Neil Slater, the chief executive of privately owned real estate manager and retail park specialist Redevco, struck a cautious note at the Mipim real conference in Cannes, talking to Paul Norman of CoStar News, and sister publication Business Immo.
Like Anne Breen of Aberdeen, he had been at the Reinvest summit for major investors and said: "My sense there was, look, it’s still a very difficult market for real estate. You’ve been seeing the sunlight of positivity coming through but my goodness me, isn’t it a difficult market out there, given where bond yields are at, given market uncertainty.
"So I would say, actually, that there’s a similar feeling to last year, just around, we’re in a great asset class but my goodness me, we have to work right now to demonstrate why you should invest in real estate, ensure the opportunity cost, ensure we can give true value, so mixed sentiment, but always great to be here."
Redevco did one of the large retail park deals in the UK of last year by buying a portfolio from Oxford Properties of 16 retail parks for £518 million.
"But it was clear we were a bit underweight [to the] UK and then we got the opportunity to go for the retail portfolio.
"I mean, today we're managing or owning about €5 billion of retail parks across Europe. It's our bread and butter. We love the asset class, really stable income, you can densify the assets, you can repurpose the assets and it was perfect."
And as part of the company's diversification strategy, Slater said it was close to redeveloping major retails asset on the rue de Rivoli and Boulevard Haussmann in Paris, plus ones in London and Hamburg into mixed use. He said: "Those will diversify away from being pure retail to actually mixed-use redevelopments, office, retail, hotels."