The Global Real Estate Transparency Index 2024

Through thirteen editions spanning 25 years, JLL and LaSalle’s Transparency Index has become established as the industry’s most widely used benchmark for assessing market transparency and is an essential guide for cross-border investors, lenders, developers and occupiers of real estate – as well as government and industry bodies looking for international benchmarks.

The 2024 Index covers a wide range of topics that determine how transparent a real estate market is, from investment performance benchmarks and market data to transaction processes and sustainability metrics. This latest edition includes 151 cities in 89 countries and territories, presenting a uniquely global picture of real estate transparency.

The most transparent markets have registered the strongest gains in the 2024 Index as they set new benchmarks for technology integration, deeper data availability and climate reporting. The U.S., Canada, France and Australia are all among the global top improvers, while Singapore has entered the ‘Highly Transparent’ group for the first time, boosted by a focus on sustainability and digital services. This top set of countries has attracted over US$1.2 trillion in direct commercial real estate investment over the last two years, more than 80% of the global total. And with the lowest risk and highest levels of transparency around demand and pricing dynamics, in particular for growth property sectors, the world’s most transparent markets are positioned to lead the cyclical recovery in liquidity as capital markets activity increases.

Beyond the ‘Highly Transparent’ countries, several major markets that have made progress and are focused on enabling higher levels of institutionalization – including India, Mainland China’s leading cities and South Korea in Asia Pacific, and the UAE and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region – offer strong long-term prospects. These markets will require a significant expansion of urban infrastructure over the coming decade but have collectively received only 6% of global investment since 2022, highlighting the scale of opportunity as transparency improves further. Progress elsewhere has been limited, and countries further down the rankings will need to pick up the pace to close the transparency gap. 

The advent of widespread generative AI (GenAI) capabilities has supercharged expectations for technology’s impact on real estate. Investment into AI is growing exponentially, and although many applications are at an exploratory stage it is already boosting transparency across the industry – helping to sift through and summarize huge volumes of legal documents, automating building management, powering interactive urban and architectural design, and enabling unprecedented levels of speed and granularity in valuations and analytics. JLL’s AI platform, for example, already helps to identify one in five capital markets opportunities globally. But extracting full value from AI will require considerable effort and investment in creating the right architecture and governance to capture standardized data that can be fed into models, something most companies – and governments – are still lacking. As these capabilities are built out, AI offers the potential for significant advances in productivity and transparency.

Sustainability transparency is becoming increasingly critical as the deadline to halve emissions by 2030 in line with the Paris Agreement nears and a growing number of countries and cities set out mandatory long-term decarbonization pathways. With new building energy performance standards, sustainability reporting requirements and corporate commitments ramping up, sustainability has been the largest driver of transparency improvements in 2024.

Despite the progress made so far, sustainability metrics continue to be among the least transparent globally. Many companies are still at an early stage in tracking their actual portfolio emissions, building level performance or climate risk, with a lack of standardized information and processes contributing to concerns about data quality and greenwashing. Markets with the clearest long-term pathway to more sustainable real estate – such as France, Japan, leading cities in the U.S., and the UK – will offer the most transparent and predictable environments, helping to address the significant shortfall in low-carbon buildings and allowing occupiers to make location and space decisions with confidence, governments to meet decarbonization targets and investors to future-proof their portfolios.