Capital is ready, but the map is hazy. We dive straight into the policy and rates fog shaping real estate strategy and explain why non-financial risks—immigration rules, housing constraints, and trade policy—now sit beside cost of capital as core investment variables. Our conversation zeroes in on how top operators are splitting into three distinct camps: defensive “heavy fog,” patient “patchy fog,” and opportunistic “clearing fog,” each with a different bet on rates, liquidity, and timing.
From there, we track where capital is actually flowing. Data centers lead for the third year running as AI training and inference strain grids and timelines, shifting the bottleneck from money to megawatts and interconnections. Senior housing emerges as human infrastructure, with the oldest boomers turning 80 in 2026, supply at historic lows, and occupancy poised to break 90%. Self-storage cements its rise to a fifth major property type, evolving into climate-controlled utility space and storage condos that blend personal and small business demand. We also unpack a more nuanced picture of the traditional sectors: office bifurcation with trophy stability and legacy distress, medical office as a demographic-backed bright spot, multifamily’s tilt to workforce and single-family rentals, and industrial’s new constraints around costs and power availability.
Demographics tie it together. With 83% of recent U.S. population gains driven by net migration and 30% of construction workers foreign-born, immigration policy becomes a first-order driver of GDP, labor supply, and housing delivery. Add a climate-driven “snowbelt reversal” among under-30s and 60–69-year-olds, and market planning looks very different from the last cycle. We then shift to the operational frontier: agentic AI and property operating systems using digital twins to create “self-driving buildings,” cutting lead-to-lease times, boosting conversion rates, and centralizing portfolio management even as on-site tech decentralizes. The strategy takeaway is simple and hard: micro beats macro. Think grid nodes, submarkets, and operators with measurable efficiency. Our market watch spans Dallas–Fort Worth at the top, Jersey City’s cost-and-proximity edge, Brooklyn’s creative office nodes, and Calgary’s pivot paired with Canada’s purpose-built rental surge.
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