Westside construction

The panel was moderated by Dennis Yeskey, national director of real estate capital markets, for Deloitte. The rest of the panel consisted of David Roth, managing director at Blackstone Real Estate Advisors; Donald Trump Jr., EVP of development & acquisitions at the Trump Organization; Robert White Jr., founder & president of Real Capital Analytics; Dr. Jane Murray, head of Asia Pacific Research and international director at Jones Lang LaSalle; and Charles Andrews of Blue Coast.

The panel focused on where the opportunity lay for US investors seeking to expand globally. White said, there were not a lot of funds that were willing to go global yet, and that the typical foreign investment came from "entrepreneurial capital, opportunistic and private investment". Roth added that there was a "large amount of investment activity" in China, Brazil and Dubai characterizing his attitude toward foreign markets judiciously as "long term--bullish, short term--cautious."

When the question was posed to list the top investment opportunities in foreign markets, White's answer was the most ubiquitous among the panel, "China, China, China." A lot of "investors got burnt in Russia," White offered as a reason for China's popularity. Murray, the resident expert on Asia Pacific, buttressed the argument explaining the area's rapid growth.