We may be divided by a common language but the debate is a global one

Nick Jopling, Head of Residential at CB Richard Ellis:

I was up at 5am this morning to put the finishing touches to my afternoon presentation. I am speaking on a 90 minute panel session on overseas residential investment opportunities; each speaker has been allocated 10 minutes to present their market and then field questions from the moderator and the audience. It's quite a challenge to explain the UK opportunity in 10 minutes, so I have decided to work on the basis of taking 15.

In the meantime, more meetings to discuss multi-family housing have been set up with the first one scheduled for 8.00am this morning. Bagels and coffee are all to hand and off we go again sitting in a meeting that has plenty of badinage between the CBRE brokers and the client. This is interspersed with very direct questions and answers about business strategies, targets and funding that I suspect principals and clients in the UK would not be so open about.

There is no doubting the optimism at the conference; everyone seems to be a buyer and there are very few sellers. In the main hall a show of hands on who is planning on selling this year, two hands went up. On the follow up of who's buying, you could feel the air rush as hundreds of hands went up. Cap rates have to be squeezed in that scenario and will be.

As ever when doing business in the US, despite the shared language, there are a number of words that we use that mean very little to Americans. For example, the words planning and valuation don't have any place in the world of property in the USA and you need to use the word entitlement and appraisal. It’s also worth noting that any reference to a scheme, such as development scheme, suggests something very dodgy more suited to a Grisham novel than a business opportunity.

The speech went well. I shared the platform with Stan Harrelson the CEO of Pinnacle, who talked about the opportunities in Asia focussing in particular on China, Japan and South Korea. Greg Kalil, Managing Partner of Brookfield Financial, covered the Canadian market and Thomas Koller, CEO of TVO Europe, talked about the CEE market. That's a large part of the world, but needless to say there were still questions about South America and Australia too.