Real Estate

Physical investments is the safest option right now

Luxx London Investment -Luxx – and OpenFunds Investment Services – OpenFunds -, announced today that they have completed a final closing for The London Heritage Fund (the ‘Fund’) with total investor commitments of 33.45m GBP.

The UBS trading floor in Stamford, Connecticut, US, once the world’s largest, had more than 5,000 traders slamming phones and kicking trash cans and now it is up for sale, according to a person with knowledge of the offering, as Bloomberg reported.

UBS, which had owned the building, is responsible for its maintenance until its lease expires at the end of next year, the person said.

Fast forward to today and the near-vacant building, larger than a football field (approximately 720,000-square-foot), has been put on the sale block, since the Swiss bank hasn’t been able to restock its trader ranks after the 2008 financial crisis, the Wall Street Journal reported.

New York’s Upper 5th Avenue remains the world’s most expensive retail street, narrowly ahead of Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay.
Paris’ Avenue des Champs Élysées, where annual rents are €13,255.2 per square metre, is third, London’s New Bond Street is fourth (€12,433.6 sq.m/yr) with Tokyo’s Ginza leap frogging into fifth place with annual rents totaling €12,102.9 sq.m/yr.

Nowadays, most investors acknowledge that listed real estate has deserved its status as a separate asset class or at least that it has a right of existence in a diversified portfolio. Index providers as well, recognize the specific nature of this asset class. Only recently, the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) introduced real estate as a separate sector based on its growing importance in the world’s equity market and its role as a foundational building block of a modern portfolio, rather than an alternative.

The Swiss rental market is expected to contract again in 2017. Wüest & Partner, real estate consulting firm, provides an average contraction of 0.7% in Ticino, the decline will be less marked.

The reference rate, since its unification in Switzerland in 2008, fell from 3.5% to 1.75%, allowing a decline in rents of up to 17% to the benefit of long-time tenants, as the report "Immo-Monitoring" refers.

Portugal will introduce a tax on real estate fortunes above € 600,000 ($661,000) in 2017 to help pay for pensions, the government has said. The measure was introduced by Prime Minister Antonio Costa’s in draft budget for 2017.

He explained the property tax income would be used to sustain Portugal’s social payments – everything from pensions to the health service to family benefits.

Swiss mortgage rates are at a record low without any downward trend: this is the housing market’s situation that emerges from the latest Mortgage Barometer carried out by the website Comparis.ch.

In the Q3 2016, the 10-year fixed-rate mortgages has again decreased slightly, dropping to 1.45%, 0.06% less than the previous three months. The same trend was also observed for five-year mortgages (from 1.11% to 1.09%) and for one-year (from 1,10% to 1.06%).