AMSTERDAM-European property professionals at the recent European conference of Investment Property Databank were divided about the direction of the market, with many unsettled by the Euro crisis and opinion divided over whether Greek sovereign debt problems would spark into other nations and genuinely undermine the currency.

Chairing the conference for a fifth year, Piet Eichholtz, professor of Real Estate Finance at Maastricht University, set the context for the two-day event: “It did appear that the tough times where behind us but then Greece happened, so the question is now whether there is real recovery or whether what appears as a recovery in some markets is in fact a mirage.”

Sabina Kalyan, head of European strategy at CBRE Investors, said that up until about a month previously, there was, "an incipient rental recovery – nothing fantastic – given that the economic recovery was going to be weak but lending was starting to unfreeze ". In the conference’s opening session, Kalyan told delegates: "The Eurozone is about to enter a period of deliberately engineered fiscal deflation, and any economic growth forecast you’ve seen that wasn't made in the last week is very, very optimistic; the chances of a double-dip recession have increased substantially… We are now entering a period where the restructuring of public balance sheets will be the dominant driver of macro economic and capital market trends.”