Contributor
New York, NY
Founder & editor of Opensqft. Previously co-founded General Assembly and Common.
For a decade, the prestige trade was allocating to a brand-name fund and letting them buy. That trade has cooled. The managers raising fresh capital in 2026 are the ones who can point to a payroll, a maintenance system, and a renewal desk — not just a buy-side thesis. Why…
Ask any multifamily operator about their biggest expense surprise of the past three years and you will hear the same answer: insurance. Premiums on coastal assets have doubled, and even inland portfolios are seeing 30 to 40 percent renewals. Flipping the Insurance Model…
Autonomy is no longer a research project. In the metros where robotaxis run at scale, two changes are already measurable: parking demand at retail centers is softening, and the trade area of a successful store is widening. Parking Is the First Domino Strip centers were sized for…
Modular construction promises factory precision and compressed schedules. It delivers them — sometimes. This explainer walks through when modular pencils and when it quietly destroys a budget. The Three Questions That Matter Is your design repetitive enough to amortize factory…
Insurance was a rounding error in most underwriting for a generation. It is now, on coastal and wildfire-exposed assets, large enough to swing a deal's viability on its own. From Expense to Investment Thesis When premiums double, basis matters more, geography matters more, and…
What if the anchor tenant of a residential community was not a gym or a pool, but a food hall run by chefs with their own equity stake? CERES is betting that culinary identity can do for new residential what golf courses did for a previous generation — at a fraction of the land…
Every emerging manager eventually wonders whether to hire a placement agent. The honest answer depends entirely on what you are missing and what you can pay for it. Access, Not Magic A good agent sells access to relationships you do not have and credibility you have not yet…
Layering mezzanine or preferred capital onto senior debt means negotiating an intercreditor agreement — a document few read closely until something goes wrong, at which point it is the only document that matters. Cure Rights and Control The provisions worth fighting over are…
The skills that make a great acquisitions professional are almost the opposite of the ones that make a great manager of them. The promotion is a career change disguised as a title bump. Delegate the Model, Keep the Judgment Your job shifts from building the model to building the…