Savills, a global real estate services provider listed on the London Stock Exchange, has released its annual report on the role that real property plays in the investment world. Here are some of its key points:

To expand on that last point a bit, the report says that volume has grown by 62% in North America during this period and by 65% in EMEA; the rate of growth in Asia Pacific has been somewhat more subdued, at 18%.

Population versus Value

The value of all developed real estate in the world, by Savills’ count, in U.S. dollars, is $217 trillion. This is 2.7 times the world’s gross domestic product.

Perhaps counter to Malthusian intuitions, there is no very close relationship between the percentage of the globe’s total human population to be found in a given region and the percentage of total residential real estate value there. Asia and the Pacific have 37% of the former but only 20% of the latter. There is another such disparity from the other side in North America, which represents only 5% of the globe’s population, but lives in 21% of its residential real estate by value (and shops/works etc. within 45% of the world’s commercial real estate by value as noted above.)

In Europe, too, there is a big gap between the population numbers and the value numbers. It represents 11% of the world’s population, 24% of residential value, 28% of commercial value.