The firm has closed £610m of transactions in Europe and the US since June 2012, and the deal flow continues apace, says Nick Judd, who co-founded the business with Philip Churchill. “We deal with institutions who then sell down their investments to their friends and family networks, who tend to be very wealthy and international,” he says. “They’ve always invested overseas and one of the reasons they continue to do so is the global phenomenon, the hunt for yield. They desperately want yield, and safe yield.”
Judd, who had lived in the Gulf for over four years before 90 North, says low oil prices, the wars in Syria and Yemen and pressure on resources from rapid population growth across the region had so far supported the move to invest in real estate overseas. “We’ve gone from a position a few years back of people who had funds that they wanted to invest overseas to a position where they remain very wealthy and they now need to invest overseas to protect their wealth,” he says. “What we see is that the investments we bring to our partners in the Middle East are oversubscribed and we are being pushed down on our co-investment, which suggests that the level of interest in international real estate is as strong as ever at the moment.”