Published by the CIPS Network of the National Association of REALTORS®
Third Quarter 1999
FIABCI Celebrates Its Fiftieth Birthday!
FIABCI celebrated its 50th birthday at its World Congress in Seville, May 22-25, 1999. E. Rene Frank, CIPS, of FIABCI-USA and Laurence McCabe of FIABCI-Ireland emceed a multi-media presentation of FIABCI's history. The evening ended with the lowering of the old FIABCI flag and the raising of the new one, by outgoing FIABCI World President Tony Grant to the accompaniment of a Spanish military band.
New World President sees Better Markets Ahead
Addressing 800 delegates from 43 countries, new FIABCI World President, Jun-Ichiro Tanaka, chairman of the Mitsui Fudosan Group, the giant Japanese property organization said the international real estate market is strong.
Noting that investors now routinely make direct judgements about investment operations in real estate or its cash flow in the funds market,
Tanaka said "In other words, it is becoming the age when only those properties, or the owners of such properties who can disclose the necessary information, can procure funds from the market. This also means a greater disapproval of traditional bank financing based on property collateral, via a long term relationship between a banker as a lender and a property owner as a borrower". He went on to say that "the fund procurement procedure for real estate investment is shifting toward market oriented investment. As professional investors directly and objectively judge the portfolio of real estate as securitized commodities, some believe that it will curb the potential risk of a bubble economy caused by excessive supplies and competition on loans.
"We must see how the trend develops in the future", he said, "but my assumption is that the real estate investment market is less likely to have excess liquidity beyond the normal supply and demand cycle, and that we are moving toward a healthier and sounder market".
Technology Takes Center Stage
Even the most casual observer at the Congress would have noted that FIABCI members seem to be in love with information technology. The sessions devoted to the subject were packed, and when Harris Warsaw, IBM vice president of marketing for small and medium sized companies in Europe, asked his audience who had a Web site, every arm was raised. NAR President Sharon Millett followed with a fact-filled presentation that vividly illustrated the fact that, without technology, today's real estate practitioner is a non-starter. She told a rapt audience that 88percent of U.S. REALTORSā use computers, that 60percent use the Internet, that 74 percent work for a company with a homepage, and that 75 percent of technology users report business generated from it. That's up from only 20 percent as recently as three years ago. The figures are lower for Europe but the pattern is similar. It was impossible to wonder about the 14 percent who resolutely refuse to join the technological revolution. |
More articles >> |
