INREV’s annual conference in Berlin got off to a cheery start on Wednesdaywith CEO Matthias Thomas jauntily proclaiming that ‘real estate is coming back to life’.

INREV’s annual conference in Berlin got off to a cheery start on Wednesdaywith CEO Matthias Thomas jauntily proclaiming that ‘real estate is coming back to life’.

Opening the conference, Thomas said that, to borrow the words from Pink Floyd, ‘the moment has arrived to kill the past and come back to life’.

‘The flow of capital is moving up to pre-crisis levels. Investor interest is back,’ he said.

Capital flow - and the sizeable war chests chasing real estate opportunities in Europe - was a big theme of the conference. According to Jeff Jacobson, global CEO of LaSalle Investment Management, the top 10 global real estate managers accounted for 40% of all capital raised last year. ‘If you put Blackstone in there, they’d account for a big chunk of that,’ Jacobson said. Blackstone announced last month that it had raised a record €5.1 bn in six months for its fourth European real estate fund.

The global economic climate also garnered a lot of interest. Jacques Gordon, a global investment strategist at LaSalle Investment Management, told his audience that after several years of strong growth in emerging markets such as India and China, the pendulum was now swinging back towards Europe. ‘For the first time in around 12 years, developed markets, including Europe, are having more of an impact on global economic performance - and up there at the top are the US, the UK and Germany,’ he said.

GDP forecasts for 2014 highlight that many European markets are performing better than they were just nine months ago, Gordon added. ‘Money is everywhere - it’s flowing cross-border but economic growth is below capacity,’ he said.

However, real estate cycles continue to play havoc with investment, he added. ‘How do you play the market today, given that most of us can’t just sit it out for five years? We (real estate) are an asset class now - we don’t have the option of going to zero.’

Investors also need to avoid a repeat of the mistakes that precipitated the financial crisis in 2007, according to Jeremy Plummer, CEO of CBRE Global Multi Manager. ‘Only in real estate do you hear "core is expensive, I’m going up the risk curve". In other industries, you’d go down the risk curve! Maybe that explains the volatility out there,’ he added. ‘ Today, investors have to be quite careful - there are already some similarities to 2005-2007,’ Plummer warned.