A technical recession and low investor confidence has produced a seven-year investment low in the commercial property market.

London's West End unseated Hong Kong-Central as the world's highest-priced office market, but Asia continued to dominate the world's most expensive office locations, accounting for four of the top five markets.

The United States has long held sway over the global economy and as such its welfare has had far reaching implications for the rest of the world. Cue the sub-prime mortgage crisis in 2007 which effectively crashed the US housing market, and of which the effects are still very much in evidence, particularly in America and parts of Europe.