NAI Sees RE Opportunity Along with Challenge

NEW YORK CITY-Amid projections that the next 12 months will mean “another year of challenge and slack demand,” Jeffrey Finn and his colleagues at NAI Global nonetheless offered reasons for optimism. Presenting the company’s annual global forecast to an audience at the New York Athletic Club Thursday morning, the NAI president and CEO said that demand would start ticking up again in 2010 amid a slowdown in delivery of new product.

All in all, Finn said, “This presents a unique window of opportunity for our industry.” He added that “this is the time we see to make money”–at the bottom of the market, not the top.

Nonetheless, Finn emphasized that what started as a malaise in the subprime market has long since become a global contagion. “Almost everybody in the world is feeling pain; it’s only a matter of degree,” he said. Dr. Peter Linneman, NAI Global’s chief economist, pointed out that the recession has hit Europe and Asia harder, because those regions have slower fundamental growth to begin with.