UK Real Estate – reasons to be cheerful

By Jonathan Cantor

5 Jun 2026 2 min read

As we head towards the summer, are there any positive signs for the UK real estate sector?

I recently attended UKREiiF, the UK's premier real estate investment and infrastructure event, along with 16,000 others also focussed on the real estate sector.

Whilst there was no disguising the fact that the market is experiencing significant challenges, in particular with viability blocking development plans, high construction costs and macroeconomic and political uncertainty, there was cautious optimism and a genuine desire from various stakeholders (public, private and local government) to make things happen.

Possibly, there was some optimism bias at play and the UK focus of the conference meant that the decrease in overseas investment into the UK did not feature, but it was hard not to be impressed by the positivity being shown and the resilience of the sector as a whole.

There is undoubtedly a degree of “wait and see” in play when it comes to deploying capital, but the impression I got was that teams are ready to move quickly when the market conditions improve.

So what is happening in the market? There are still transactions closing. They just take longer to reach the finish line and often the final terms are very different to those struck months earlier when the transaction started.

There are positive signs. Greystar recently closed the largest pan-European value-add residential fund, which includes UK as one of the target jurisdictions for investments that will include PBSA and purpose designed multi-family assets. The fund was oversubscribed and closed with commitments of 2.7m Euro with a further 550m Euro for discretionary co-investment vehicles. In addition, data from Calastone shows outflows from UK property funds in May 2026, £15m, being at their lowest level in nearly 2 years. These events show an increase in investor's confidence in the market.

Let's hope that is the case and as well as sun and sport, the summer brings an uptick in transactional activity in the real estate sector.