Whenever an economic or financial shock ripples across the planet, the subsequent recovery often introduces eager new participants and establishes much-needed new rules. From this reconfigured platform, networks and hierarchies often emerge that did not exist before. Two years after the global financial crisis, the landscape for real estate investment indeed appears to be in the process of reconfiguration. Today, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and the Americas each account for about 37 percent of the global stock of “invested” property, which includes properties owned for investment purposes, or about US$4.2 trillion in each region (see “Global Real Estate Market Size,” page 18), according to DTZ.The remaining 26 percent of the global invested stock, or US$3.0 trillion, can now be traced to Asia.

In addition to the shifts in global invested property stock, the volume of transactions has drifted eastward as well. As recently as 2007, the Asia Pacifi