At Mipim 2026 in Cannes last week, Savills Investment Management's chief investment officer, Michael Neal, and its head of France, Belgium and Luxembourg, Laurent Vouin, sat down with Paul Norman from CoStar News and Luc-Étienne Rouillard Lafond from sister publication Business Immo.
They initially spoke about the market environment and investment capacities, where Neal said: "I think when we look at the [Savills IM's] 2026 outlook report, the one thing we did talk about was 2025 being really a year of reset where valuations bottom, where you saw performance across global indices starting to trend positive.
"Investors are looking for data points, really, to have that confidence that the outlook looks strong."
Neal also spoke about the recent escalation in the Middle East and how that might be changing the conversations at Mipim: "Obviously the situation in the Middle East is concerning, but I think where investors have got to from a pure economic and future outlook, performance perspective is a world where geopolitics is playing a very significant role in investor thoughts."
He added: "Our view is ultimately [...] that risks have been elevated for some time.
"As an investor, you should always play an asymmetrical approach to risk and return.
"So wherever you sit within the overall risk spectrum, whether you're a core investor, core plus, value-add, opportunistic, you should be expecting higher returns than what you were previously there just to compensate ultimately for the geopolitical risk."
Narrowing in on the company's strategy for France, Vouin said: "France is of course a very important country for most of our strategy that we're trying to deploy across Europe. And therefore we try to be as active as we can on offices, on logistics and CBD offices, mostly on logistics, on residential.
"We have a new joint venture with EDF Invest and that was started at the end of last year. And we are working on some important mandates of us that we we've been managing for quite a long time already. So we're trying to be active across the market."
He did, however, suggest there was a lack of product, though he acknowledged it was early in Mipim, as he was speaking on the Tuesday.
For specific conversations about the UK and French markets, especially residential, and the importance of income resilience, click on the play button above.