LeadingRE Asia Pacific Forum Tokyo 2026

What Tokyo told us about where capital is moving next

By Abhii Dabas, Founder and CEO, INTRIC

Our founder Abhii Dabas joined the Asia Pacific Forum hosted by Leading Real Estate Companies of the World in Tokyo. Across two days of conversations with agency leaders, investors, developers, family offices and cross-border advisors, one theme kept surfacing: global wealth is becoming dramatically more mobile, and the reasons behind that movement are becoming easier to predict.

Tax is now one of the biggest drivers of capital flows

You can see it in the corridors themselves. New York to Florida. Western Europe to Thailand. High-tax jurisdictions into globally diversified structures and residency strategies.

Capital is not only chasing returns any more. It is chasing efficiency, optionality and resilience, and it is moving faster than most market commentary allows for.

Lifestyle has become an investment thesis

Los Cabos is seeing extraordinary inflows, particularly from the US West Coast. Hawaii continues to attract globally mobile capital despite pricing pressure.

The question behind those purchases is rarely about yield. It is about where a family wants its network, health, education and quality of life anchored over the next twenty years.

Investors want redundancy, not just a second home

Residency-by-investment continues to shape buying behaviour. Malta, Greece and Latvia all came up repeatedly in conversations about mobility, diversification and long-term planning.

What sophisticated investors are actually buying is redundancy. A second base. A second banking corridor. A second legal system. A second set of options if the first set narrows.

Geopolitics keeps pointing to the same two countries

When the conversation turned to preserving wealth through uncertainty, New Zealand and Australia were consistently near the top of the list. Stable governance, strong institutions, food and energy security, and distance from the flashpoints.

Africa is entering the conversation seriously

Some of the most interesting discussions in Tokyo were about emerging destinations. Kenya and Zimbabwe are drawing attention from investors looking beyond traditional Western markets for long-term asymmetric opportunities, and looking early, before institutional capital fully arrives.

The bigger shift

Cross-border wealth is no longer niche. It is becoming the default mindset of sophisticated capital.

The investors who do well from here will be the ones who understand more than individual cities and projects. They will be reading global capital corridors, policy shifts, migration patterns, tax structures, demographic flows and geopolitical risk as they happen.

That is the work we do at INTRIC. We study these shifts, capital movements and emerging diversification corridors across more than 70 markets, so our members can see where capital is moving before the headlines catch up.

If you are a family office, investor, developer, advisor or globally minded entrepreneur, you can request access to the latest INTRIC Intelligence insights and reports.