In this episode of the [i3] podcast, I'm speaking with Mary Power, who is the Head of Property Research at asset consultant Jana. We cover the struggles of the property market in the early 90s, when Mary started out in the industry, and the learnings from that time. We take a look at how investors have dealt with 13 consecutive rate rises, starting in 2022 and we cover portfolio construction issues, including blending listed and unlisted property assets, the convergence of real estate and infrastructure, while Mary also predicts that up to 50% of Australian property money might be reallocated to international assets as super funds grow bigger.

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Overview of podcast with Mary Power, JANA

03:00 Getting into the industry
04:30 The early 1990s was a dramatic period in the office market and as a young person in the industry that experience was fascinating
07:00 I think we have turned a corner in terms of unlisted property
8:00 In June 2022, we headed into 13 interest rate rises, which was a significant head wind for the property sector.
10:00 The REIT sector is very sensitive to interest rates
11:00 Are REITs equities or properties?
12:30 Property people don't price off the cash rate; they price off the 10-year bond rate
14:00 The Melbourne property market is still a little bit difficult
16:00 People aren't getting their forward projections of labour seating in offices right
19:00 I think it is very hard to promise quarterly, ongoing liquidity in a portfolio with large assets
25:00 There is a big push for the build-to-rent sector to mature in Australia
31:00 Super funds could move up to 50 per cent of Australian property money offshore

Full Transcript of Episode 121

Wouter Klijn 02:01

Mary, welcome to the podcast.

Mary Power 02:04

Thank you very much, pleasure to be here.

Wouter Klijn 02:07

So you've been with Jana for more than 15 years. What got you into property investing or property research in the first place?

Mary Power 02:16

Oh, I might have to let you in on a little secret. I I've actually had two stints at Jana. I was actually at Jana in the between '94 and 2000 as well. So yes, I was how did I get into property? It's a great question. I had a friend whose father was a valuer, and I commenced the property valuations course at RMIT, and he got me a cadetship at Urbis, known as at Cox then, and I was hooked. I was enjoyed it immensely. And love the idea of the commerce and the built form coming together. Yeah. So I, I really enjoyed it. And I, I joined at a time when the property market was exuberant in the late 80s, and then it went into the early 90s, which was the recession we had to have. So I saw the best and the worst at the time. And I always say I learned all my skills over those eight or nine years.

Wouter Klijn 03:12

Yeah, and apart from the environment at a time, has the investment side changed much? I mean, do do the valuation practices change the deals, change the structures. What's that like?

Mary Power 03:26

It's a great question. In fact, a lot of it's changed, and a lot of the fundamentals remain the same. So lots of change, lots of so if you went into the early if you went into the early 90s and we had that recession, which absolutely impacted the office sector. In Melbourne alone, there were six office buildings that were built, and they would have been built on, not with pre commitments that you would have today, so built by developers who then had to entice tenants in. So a mill, we say, a million square feet, or square metres of Office became was built, and then the rest became vacant. So vacancy rose to about 25% and in fact, rents halved. So it was a really dramatic period in the office market. And it was, you know, as a very young person learning it was, it was, it was fascinating. What had happened over that period. We didn't have a Funds Management basis. Then the I think, as we headed into the 90s, I think amp and national mutual were about the only funds managers that were available. Most of property was held within a Balanced fund. And of course, over the course of the next few years. If you fast forward to 2025 the Mercer survey is, in fact, about 94 billion. That's without Goodman, I think that adds another 18 billion on. So, you know, you're a very substantially funds management platform has emerged over that period, over that last 30 years. And you know, it. It now consists of specialist sector managers plus diversified managers. So it's been amazing.

Wouter Klijn 05:05

Yeah, sounds like the office sector has gone through a few problematic periods and more exuberant ones, because we've seen, of course, with covid and as well that it got strongly impacted we were working from home. Did that experience earlier on help you going through the covid period?

Mary Power 05:26

I think covid, I always say covid was a black swan event. No one had, noone had predicted it, but the balance sheets and corporates and and employment data was all in good shape. It wasn't the same. In the early 90s, we had very high unemployment, up to 11% most people I knew had someone had lost their jobs, and these were very smart people, and we had a lot of corporate issues going on in the early 90s. That wasn't the case in covid. We were in pretty good shape going into the into the covid. So I think whilst it was annoying, and we hadn't seen it before, it was nothing like what I'd seen in the in the early 90s. So that gave me some comfort at the time, yeah. And of course, we had, you know, the new phenomena of working from home, which was something we hadn't had before. And of course, you know, various states had different lockdown periods. Melbourne had a very severe lockdown period. And of course, it's taken some time for people to return to the office. Yeah.

Wouter Klijn 06:28

Fair enough. So if we fast forward to today's environment, I looked recently in sort of the superannuation returns for the full financial year, and spread out by the different asset classes. And what sort of struck me is that unless that has been relatively poor performer in recent years, last two years, negative, this year, low, single digit, but at the other side, first time it's single digits again with positive results, have we turned the corner there?

Mary Power 07:01

I think we have, and I think you know what happened in 2020? Was covid occurred, and there was this, you know, significant lockdown over quite a long period of time. Never good for the built form that have leases in place. They have contractual leases in place, but you still need people to buy things at shopping centres and office buildings to be occupied for those leases to be sustainable and and of benefit to the tenant. So I think that was very difficult period. I mean, I'm would, I would call the Property Council at the time, they had to negotiate with tenants, 1000s of and come up with a code of conduct of how to interact with a tenant during this, you know, significant period of disruption. And to their credit, they did do that within a reasonably short period of time. On the other hand, infrastructure asset had one contract with talking about 1000s of contracts through the property sector. So it was, it was very, a very difficult period, but I think they did a great job. And then, of course, we headed into in June 22 the start of 13 interest rate rises, which, of course, was a significant headwind to the property sector, because it had performed quite well, even through covert up until the mid, mid 2022 and then we started facing into to higher interest rates. And the higher interest rates, in fact, had been quite difficult for cap rates at the time as a differential. So we know what happened. Cap rates expanded, capital values went down in most cases, the income line, the leasing line was was not too bad that that sort of stood up. You know, it was really the rapid interest rate rises 13 right? Interest rate rises in a short period of time. That really was the problem for the property industry, yeah.

Wouter Klijn 08:50

And then if you look at the listed side of the property sector, somehow they did much better. So I looked at Australia's property that increased by 13.8% and then I think international listed property went more than 9% why is there such a strong difference between the listed space and the unlisted space over that period?

Mary Power 09:12

So I think, you know, the listed is highly correlated to equities, so you have a big influence. You know, I go back to March 2020, and the a rate sector fell by 46% so that was a very, you know, th