APAC living crosses from alternative to core

Cushman & Wakefield's inaugural APAC Living Investor Survey 2026, reported by IREI, finds 85% of surveyed investors planning to increase living investment over the next five years, with respondents collectively estimating $33.2 billion of deployment across the region in that window. Since the number reflects allocator conviction rather than a booked transaction pipeline, it gives the sector a coherent region-wide benchmark and a baseline for every future survey to be judged against. At that scale, the alternatives label starts to look like a holdover.

A third of investors with diversified real estate portfolios expect living to exceed 30% of those portfolios within five years, which is the more telling number in the survey and the one that puts the sector in core territory. The survey's stated justification leans on defensive characteristics—stabilized, income-producing assets with resilient demand fundamentals—rather than a growth story, and Cushman & Wakefield's Conal Newland, international director and head of living for APAC, calls that shift institutionalization: living evolving from an alternative strategy into core real estate even amid economic and geopolitical uncertainty. Investor preference for income is doing the heavy lifting.

The survey's thesis fits the supply-side recovery this publication has tracked in the US, where a drop in construction is giving owners leverage across property types, and APAC living shares that logic: allocators are paying up for existing, income-producing assets while new supply gets harder to deliver. Read that way, the $33.2 billion estimate is less a precise projection than a floor on how seriously the region's investors are treating the sector.

Because APAC's living markets vary widely, the aggregate dollar figure does not reveal where execution will be easiest, which is why the 30% portfolio target is the more durable signal. It describes the end state investors are planning toward.

Allocators weighing living against data-center or industrial exposure should watch the 30% threshold: once living crosses that share inside diversified portfolios, it stops being an 'alternative' in manager letters and starts being benchmarked and underwritten like core property. That shift will reward sponsors who deliver cash flow and punish those who sell living on narrative, as living gets judged against the same income benchmarks as office and logistics. The test now is whether $33.2 billion can actually be put to work in markets where stabilized living assets remain scarce.