Two years ago, I decided to set up Macro Real Estate. The decision to have an entrepreneurial setup was not an easy one after having spent more than 16 years in corporate environments at CS and SNB. But I believed there was a market opportunity to provide services for investors and investment managers in global and Swiss real estate.

On the one hand, there is still a lack of internal research capacities at many real estate investment management firms. Still, they need proper reporting on markets for internal purposes or clients.

On the other hand, some investors are not adequately set up to master the challenges of global real estate investing. I was then and am still not happy with the advice many Swiss institutional investors are getting on international real estate from their advisors, who are also covering other asset classes as well. They don’t seem to understand how real estate outside Switzerland works, and their advice can lead to many missed opportunities and accentuation of concentration risks in real estate portfolios.

After two years and many experiences older, I can be very thankful to many people who have supported and encouraged me.

We had a head start. We could secure for the first twelve months a significant mandate from a Swiss bank acting as an outsourcing partner for their global real estate research. But more and more, we got requests from smaller real estate investment managers who needed slides and market reporting on European real estate markets. In addition to core real estate markets in Europe, US and APAC, we are a unique player that can cover niche markets like CEE, including Romania. For other clients, we provide expertise on Scandinavia or European health care real estate markets. Being one of the few players anticipating the inflation wave, we are also doing inflation forecasts for European markets.

We also managed to secure ghostwriting mandates from large REITs and institutional investors. We are also helping some clients with manager selection and strategic advice.

Our expertise was highlighted in the invitations to speak at universities and industry events. We were pretty also frequent participants at panels. I was overwhelmed by all these invitations and would like to thank all my supporters.

Usually, companies never report on failures in articles like this. As we are doing things differently at Macro Real Estate, I would also critically review some areas where we have yet to progress. The one is with clients outside of Europe, where we would like to grow more in the future. But the area where we haven’t progressed enough is with Swiss pension funds. That’s an area that we would like to explore in the future. I still believe that many are not yet benefiting from the full potential of global real estate, and the advice they are getting is not the best. In an optimal world, we would help them set up international real estate strategies and help them select non-listed real estate funds and managers for Europe, the US, and APAC.

Macro Real Estate has strong research expertise and is constantly in the market meeting with managers, like three weeks ago in Singapore. So, we are early on trends. Currently, we observe a market correction in real estate valuations in the making of 15%+ in the US and 10%+ in Europe and 5%+ in Switzerland. More to come. Investors and investment managers need to stay on top of the market and macro evolution to remain successful in an environment that won’t be as easy as in the last 20 years.

I would like to thank you again for all your support

Zoltan