Global Meeting Place

To the layman, recent news headlines about the sale of the Chrysler Building to a Middle Eastern wealth fund and Anheuser-Busch to InBev might tell the whole story in a nutshell: America’s trophy assets are for sale, thanks to a depressed US economy and a devalued dollar. In fact, the real story is more complicated than that. Commercial real estate as an attractive investment vehicle is a two-way street, with US investors and developers looking for opportunities overseas even as deep-pocketed foreign buyers are shopping over here. As a sign of the times, Dubai-based Cityscape, a division of IIR, is holding its first US conference Sept. 9-11 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. The intent is to provide a meeting ground for domestic real estate players and those from emerging markets such as the Middle East and India. Real Estate New York spoke with Rohan Marwaha, managing director of Cityscape, about the global back-and-forth of real estate investment.

RENY: In terms of its intended reach, is the New York conference different from the conferences you’ve done earlier this year and in years past?

Marwaha: Yes. We run 12 major events globally, and the emphasis up until now has been very much on the emerging markets. What’s happened recently, with the credit crisis and liquidity crisis here in the US, is that investors in the US are more proactively looking for opportunities outside the US and predominantly in emerging markets such as China, India, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. So we’ve really capitalized on this trend. We are now organizing Cityscape USA for two reasons: for US investors to look at opportunities in the emerging markets, and for emerging market investors to look at depressed US real estate assets, projects and vehicles as investment opportunities here.