ABSTRACT
Many US investors and most UK investors going international looked first at investing in continental Europe driven by familiarity and perceptions of risk. However, US opportunity funds opened up the new emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s and entered Latin American and Asian markets in force in the following decade. Table 10.2 shows a split of the main countries of Europe into core, developing and emerging markets as defined in the first edition of this book. Low-risk investors would be more likely to go to core markets; high return investors such as opportunity funds might seek out emerging markets. The allocation of countries to core, developing and emerging property investment markets is somewhat arbitrary and changes over time. (Several of the developing markets shown in Table 10.2 are now core markets, and some emerging markets are better described as developing.) Nevertheless, broadly speaking, core markets have a benchmark (for the relevance of this, see Chapter 3), are politically stable, have a stable currency, offer professional services necessary for institutional investment and are liquid and transparent.
