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CHICAGO-A recent report by law firm DLA Piper, based here, shows that most real estate executives now rank the current credit crisis as the most impactful event in the industry in two decades. The survey has also shown the executives do not expect stability to return to the real estate market until at least 2010, with securitized lending not returning to previous levels until at least 2011, if ever. The report surveyed 424 real estate executives in August, and is being released in conjunction with DLA Piper's 2008 Global Real Estate Summit, to be held in Chicago Tuesday.

"One of the biggest things is an acknowledgement and analysis of what the projection of the feeling of the time period for recovery is, and when we're going to get back to stabilized market transactions picking up to a better pace than the last 12 months," Jay Epstien, chairman of the company's US real estate practice, tells GlobeSt.com. "If you monitor how people have talked about the period of recovery in the last 12 months since the start of the credit crisis, each time you measured it people have had a different view. It's pretty striking that now the overwhelming majority of answers have leapfrogged over 2009."

Given the developments involving Lehman Brothers, AIG and Merrill Lynch in the past two weeks, the firm conducted a follow-up survey last week. In light of recent events, about 60% said they now see the current credit crisis as the event in the past 20 years which has had the largest effect on the real estate market, Epstien says. Only weeks before, 60% of respondents ranked the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and early '90s as most impactful, with the current credit crisis ranked second.