Overview
The purpose of the Monitor section is to give you an essential daily and weekly dose of information on global real estate markets, so that you can monitor the developments and stay on top of what is happening in your market. This includes the latest news on events with market impact, exclusive Reuters interviews with the movers and shakers of the industry, analyses of the hot topics and new data releases both at macro (e.g. inflation, GDP growth) and real estate level (e.g. performance indices for direct markets), plus key data from specialist real estate information providers and from Thomson Reuters databases.
Global news, analyses and interviews
The Monitor section gives you typically 40-50 articles a day, all selected by the Reuters editors from the main Reuters news wire. If you struggle with the information overload, this can be a good way to get the daily essentials as the screening of content happens at two levels one for the content to get into Reuters main news wire, and the other to be selected by dedicated real estate editors
for the service.
You can follow or find the articles online or you can get the headlines in a convenient, blackberry-friendly text email alert format. You can select whether you would like to receive these daily (2-3 a day), weekly (typically on Thursdays) or none.
A dedicated group of real estate correspondents, leveraging the network of Thomson Reuters 2,700 journalists in 200 bureaus, ensures truly global coverage, with strong local presence.
You can select a specific region through a pull-down menu if you would only be interested in a particular geography. The articles are tagged manually to ensure relevance.
Reuters news has been at the heart of the markets for over 150 years, thanks to strict quality controls and reporting principles, focused on speed, accuracy and freedom from bias.
A couple of examples of the type of coverage you can expect. A great illustration of our coverage in the US would be the subprime crisis in 2007, including breaking news and analyses of the times. In 2009, our focus has turned to REITs in distress, the battered housing market and related trouble in commercial mortgage securities.
In EMEA, we have charted the implosion of the British and Spanish property markets – the frontline of the European real estate bust and the impact of a mortgage famine on burgeoning European economies stretching from Poland to Turkey to Kazakhstan. We have monitored the flow of Middle Eastern money into real estate, the developments in nascent property derivatives market and implied expectations for the direct market, and the changing fortunes of the listed property sector including recent rounds of rights issues, the wave of forced sales from suspended unlisted funds and opportunistic private equity fundraisings.
In Asia, the story of de-coupling and re-coupling of Asian markets has been high on the agenda as well as specific insights into leasing market and occupancy rates in Hong Kong, Tokyo or Singapore. For China and India, insights into regulatory changes come from Beijing and Shanghai, as well as news on new funds being raised for investments in China or India.
On top of regular reporting, Reuters Editorial also runs a series of Summits, including the Global Real Estate Summit in June, which are exclusive interviews with top level executives in the industry, for example on GIC investment plans in 2007. These also get packaged into special reports, like in 2007 and 2008.
In addition to Editorial Summits, we organize an annual Global Property Outlook Conference in December, focused on explicit forward views of key market players. You can watch videos from 2007 and 2008 events and read a set of news articles that came out on the back of these events.
Special reports/interviews also come out of major industry events organized by our partners like MIPIM Asia and MIPIM in Cannes.
Cross-asset class approach
Our approach to real estate puts the real estate risk at the centre and aims to bring a 360 degree view on such risk exposure. This means covering direct investment markets, listed (public) equity / REIT sector, private equity funds, as well as property derivatives and debt / CMBS markets, all in one place.
We focus on commercial real estate but residential real estate is also covered as a sector (e.g. apartments in the US), as an economic variable (housing starts, house prices etc.) and for index trading (property derivatives), for example in the US, UK and Hong Kong.
Third party news feeds
While Reuters articles can provide a truly global and cross-asset coverage, they are best complemented with more specialist real estate coverage. At the moment the Monitor section allows you to add (click on SELECT SOURCE button at the top in the middle of the screen) feeds from CoStar for the US markets and from RealDeal for New York.
Data from contributors
We are working with the leading providers of demand-supply information, performance indices, rental data, yield/cap rates and transactions to bring them into one place for quick reference. While this is still early days you can already access selection of data from leading providers. See the left-hand-side bar in the Monitor section. You can scroll down the headline data for quick reference and in some cases access the dedicated pages with more detailed data as in Indices section.
Search the Archives
In the Monitor (and other sections) you have access to the search engine, developed for the purpose of this service. It is restricted to the content on the site, ensuring higher relevance of search results. It will search across other sections as well and display results accordingly.
For example, try “London office” (for articles including the exact phrase London office), and it will retrieve at least 200 items in Monitor, 30+ items in Research etc.
The archives, accessible through search, include more than 22,000 articles from Reuters, 17,000 from CoStar and 1,000 from RealDeal, all covering the period since mid-2006. Then there is another set of 37,000 and 77,000 articles in Equities and Economics news sections, respectively.
But don’t I get it all free on the Internet?
You will find some of the content through various free Internet channels, including our own reuters.com for general audience. However, this will be limited and will require your time and effort to find it, plus knowing that there is something to be found!
Value summary
Our proposition to you here is that we lower your cost in terms of time and effort needed to get the information, plus give you access to the most comprehensive access to global and cross-asset coverage of real estate markets both real time and in the archives, all organized in logical way from real estate markets perspective. Less is more with daily screening for most relevant information for you, and certainly less hassle in having access to a one-stop-shop service, including other Sections (not described here).
Finally, of course this wont cover everything you need at this stage, given a massive fragmentation of the information in real estate. But we are continuously developing the service (as we have shown over the last 2 years), working with partners and expect significant enhancements to both content and functionality throughout 2010 and beyond.
For our views on information landscape in real estate market and our role, you can read an article in the recent EPRA Magazine (page 4).