It has been a whirlwind few years for Limitless, a division of the sprawling Dubai World group. Founded in July 2005 with the express aim of designing and developing the best environmentally sustainable buildings and cities, the agency has already scored some big successes. Elliot Wilson reports.

Katerina Kalfamanoli joins Colliers as director of investments and commercial leasing. She leaves Cushman & Wakefield, where she was senior surveyor, capital markets. Prior to that she was a managing director and head of agency at DTZ Greece. Spyros Raptis also joins as senior advisor and valuation professional. He previously worked at Axies Lambert Smith Hampton as senior valuer and at Savills Hellas as valuation analyst.

European CMBS forced to the brink

Chris Jolly, formerly co-head of corporate finance at Jones Lang LaSalle has joined Merrill Lynch as head of its European real estate business.

Pension funds line up for inflation-linked lease exposure

Changes afoot at Grosvenor...

A shortage of inflation-linked risk has pension funds turning to real estate for opportunities. With demand rife, developers can negotiate favourable terms on inflation swaps. Duncan Wood reports.

Financing the cities of the future

Bank of Ireland has established a property finance team in Frankfurt. The team is led by Claus Proschka, formerly of Hypo Real Estate and Allgemeine Hypothekenbank, and will have a pan-European remit. The move underlines BoI’s international real estate ambitions, after it recently established a property finance business in the US.

US property stock research firm Green Street Advisors is poised to expand into Europe. Its current chief executive John Lutzius is likely to move to London in April. Lutzius will relinquish most of his US managerial duties to lead the firm’s expansion.

Leading UK pub and restaurant group Mitchells & Butlers has been forced to shelve a £4.5 billion real estate joint venture and has been plunged into turmoil following a disastrous series of hedges that cost £274 million. As Liquid Real Estate went to press, the instability had prompted a bidding war for the company.

A flood of redemptions from real estate funds has rocked the sector in the UK, forcing leading investment houses to stop customers taking their money out. The industry hopes the worst is over, but market opinion is not unanimous that the future looks brighter. Julian Marshall reports.

Against a backdrop of the most savage falls in UK commercial real estate values ever recorded – IPD’s UK index fell 3.6% in November and 3.7% in December – the real estate derivatives market has not been found wanting.

Real estate’s role in corporations’ approach to improving sustainability and showing sensitivity to the environment has never been clearer. A recent survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit of 1,254 senior business executives, including more than 300 chief executives, revealed the role real estate and facility strategies play in corporate sustainability efforts. Nearly half of all respondents named as their leading sustainability priority a goal that is addressed mainly through real estate-related strategies.

Deutsche Bank has cut back staff numbers in its European commercial real estate business, letting go at least 16, including some senior management. Paolo Massi, managing director of commercial real estate for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, was let go at the end of January, as was Morgan Garfield, managing director and head of UK conduit lending. John Nacos, head of commercial real estate, Europe, remains at the bank.

Testing the limits of green development

Morgan Stanley slashes US residential business...

India’s stock markets might be going to rack and ruin but leading domestic real estate firms are queuing up to sell shares in real estate investment trusts (Reits) in Singapore.

The Greek property sector is growing thanks to a surge in retail development. Concurrent capital markets’ liberalisation has allowed investors and developers greater access to the equity and debt markets. Phil Moore reports.

Morgan Stanley will scale back its residential mortgage operations in the US in response to the continued deterioration of the mortgage markets. The firm will discontinue its UK-based residential mortgage lending business, Advantage Home Loans. About 1,000 employees in the US and the UK will be affected by this restructuring. These cutbacks were announced in mid-February.

For the past five years or so, commentators have frowned at Australia’s listed property trust sector, which has consistently outperformed every other major asset class in the country, and argued that this success couldn’t last. And for the past five years they’ve been wrong.

Having bailed out the US investment banks in their hour of need, sovereign wealth funds are also turning their vast pools of cash towards real estate. Industry experts predict a doubling of investments by these funds to $10 billion within five years.

The reputation of commercial real estate stocks among retail investors is sullied. With the possible exception of the internet and technology sector at the beginning of the decade, never has an industry been held in such low esteem by the investing public. But does the old adage about the retail money and smart institutional money always flowing in opposite directions hold true: is there value in European property stocks?

It took six weeks but 2008 finally got its first CMBS deal in mid-February, from Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns, who sold a $1.2 billion transaction.

As the Northern Rock saga rolls on, UK mortgage lenders that had frequented the now-shuttered residential mortgage-backed securities market are seeking to fortify funding lines. Alliance & Leicester, one of the country’s largest lenders, with a £41 billion ($82 billion) prime mortgage portfolio, is one operation that has been identified as perhaps having been too dependent on the RMBS market.