Real Estate Trends For 2022

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2020 - Brutal for real estate. Brick and mortar retail, offices and housing were all hit badly.

2021 - Less Brutal - Net store closures have slowed down to a trickle, offices have started to see humans within those walls, demand for housing is up, and hotels, which also saw rock-bottom occupancy levels in 2020, are witnessing a revival.

2022 🔮

🛒 Retail - Deloitte predicts that online spending will well outpace in-store spending next year too.

All of this means that poorly located malls could really struggle in the coming year and retailers may be forced to draw the curtains on store locations that don't see enough foot traffic to justify keeping them open. 

However, while lockdowns may have killed quite a few stores, one breed of store that hasn't fallen victim to that trend is the Tier-2-and-below discount shopping centre. Those will continue to thrive as inflation is here to stay for a while.

🏢 Offices - Office leasing will pick up, if Covid doesn't misbehave again. But overall growth in office rentals is still some distance away. The shared economy - co working, student housing - will begin to make a comeback after a messed up 2020-21. 

🏗 Warehousing - 2022 would be about sustained demand for warehousing and distribution centre space as retailers expand their online footprint and speed up deliveries. 

The rise of e-commerce may be bad for brick-and-mortar retailers and malls, but it's great for industrial investors and REITs. 

🏡 Housing - Demand for housing is healthy and going by experts who crunched Q3, 2021 numbers, new home sales as well as launches will continue to grow right through 2022 and beyond. 

💽 Data Centres - The pandemic brought in a tide of workers doing their jobs remotely. And while companies are recalling employees back to the office, many will no doubt remain remote in 2022.

As day-to-day data volumes increase and companies grow increasingly tech-savvy, high-capacity data centres will remain in demand.