As per the global commercial real estate services and investment management company JLL, two-thirds of the global markets have witnessed increased transparency over the past two years.
The agency, which released the 14th edition of its Global Real Estate Transparency Index (GRETI) last week, revealed that while established markets continued to capture the majority of global capital, countries in APAC (Asia-Pacific) and MENA (Middle East and North Africa) have emerged as primary engines of global transparency gains due to rapid digitisation and proactive government reforms.
As market conditions become more segmented, commercial real estate transparency increasingly plays a crucial role in global liquidity and capital allocation.
“Transaction volumes in the ‘Highly Transparent’ group have risen by 64% over the past two years, outpacing the rest of the world by 20 percentage points. Because investors require scale, early price discovery, and reliable data to mitigate risk, these thirteen markets now represent 56% of total income-producing real estate worldwide and more than 80% of global direct investment,” JLL said.
“Transparency is no longer just a benchmark for market maturity: it’s a prerequisite for global capital deployment,” noted Richard Bloxam, CEO of Capital Markets at JLL.
“In a period of uncertainty, investors are prioritizing markets with strong digital infrastructure, robust data disclosure, and regulatory clarity. The reforms underway across a number of APAC and MENA markets will help improve operating conditions, narrow the transparency gap with established global hubs, and unlock cross-border investment,” he added further.
Five countries in Asia-Pacific generated the strongest transparency gains in this year’s survey, accounting for half of the top 10 improvers worldwide.
India led the upward trajectory through the expansion of its digital infrastructure, enhanced market data availability, and an expanding REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) market.
“Vietnam, South Korea, and Australia are already some of the world’s most transparent countries, and Thailand also made major strides by strengthening corporate governance standards, refining legal enforcement, and expanding disclosure around alternative property sectors. As a result, cross-border investment into Asia-Pacific has rebounded sharply, driving direct transaction volumes in key markets such as India and Vietnam to all-time highs,” JLL remarked.
Beyond traditional property sectors, greater transparency is expanding the investable universe into more operationally intensive and non-traditional real estate.
Alternative asset classes such as data centers and infrastructure now account for 20% of direct transaction volumes globally, and investors in these sectors are placing greater emphasis on transparency around energy grid capacity and power resilience.
“Over the last cycle transparency gains have concentrated in debt markets and niche and alternative sectors, which are all gradually approaching the data availability in the traditional sectors,” said Dominic Silman, Chief Economist for LaSalle.
“As transparency in an alternative sector improves, that’s often a leading indicator of growing institutionalization and investment,” Silman stated further.
JLL also found regulatory changes bringing an influx of private wealth and retail and pension capital into real estate, creating a greater need for standardised, higher-frequency reporting and valuation transparency.