely to change in the future. The starting point, as ever, is macroeconomics. Studies in OECD countries, which now date back […]
31 January 2019
A market in perspective: Economists are a sober lot, generally. Facts alone do not satisfy us. At a macro-economic level, our interests lie predominantly in the relationships between economic indicators, market performance and policy-based decision-making. We are generally wary of speculation, preferring to base our analysis on the links between economic data wherever possible. Identifying the reasons behind the performance […]
1 November 2018
Property Monitor’s Moe Abeidat discusses buying property in Dubai and the factors that influence purchasing decisions. One thing that stood out, amidst our last sprint to publish Cavendish Maxwell and Property Monitor’s Q3 2018 Residential Market Report for Dubai, is how today’s average prices for a villa/ townhouse and apartment, $517,000 and $327,000 respectively, are approximately the same as in […]
