here is the UK’s commercial property market heading next? This was the question I posed this week to over 200 delegates at the FT’s ninth annual property summit in central London — and the answers provided by the collective luminaries of the real estate world will interest those of you investing in listed property companies, funds and even buy-to-let.

Successful property investment is all about timing the cycle. That’s the easy part — the hard part is knowing when the music’s about to stop. And in a sector where events have a habit of repeating themselves, people tend to be long on optimism and short on memory.

My first reporting job was on a commercial property trade magazine where I did untold damage to my liver covering the boom of the Noughties, and then (after a brief interlude covering more glamorous international property markets) I joined the Investors Chronicle in 2008, just as the market tanked.

Listening to speakers at the FT conference this week, in many ways it felt like 2007 all over again. There was a nerve-jangling feeling that the party is about to end.

Investment yields for commercial property are back down to 2007 levels, and in many locations across Europe have contracted even further. But the events that have brought about this cyclical shift are about to change.

Years of rock-bottom interest rates and huge amounts of quantitative easing have been the property industry’s life support system, artificially depressing bond yields and making riskier real estate look attractive to more people. London has become a global playground for foreign investors, driving asset prices even higher and yields ever lower. But now the Fed is looking to pull the trigger on rates, and the prospect of further QE looks slim.

Mike Prew, the veteran property analyst at Jeffries, has coined the term “real estate tourists” to describe overseas investors who are merely holidaying in the property sector (although they have been responsible for some 60 per cent of London’s investment volumes in recent years). Mr Prew turned bearish on the big listed real estate investment trusts (Reits) this summer after the sector doubled in value in the space of four years.

There are others who are getting excited about the prospect of rental growth, but in Mr Prew’s view, the real estate cycle as we know it is “broken” and the so-called “Great Wall of Money” from sovereign wealth funds targeting central London trophy assets has had a few layers of bricks removed. This feeling was certainly evidenced by the delegates I met and interviewed this week — although (as is common at property get-togethers) nobody wanted to use the C-word.

Crash. Or “correction”. I’ve said it — but is one about to happen? Not for the same reasons as last time. Worry factors for UK Reit and property fund investors include increasing evidence that the “tourists” are seeking to check out of the London market, and the chain of events this could unleash.

Property advisors told me that their Asian clients in particular were having conversations about selling and testing the London investment market’s legendary liquidity — implying this was due to currency movements and changing investment needs at home. Data this week from Great Portland Estates estimates that offices in the City of London worth more than £6.1bn are now up for sale on the investment market (if true, a 510 per cent increase since May, and the highest amount for five years) which rather signals that yield compression is at an end. If the tourists are departing, who will buy?

Whether we are seeing the beginning of a wholesale repricing of the commercial property sector remains to be seen — but the big difference this time is that UK banks are nowhere near as exposed. Sovereign wealth funds, private equity — particularly from the US — and a new breed of debt funds have sprung up to fill the finance gap.

Regardless of how all this may all play out, the other key theme from the conference was decentralisation.

Priced out of London, big domestic investors including M&G (the investment arm of the Pru) have turned to speculative office development in the “big six” regional cities — Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol and Birmingham — in the search for yield. It’s a risky strategy (albeit one that looks to reward the early entrants with double-digit returns) but the relative scarcity of new office development in these hubs has resulted in good lettings at decent rents to tech companies and large professional services groups.

Birmingham has moved from sixteenth to sixth place in a list of desirable locations for property investors within the space of a year, underlined by HSBC’s decision to relocate its retail banking headquarters to the region (which after all spawned the Midland Bank in the first place). Central London has not just become expensive for property investors and developers — it is also pricey for the companies paying to occupy their edifices.

Office rents are just one part of the equation — companies know the affordability of rental housing and the cost of commuting are crucial factors in the recruitment and retention of staff. Property developers said that rather than the number of car parking spaces, recruiting young, talented people was top of mind for all the big businesses they spoke to who were seeking a new headquarters. Today’s graduates are more mobile than ever, they noted, and will consider working in London or Manchester in the same breath as Berlin or Barcelona.

Some of the most crowded sessions were those touching on student accommodation and the private rented sector (PRS) or how developers can tap demand from Generation Y by building homes for rent en masse. M&G’s PRS fund has a queue of capital as investors jostle to enter the sector, we were told. In these times of uncertainty, that should provide some succour for buy-to-let investors in Birmingham and beyond.

Claer Barrett is the editor of FT Money. claer.barrett@ft.com; Twitter: @Claerb