« In real estate, you don’t go international overnight »

Business Immo AXA Real Estate was one of the first real estate asset managers to go international with French institutional investors. What were your arguments to convince them?
Pierre Vaquier Real estate is an asset type in its own right. For an institutional investor, the golden rule for investing outside of the domestic market is risk diversification. With corporate real estate being particularly correlated to the real economy, the different economic cycles can be played in favour of disparate situations in one economic region or another. Even within Europe and the Euro zone, there can be damaged markets, but also pockets of growth. More than just intrinsic performance, which is better when diversified, as demonstrated by the IPD statistics, the risk profile can also vary from one country to another due to the structure of the real estate market. For example, when you select an office block in Brussels rented for 15 years to a European institution, you are buying an almost compulsory product.