Funding’s new frontier

Lebanon has all it takes to be a haven for real estate investors; no crash in property prices is known to have ever driven desperate developers to leap off their office balconies. Even when real estate financing bubbles were bursting in neighboring countries and across the Atlantic, the case for Lebanese real estate remained strong, with compelling fundamentals and more specifically, guaranteed tightness in land supply. Traditional real estate funding — with cash, help of family, bank loans and some government-subsidized schemes — is as deeply entrenched in Lebanon as is the national preference for real estate as an investment. So far, what remains scarce within Lebanese borders is private equity (PE) real estate funds. But some entrepreneurial minds have placed their bets on fund-type private equity investing in the local real estate scene, arguing that Lebanon’s property boom (most of the $14 billion in FDI inflow since 2008 was