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Customer expectations, advancing technology and a burgeoning build-to-rent sector are encouraging the best residential landlords to boost their “digital kerb appeal”, says Yardi's Paul Yount.

Yount, Yardi’s industry principal and product manager for RENTCafé, says renters no longer expect to spend their Saturdays pounding the pavement or filling in dozens of rental application forms.

• By April 2021, office-focused listed real estate companies became the worst-performing segment in the MSCI World Core IMI Real Estate Index, on a cumulative basis since January 2020.
• Office’s relatively poor recent performance upset the pattern of returns — across regions and public and private markets — seen in 2020, when industrial outperformed, retail and hotels lagged and office and residential had middling returns.
• Private-market data has not shown such a shift in sector-performance rankings but, looking deeper, we can see the performance of office assets has varied by location type and lease structure.

- The vacancy rate for Large Multi-Tenant (LMT) logistics facilities in the Greater Tokyo area rose by 0.6 points q-o-q to 1.1% in Q1 2021, marking the first time the vacancy rate has exceeded 1% since reaching 1.1% in Q4 2019. Although the unprecedented surge in demand for facemasks and other daily necessities triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic led to stronger competition for logistics space in 2020, activity now appears to have eased.  That said, overall demand remains stable.

- The LMT vacancy rate in the Greater Osaka area fell to 1.9% in Q1 2021, down 1.8 points q-o-q. This marked the first time the vacancy rate has dropped below 2% since Q2 2016, when it also stood at 1.9%. The fact that rents have risen by 13% over the past two years, combined with increasing uncertainty over future economic performance, has meant that tenants are becoming more cautious, slowing the pace of rent increase.

- The LMT vacancy rate in the Greater Nagoya area fell by 1.7 points q-o-q to 8.6% this quarter. With some 170,000 tsubo of new floor space coming available in 2022, owners are stepping up their promotional campaigns to attract tenants.

- This quarter, CBRE has initiated the publication of LMT indices for the Greater Fukuoka area, where the vacancy rate has remained at 0.0% since Q2 2019. With development of multiple new LMT facilities now underway, properties possessing more user-friendly layouts will command an advantage over the competition.

• Industrial GVA was negative at -6.7% Q4 2020.
• Average super prime industrial rents were up 0.4% across the quarter. Australian super prime rents average $113/sqm
• Super prime yields have compressed by 57 bps y-o-y resulting in record low yields
• Land values for 1.6ha lots increased by 2.5% q-o-q averaging $570/sqm while 0.25ha lots increased by 5.4% q-o-q to $719/sqm.
• Transaction volumes. Transaction volumes above $5m totalled $393m across 18 transactions. This is 78% down on volumes recorded in Q1 2020.