‘The mood is much better,’ he said. ‘Obviously contributing to that is inflation coming down and interest rates coming down. Everyone is feeling very positive about economic prospects. Transactions are already following.’

Duarte said that valuations in most sectors and geographies have bottomed out following the market disruption seen in the last two years and that he expected the market to come back strongly.

‘Potentially, we've hit the bottom,’ he said. ‘There will be more and more allocations to real estate and I have certainly been having a lot more discussions with investors over the last two quarters than we did last year. That points in the right direction.’

The situation, Duarte added, is helped by the fact that, unlike previous downturns, occupier demand remained robust over the last two years. ‘In Europe, at least, we find that the supply/demand fundamentals are much stronger than they should have been considering that we had a downturn,’ he said.

‘You would normally associate a downturn like this with rents coming down quite significantly as a result of vacancy going up. But we haven't had that. We’ve continued to have a relatively robust occupier market. We don't, at this point in the cycle, have the excess stock that needs to be absorbed.’

He added: ‘Vacancies are low across all sectors, even in the office sector for the right quality offices. We are also seeing record high employment. So we expect to see very strong rental growth for the next few years, especially given that there's no development pipeline.’