New York Tops the List of Real Estate Investment Opportunities

NEW YORK CITY- Real estate investors looking for a profitable place to park their money could do no better than selecting New York City real property according to a new report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Lend Lease. While predicting that real estate investment prospects for all major metropolitan areas will decline next year, Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2000 ranks the New York market as the most attractive area for the first time in more than a decade.

Three major reasons are cited for New York’s rise to the top of the study’s charts, according to Peter F. Korpacz, director of the global strategic real estate research group at PwC. First among the reasons is supply constraints. “There’s not a lot of land left to develop,” Korpacz says. The New York market is strong now because of its success in the late 1990s, which saw rents rise significantly and generated high occupancy rates.

Needless to say, there is another reason for the change in ranking. The destruction of 13 million sf of Downtown office space on Sept. 11 makes an already supply-constrained market even more heavily weighed toward the demand side, according to the report, further enhancing the strength of the New York market as an attractive investment opportunity in the coming year. “Considerable upside exists in most buildings to write old leases up to market at rollover,” the report states.