MIAMI—As deal flow and pricing reach ever-higher levels, it's important to ask whether investor confidence is being checked by discipline. Akerman LLP's Richard Bezold tells GlobeSt.com that by and large that a disciplined approach is evident, even as the firm's sixth annual Akerman US Real Estate Industry Outlook Survey finds that investors are more optimistic about the health of commercial real estate and the underlying fundamentals than they've been in quite some time.

“Our clients are very disciplined in looking at the properties,” say Bezold, chair of the real estate practice group at locally based Akerman. “They spend a lot of time on due diligence and on crafting the kind of right capital stack to put together. In some areas, they are more conservative than they were in 2007.”

In common with the previous market peak, investors are being pushed by low cap rates into secondary and tertiary market opportunities they might not have considered a few years ago. Yet Bezold says they're looking at these markets with a different mindset than they evinced in '07. “They're being very disciplined in the way they deploy their funds, whether it's debt or equity,” he says.

More so than in '07, investors are finding partners when doing deals, says Bezold. More to the point, they're finding more of them. “In '07, we would see a REIT or a fund, or a developer go in on a project with just bank financing or CMBS, but now there are usually three people at the table,” he says. “I'm still not seeing many of our clients putting 100% equity into these deals. They're doing joint ventures with the REITs, the funds or foreign investment. And so we're often dealing with more than just the sponsor and a lender in these deals.”

This move toward sharing the risk exemplifies the discipline that commercial real estate players are bringing to their game in 2015. “Especially on the equity side, people have begun to realize what they can and can't do,” says Bezold. “They may realize that they're not owners or operators, so they're willing to do JVs with people who do focus on that.” That's often the case among foreign investors, who partner with US operator as they enter the domestic market.

Although Akerman's survey finds that for the first time, respondents rank global unrest as their chief concern, Bezold isn't seeing overseas investors coming to the US as a means of escaping economic and political uncertainty in their own countries. “Our South American clients aren't coming up here because they don't want to keep their money down there,” he says. “I think it's more like they see there's a benefit to investing up here. It's more rational as far as that goes.”

Even the influx of Chiense money isn't due to concerns about the investing climate in the world's most populous nation. China, says Bezold, “seems to be a very stable place to make an investment.”

A plurality of survey respondents expressed confidence is the well-being of the US economy; Bezold believes we'll continue to hear that theme when Akerman conducts its next survey a year from now. “Employment is growing, not at a leapfrog rate but at a somewhat constant rate,” he says. “We need jobs in order to push real estate; that really is what supports real estate.”