Report Puts Price on Global Developed Real Estate

What is the total value of all of the developed real estate in the world? According to the British real estate advisory firm Savills, the price tag in 2015 for that global inventory would be $217 trillion.

How much is $217 trillion? Well, that would equal 2.7 times the world’s GDP or approximately 60 percent of all mainstream global assets.

“To give this figure context, the total value of all the gold ever mined is approximately $6 trillion, which pales in comparison to the total value of developed property by a factor of 36-to-1,” observed Yolande Barnes, head of world research at Savills. “The value of global real estate exceeds – by almost a third – the total value of all globally traded equities and securitized debt instruments put together and this highlights the important role that real estate plays in economies worldwide. Real estate is the pre-eminent asset class which will be most impacted by global monetary conditions and investment activity and which, in turn, has the power to most impact national and international economies.”

The Savills data also found that residential property was the greatest single component of global real estate value, totaling $162 trillion or 75 percent of the whole. Twenty-one percent of the world’s total residential asset value is in North America, although the continent is home to only five per cent of the world’s population, whereas China accounts for nearly one-quarter of the residential total value despite having one-fifth of the world’s population.

On the commercial real estate side, Savills determined that nearly half of the total asset value for the sector is in North America, while Europe makes up over 25 percent and Asia and Australasia contain 22 per cent, with the remaining five percent divided between South America, the Middle East and Africa.