Global Demographics 2009: Shaping Real Estate’s Future explores how demographic trends are affecting real estate investment and development decisions worldwide. The publication, the second in an annual series from the Urban Land Institute, examines major factors that affect land use, namely population growth, urbanization, aging and migration.

Some of the book’s highlights include:

* The greatest population increases worldwide in the next 40 years will occur in China, India and the United States.
* The population of Europe will decline between now and 2030.
* Mature but still growing economies, including the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, will offer attractive real estate investment and development prospects once the recession subsides.
* The developed world’s large workforce is aging rapidly while the young labor pools in the Middle East, Africa and South Africa are expanding.
* Fertility rates have dropped globally, even in developing countries.

The report states that demographics are the foundation of real estate decision-making. Population, household and income characteristics, along with the direction of future trends, determine whether demand will exist for new housing or retail space. Growth in the labor force and its composition strongly influence the success of office and industrial properties.

http://www.realestateindustrywatch.com/book-describes-impact-of-global-demographics-on-real-estate%E2%80%99s-future/

brought by Moishe Alexander, CFC Canadian Funding Corp CEO

B.C. real estate – and specifically Vancouver real estate – has long been subject to boom-and-bust cycles. Speculation arrived on the Granville townsite with the railway in the 1880s, flourished with the influx of investors from Asia in the 1980s and gave legs to the mortgage scams and leaky condos of the 1990s. This time round, easy credit fed the boom – most spectacularly stateside, but also extending to the U.K. and the emergent economies of eastern Europe and Asia.

Vancouver took its place on the global stage as developers and marketers turned here for expertise in selling their latest projects, and in short order “super, natural British Columbia” became the best place on earth to buy property. While the first cracks in the global property boom started appearing in 2005, it wasn’t until the bankruptcy of Lehman Bros. on Sept. 15, 2008, that the problem of tightened credit really hit home, cutting off the lifeblood of local developers – most notably Millennium Development Group, builder of the Vancouver Olympic Village – and driving a nail through the heart of consumer confidence.

In our 2009 review of the local real estate market, we look at three themes or projects that defined the boom – the international marketing of Vancouver, transit-related densification across the Lower Mainland and the landmark Olympic Village development – and ponder how well they might hold up in what could be the toughest year for B.C. real estate in over a decade.