A Bright Start to the Year

Despite the economic doom and gloom that continues to surround us all, the new year has started brightly for us with, perhaps, encouraging signs that the inherent optimism of developers has not been completely lost.

Since the start of the year, we’ve reached agreements with developers in Turkey, Portugal and Morocco to assist with the master planning of new integrated resorts. The consensus among these groups is the thought that now is the perfect time to start planning the master planning process, together with the subsequent submission for planning approvals, will take 12-18 months by which time it would be reasonable to expect that we’ll have reached the bottom of the market and the graph of economic indicators will be climbing again. And, the logic further goes, if that’s not the case and we’re still mired in recession, then that will be a great time to start construction because build costs will be as low as they’re going to get.

The other common threads through each of these developments is that they are well funded, well located and are being developed by groups with solid track records of delivering returns on investment, all of which helps to ease the concerns of investors.