Israel is ranked 34th out of 97 countries in the Jones Lang Lasalle Global Transparency Index for 2012. The US tops the index, followed by the UK, Australia, the Netherlands, and New Zealand, as "Anglophone markets continue to dominate top ranks" as JLL puts it.
JLL says that the 2012 survey found that almost 90% of markets improved since the previous biennial survey in 2010, which reflected the slowdown in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis.
JLL classifies Israel as "semi-transparent". Israel fell six places in the new and expanded survey from 28th place in the 2010 survey. Israel was ranked 27th place in 2008 and 29th in 2006. Israel tops the 24 countries Middle East and African countries included in the 2012 survey. JLL says, "The pace of improvement in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has been slower than in other regions since 2010. Dubai remains the region's most transparent market, but the most significant progress has been in the Lebanon, where the market is gaining transparency and attracting more institutional players. By contrast, Egypt is the only market globally to have registered deterioration in transparency over the past two years."
Before National Economics Council chairman Eugene Kandel calls on foreign investors to take up positions in the Israeli real estate market, he ought to know that, to foreign investors, Israel does not appear to be an attractive market. Although Israel's transparency level has risen in the past two years, the improvement was less than in other countries, driving Israel's rank down behind Greece, and just above the Philippines and Slovakia.
JLL's charts highlight the inverse relationship between transparency and corruption as measured by Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index, which ranks Israel 36th out of 183 countries examined. Since corruption is not the problem, Israel's overall score is dragged down by other factors. JLL does not go into detail about Israel, except for one revealing sentence: Israel is mentioned alongside South Korea and Dubai as a market with strong regulation but a paucity of market data, which it attributes to powerful real estate companies that do not adopt international standards.
Improving market fundamentals data and performance measurement, combined with better governance of listed vehicles, have underpinned much of the transparency progress over the past two years. Major leaps in performance data have been made in Brazil, Emerging Asia, Mexico and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Market fundamentals data has been enhanced in most markets, with several CEE countries, such as Poland, adopting and improving upon best practices for real estate market data collation.
The issue of environmental sustainability is gradually moving to the forefront of real estate investor and corporate occupier concerns. In response, we have launched a separate Real Estate Sustainability Transparency Index for a sub-set of 28 countries, covering such issues as energy benchmarking and Green Building rating systems. The UK, Australia and France are the top scoring countries in this new Index.
The Global Transparency Index comprises five sub-categories - performance measurement, market fundamentals, governance, regulations and laws, and the transaction process - each comprised of topics, for a total of 83 questions and data points.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on August 7, 2012
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