Message from the CEO
Back from Berlin
It was a pleasure to see so many of you at the INREV Annual Conference in Berlin in April. Geopolitics book ended discussions on stage, with high quality presentations from Dr Pippa Malmgren and Jami Miscik demonstrating that the world in which we do business gets increasingly complicated. Their ability to distil this world view and provide us with relevant insights was just one factor that contributed to the conference receiving our highest rating ever from our 420 attendees.
Berlin was also the official launch of the revised INREV Guidelines, which have been welcomed by the membership, and are now available online. I encourage you to familiarise yourself with the changes as well as the supporting materials such as tools and webinars.
With fund managers in the final throes of receiving or applying for AIFM licences it is tempting to assume that the bulk of the regulation from the financial crisis is all but embedded into the industry.
However, this is not the case and INREV’s work in Public Affairs continues to tackle new threats to competition and the future health of the industry. We are currently responding to regulation in two new areas. Base Erosion and Profit Sharing (BEPS), will look at limiting strategies which avoid tax by shifting profits to alternative locations. While we welcome the restricting of illegitimate activity in this area, BEPS also threatens legitimate structuring the industry undertakes to enable cross border investments. We fear that if implemented, it will negatively affect flows of both equity capital and debt capital into indirect real estate.
The second area is a proposal by the European Commission to look at the use of benchmarks. It proposes that when indices are used, input data should be made available. This has obvious consequences for the industry which has increased professionalism through the use of performance evaluation indices. This progress would be lost if indices were forced to make the underlying data available. We will continue to keep you updated on our work in these important areas.
The INREV Young Professionals Seminar in Lisbon later this month signs off our events programme for the first half of the year. We will return after the summer for a busy second half beginning with the North American Seminar in New York. In the meantime, I hope you all enjoy a relaxing break over the summer.
