Bisnow Reports

This holiday season is one filled with contradictions for retail real estate. Consumer confidence has plummeted, but their spending is at all-time highs. Leasing is bustling and vacancy is tight, but store closures are outpacing openings.On this episode, Northwood Retail President Ward Kampf joins the show to unpack the uncertainty surrounding the asset class, which has also been deeply impact by tariffs, artificial intell...

2025 has not gone according to plan.

Real estate has been bandied about by headwinds of economic, policy and fundamental changes. Interest rate reductions and rising deal flow has the industry feeling better, but stability is a pipe dream these days, especially when federal data is missing and CRE research can conflict.

But forget about the data, economist Peter Linneman said on this week’s show — how is it really going in y...

While the longest government shutdown in U.S. history may be over, the commercial real estate industry will be feeling its impact for some time. From HUD halting originations and approvals to hotel demand drying up and data going away, the pain has been widespread.
And it will continue to impact underwriting and kill deals, especially in the multifamily realm, Origin Investments co-CEO Michael Episcope said.

Roughly 2,00...

The U.S. office market is molting. 

The industry has spent the last five years shedding its old skin — and underperforming assets — and is attempting to emerge fresh and appealing to workers.

Return-to-office mandates are helping bring workers back to their desks, and vacancy just ticked down for the first time since 2019. But few mandates come with teeth, meaning how many employees actually show up on any given day ...

After years of cautious experimentation, CRE’s biggest players are finally scaling artificial intelligence.

JLL has been at the forefront of it, launching an in-house AI platform called Falcon that is cutting deal timelines from weeks to hours and automating the drudgery that once bogged down teams. The result is higher revenue per head, higher success rates when pitching and faster closings.

On this week’s show, CEO...

Live from the CREtech main stage at New York’s Javits Center on October 21, WeWork CEO John Santora sat down with Bisnow Editor-in-Chief Mark Bonner to unpack one of CRE’s biggest comebacks — from bankruptcy to EBITDA positive, $2.2B in revenue and 550K members, including 47 of the Fortune 100. Occupancy has surged past 90% in Midtown Manhattan and hit 100% in key global markets.

This conversation dropped 24 hours early — i...

The optimism that permeated commercial real estate at the start of 2025 has died down as the year has gone on.

That's the headline from Deloitte's annual CRE executive survey, but Deloitte partner Sally Ann Flood said on this week's episode that the responses showed an increasingly bifurcated market. Some asset classes, like data centers and warehouses, are "red hot," while investors are still grappling with distress in...

The AI trade is reshaping markets and CRE is riding shotgun.

A surge of capital into chips and data centers has turned AI into the backbone of U.S. growth — pushing tech spending to dot-com-era highs and doubling data center pipelines.

But will it pay off? Alarm bells are ringing that adoption may not match optimism. That could quickly mean swathes of massive data centers sitting vacant.

Michael Pearce, deputy chief U.S. econ...

The starting gun has gone off: The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates 25 basis points. Now CRE can be off to the races.

At least that’s the narrative.

In practice, CRE cares more about long-term debt, and the 10-year Treasury ran counter to expectations and actually rose 10 bps, Jim Costello, MSCI’s director of real estate economics, said on this week’s show. Besides, the industry’s problems go far beyond interest rates,...

It’s a high-pressure year for multifamily. Looming maturities, tough capital markets, changing policies, a major shake-up of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on the horizon and intensified national attention are all converging to complicate the sector.

But multifamily fundamentals are strong, Sharon Karaffa, president of multifamily debt and structured finance at Newmark, said on this week’s episode.

“Absorption has been very high...

Global bond markets are under siege and CRE is caught in the crossfire.

UK 30-year gilt yields surged to their highest level since 1998, and volatility in U.S. Treasuries has repeatedly brushed them against 5%.

For commercial real estate, that means more expensive debt, climbing cap rates and global investors second-guessing allocations.

Christopher Stanley, banking industry practice lead at Moody’s Analytics, sai...

This episode of First Draft Live is presented by Agora.

The godfather of the CMBS market issued a warning that commercial real estate is not out of the woods of its downturn, which is a potential problem for the U.S. economy. 

“The losses in CRE are so big that the rippling effect of those losses to the economy are so big that they could be quite harmful,” Ethan Penner, the founder of Mosaic Real Estate Investors, said o...

This episode of First Draft Live is presented by Agora.

It’s been a chaotic year for the construction industry. 

Between a volatile tariff regime, elevated interest rates and increased pressures on its labor force, contractors have had to navigate one of the most difficult environments in recent memory. 

On this week’s First Draft Live, Shawmut Design and Construction CEO Les Hiscoe breaks down the impacts of the ...

The original Opportunity Zone program drove more than $100B into real estate and business investment, but it also faced criticism it missed its mark, failing to spur development in the areas that needed it most.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act just made OZs permanent and it aims to fix all that, tightening the rules on what areas may be designated OZs, lowering the area median income threshold and heavily incentivizing rural...

Liberation Day Part 2 has come and gone, and the U.S. has more clarity on the global trade landscape.

Some of the levies will have CRE breathing easier, but some — including the 35% rate on Canada, a hugely important market for construction material imports — might be worse than the industry feared. Already, tariffs have driven construction costs up anywhere from 6% to 10%.

But at least some of the uncertainty has been chipp...

The rise of AI is pushing data centers to their limits. Calls for bigger, denser facilities are increasing and tenant power requirements are doubling in many markets.

It’s still not enough to meet the needs of today’s market or tomorrow’s users.

On this episode, Bisnow National Data Center Reporter Dan Rabb said keeping the momentum of the data center boom is all about finding power. And while possible solutions abound — mic...

Though a few brave (or crazy) pioneers have dabbled with using crypto in commercial real estate, the industry has mostly sat on the sidelines for years.

The reason: not enough regulation, no stability or guardrails.

This week, that started to change. The passage of the GENIUS Act to create a framework for stablecoins, plus two other bills making their way through Congress, could lead to a rapid rise of building tokenization,...

The One Big Beautiful Bill is now law, and its impact on housing could be massive.

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit received its biggest reform in 25 years, including halving the requirements of how much of its funding must come from municipal bonds.

LIHTC and the Opportunity Zones program were both made permanent, and major adjustments to OZs — including a wave of new zones to come and a new focus on rural areas — could su...

U.S. foreign policy these days is a sea of uncertainty — CRE investors’ least favorite thing. From whipsaw tariffs to taxes seen as “revenge” against international players who don’t fall in line with Trump administration goals, money managers are increasingly tentative to put their money on American soil.

This week, Trepp Senior Research Manager Tom Taylor discussed why it makes sense that some global investors are pulling ...