Will Robson on real estate debt
From GRI Club Interviews: Will Robson - “Lenders with rescue capital are looking at the data” | EN 🌐 · · GRI Institute
“Bringing this index to the market helps institutionalize real estate debt, and I think we'll continue to see a lot more debt flowing through these alternative routes to real estate lending.”
On , Will Robson, Global Head of Real Estate Applied Research at MSCI, spoke about real estate debt during GRI Club Interviews: Will Robson - “Lenders with rescue capital are looking at the data” | EN 🌐 on GRI Institute.
About Will Robson
Will Robson, Global Head of Real Estate Solutions Research at MSCI, discussed the firm's recent launch of a real estate debt fund index in a February 2025 interview. He stated that the index helps to "institutionalize" real estate debt and predicted continued growth in debt flowing through alternative lending routes. Robson noted that lenders and equity investors providing "rescue capital" are using MSCI's loan-level data to identify distressed assets, particularly in markets such as U.S. CBD offices that have seen significant price corrections. In earlier appearances, Robson addressed the use of data in multi-asset-class portfolios. In a 2022 interview, he argued that investors often rely on proxy data for private infrastructure, which can lead to "sub-optimal allocations" by misrepresenting correlations and volatilities. In a 2021 presentation on climate risk, Robson distinguished between backward-looking carbon footprinting and forward-looking measures like climate value at risk, which he described as assessing the potential financial implications of future climate hazards on portfolios.