International property services group Savills, the No. 1 player in UK real estate, is celebrating twin anniversaries this year — its 160th year of doing business in Britain and its 20th year in China.

Starting with a staff of just 20 in Shanghai in 1995, Savills now operates 14 offices across China, employing more than 6,000 people and overseeing 140 million square meters of property under its management.

Savills China last year reported record profit and revenue.

Jeremy Helsby, chief executive of Savills Plc, was in Shanghai recently for anniversary festivities. He predicted that China may become Savills’ largest business in Asia in the next five years.

Helsby calls China his favorite country and Shanghai his favorite city. He sat down with Shanghai Daily to share some of his views on the rapid development of commercial real estate in China, the increasingly important role of Chinese property investors in the global market and where Savills goes from here in China.

Q: How would you evaluate the development of commercial real estate in China over the past two decades?

A: Let’s just say it’s grown up. It used to be very immature, and now it is a mature and global industry, able to compete with other major cities. The biggest change I’ve seen is definitely the quality of real estate, which has improved enormously. Local developers used to have very little experience. They knew little about how to build a building well. All they cared about was that it looked nice. They didn’t think about it from an investment point of view: Who is going to occupy this building and who is going to pay the rent?

The value of a building is driven by rents. In the last five or 10 years, developers here have become much more sophisticated. They do joint ventures with Hong Kong developers, gain expertise from them and then do it by themselves. The quality of buildings, from a tenant’s point of view, is becoming much higher. Chinese developers are now building projects that not only look sexy but are good to occupy.

Q: Chinese investors, both corporate and private, have been aggressively making overseas investments in the past few years. Would you comment on that buying spree?

A: I think it’s not so much a spree, rather it’s a long-term trend. I am incredibly bullish about it because so much wealth in China has been created. Chinese people travel more and are looking at new markets all the time, whether they are in America, Europe or Asia. They are becoming very sophisticated. I think this trend will expand steadily in the next 10 years. It is not bubble. This is long-term strategic investment. More Chinese people want to put some of their money overseas. They are following their children’s education. China will continue to create wealth for all the reasons why it has done so in the last 10 years. The rate may slow, but the trend will continue. For us, it’s the most exciting growth market in the world.

Q: How does Savills respond to such a trend?

A: The pace of Chinese investment is huge, probably greater than the pace of Savills’ growth. Over the last five years, the pace of investment outside of China has been significant, both in residential and commercial, both in private and corporate. For instance, in London, we have a Chinese desk staffed by Chinese speakers whose role is to assist Chinese investors in UK real estate, and we are about to do the same thing in New York. In Sydney, our office in Chinatown was started entirely with Chinese people, and 80 percent of houses are sold to Chinese-speaking buyers. To me, the China market is potentially the most exciting and dynamic in the world because you are creating millionaires and billionaires faster than any other country in the world.

Q: Chinese buyers often have been blamed for soaring property prices in overseas markets such as London, Sydney and Melbourne. What’s your view on that?

A: In London, that’s certainly nonsense. In the existing market, overseas buyers represent only about 10 percent of the market, which is a tiny proportion. The new development market is just a very small percentage of the overall market, and we are talking here only about the new development market. The percentage of overseas buyers has been actually coming down as more British buyers come into the market. I can’t comment on Australia because I am not in Australia. But I was there a few months ago and did talk to some people there. There is a lot of demand in Australia and in Chinatown in Sydney, that’s true. But if you talk about the market as a whole, you will see there are huge numbers of people coming to live in Australia who are not Chinese. A lot of English people want to move to Australia because it is a lovely place to live in. Is that a bubble and is it going to burst? No. You just have a lot of people and a lot of money in property in Australia, not just purely Chinese people.

Q: What are the prospects of the commercial real estate investment market in China? What challenges does that market face?

A: The challenge here is that lease periods are very short. If I am a global investor, I can invest in London today at around a 4 percent cap rate and I probably get a 20-year lease — what we call “upper only” lease. That means every five years, the rent can only go up, never down. So you buy it like a bond, and that’s a very attractive proposition. In China, I get a three-year lease. There is so much development coming on — and that’s the good thing and the bad thing about China. You build so quickly and have so much land, which makes preservation of value more difficult commercially. In London, the value is so high because there is so little available land. You can build high; we can’t.

I think, from an overseas point of view, that China will have a lot of development coming through in the next two years and my gut feel is that people might wait. The commercial real estate market in China is more attractive now, but I think global investors will wait for one or two years for these developments to come through and see what happens before investing. Still, I am very positive about the market here.

Q: Savills has been present in China for 20 years. What is the biggest challenge you have had in expanding your operations here?

A: More companies are coming into the market, which leads to intensifying competition. Our biggest challenge is people — finding professional property people — because the industry here is relatively young. We have to train more people than we would probably like to have to do. We have to take a longer-term view. Training takes up to five years. In the UK, we have a long tradition of chartered surveyors. People go to university for a property degree. But you don’t have that history in China. In Beijing and Shanghai, the situation is easier, but if we expand into new cities, particularly second-tier and smaller cities, it is difficult to find quality people, so we have to bring people out from Shanghai and Beijing to train local staff, which takes time.

Q: Savills started with 20 people in Shanghai in 1995, and now you have more than 6,000 staff in the country. How do you see those numbers growing in the next couple of years?

A: In the next five to seven years, we ought to be able to get close to doubling our turnover as the industry becomes more mature, the market becomes more international and we are better able to find quality people. I see huge growth that will probably come organically rather than through acquisitions.