John Forbes opened the seminar by pointing out that at the start of September, we were worried that there would be very little to discuss. Since then, there has been a flurry of activity, with REIT on REIT M&A, public to private and capital raising.

This was followed by an update presentation from Alexander Imseeh, Senior Manager, Investment Trusts, London Stock Exchange. This covered activity on the market generally, the recent reforms of the main market and an overview of REIT and real estate ETF activity. You can see the slides here.

Alex then joined a wide ranging panel discussion:

• Moderated by Phil Nicklin, partner, EY
• Alexander Imseeh, Senior Manager, Investment Trusts, London Stock Exchange
• Jonathan Murphy, CEO of Assura Plc
• Sapna Shah, Senior Adviser for Panmure Liberum and Senior Independent Director for Supermarket Income REIT
• Svitlana Gubriy, Head of Indirect Real Assets for abrdn plc and manager of the abrdn Future Real Estate UCITS ETF

The discussion covered a huge sweep across the landscape of global and local issues, allowing the panellists to share their very different perspectives of the market, looking at the recent activity but the worrying lack of new IPOs. How will the market grow, bearing in mind that lack of scale is already an issue.

There was an extended and fascinating discussion on net asset value (NAV), prompted by a question on the fact that the majority of UK REITs are trading at discounts, so what needs to happen to see a narrowing of these discounts? The discussion on this point highlighted that there was a broad concern about the UK fixation with NAV. Investors elsewhere, particularly the US, are much more focused on earnings and distributions. This is only one of a number of significant differences between the US and the UK. The major concern in attracting international capital is the lack of size of the UK REITs. There are no UK REITs that are globally significant. SEGRO is the nearest, and has a market capitalisation of more than twice the next UK REIT. UK REIT market capitalisation tails off quickly after that. There was a general acceptance that further consolidation of existing UK REITs would only get so far. Some big new IPOs are needed to shift the dial.

The panel then moved on to a discussion of underlying assets, with particular concerns over the state of the office market with the post-pandemic shift to more working from home.

As ever at ULI capital markets events, there were excellent contributions from the audience and the discussions continued into the drinks and networking afterwards.

You can some photographs of the event here.