COVID-19 has caused a severe and rapid economic contraction and accelerated secular changes already hitting parts of the real estate markets. Investors face a fundamental question: How will real estate evolve as a sector and asset class? Here are our 2021 real estate trends to watch.

With new COVID-19 lockdowns and swaths of white-collar workers working from home, many office tenants are contemplating whether the future of work includes office space. This could have significant impact on office demand and income from leases.

Part 1 of this year’s MSCI Real Estate Research Snapshot is a compilation of our research published through the first half of 2020. At the start of the year we suggested that 2020 may prove to be a watershed year in terms of the way investors consider real estate as an asset class. On the face of it, it seems that due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic we may have been right, albeit for entirely different reasons.

Infrastructure investments have not been spared the effects of the pandemic. A closer look across investment types, subsectors and risk levels over time may provide useful perspective as private-capital firms and their investors manage through.

Property investors turned to global gateway cities to diversify portfolios and generate capital growth in the years since the 2008 global financial crisis. We assess whether COVID-19 could jeopardize the relative dominance of these power cities.

Some commercial tenants have stopped paying rent amid COVID-19. Without rental income, property funds are not able to pay distributions to shareholders and borrowers cannot service their debt. We analyzed property-fund data to assess the impact on investors.