By Neil Lewis, CEO and founder, Property Secrets

There was something different about this year's Munich real estate expo. For anyone who's a regular, it was pretty unmissable. For the first time, as long as I can recall, there was a significant number of German investors present.

I know this because they were the ones not wearing the instant translation headphones in the German language seminars. And, believe me, the number of non-headphone wearers had shot up.

This tells us a lot about the development phase of the German property market.

The last time I talked about the German market, back at the end of 2005, I said we were in a wait and see phase. We could see the big investors from outside the country piling in to massive property investments in the big German cities.