Christian Ulbrich
Management
Well, again, the GFC, I can only repeat myself, was a lack of trust in the financial stability of banks. So what had to be done was to get that trust back into the market and then the economy was starting to develop again. Here we have a virus, which is affecting people personally. So what is needed is that people have their confidence that their health is not exposed. And, I guess, at the end of the day, for most people that would mean, they are waiting for the vaccine to feel really comfortable again. And we don't know when that will be delivered. And the big difference at that time was, every business was continuing to operate many people in a more muted fashion, but everybody was operating. We didn't have any lockdowns of buildings or anything like that. At the moment, we have still most of the countries we operate in, in a lockdown mode. And that is a massive difference. And therefore, it is very hard to make any comparisons between the two. I think we all have to be a little bit patient and see the real impact on the economy going forward. What I can assure you that, we are fully operational as an organization. So every client demand, which is out there, we can cover. There's all kinds of technology being used to help deliver deals on the leasing and on the capital markets side. When you look at the leasing side, you have the full spectrum of renewals. I mean, renewals will happen anyway, because people will have to renew space. They may take a little bit less, but they will renew their space, in principle. So that piece will continue. And then usually kind of the strategic deals. And if I had decided that I want to move my -- a major location into a different location, those deal tend to continue. They will be slowed, but they tend to continue. What is mainly impacted, for the time being, is kind of the smaller things. Companies planned for taking additional floor, additional 10% of space. They kind of push that out, because they want to see how the economy is developing. But anything which is strategic tends to happen, but slightly belated. That is on the leasing side. On the capital markets side, as I said earlier, there is still the need to find the new kind of matching price between buyers and sellers. It's not that nothing is happening. Obviously, there are transactions happening, but at a much lower rate than we would have seen before the COVID crisis. And so, that will take time until people have the confidence that they think that this is the right price to buy or to sell.