Topic
Strategies, structures, and stories from the people allocating capital to the built world.
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…
Most pro formas built between 2015 and 2021 carried one silent assumption: exit cap rates at or below entry. That assumption is gone, and the models that still lean on it are producing fiction. Three Inputs to Re-Examine Start with the exit cap — underwrite it flat to entry at…
Underwrite the exit cap flat to entry as your base case, and wider in your downside. If a deal only clears the hurdle with compression baked in, you're not winning a deal — you're buying optionality on rates, and that's a different (worse) business. The way to stay competitive without lying is to find the return in…
Two years ago, the median emerging manager ran their entire acquisitions pipeline out of spreadsheets and a shared inbox. Today, the best of them have something closer to a quant desk: automated comp pulls, AI-drafted investment memos, and underwriting models that update…
Private equity normalized the secondary sale of LP stakes years ago. Real estate is finally catching up, and the discounts on offer are reshaping how patient capital thinks about entry timing. Who Is Selling, and Why Denominator-effect pressure, fund-life expirations, and LPs…
Self-storage, infill industrial, manufactured housing, grocery-anchored retail. None of them headline a conference. All of them have quietly outperformed flashier sectors through the repricing. Durability Beats Narrative Boring assets share a profile: sticky demand, low capex…
Every sponsor's deck shows a wall of green. The job of a serious LP is to figure out how much of that green the sponsor actually created versus inherited from a decade of falling rates. Attribution Is Everything Ask for realized deals only, with gross and net side by side, plus…
A typical operator runs a property-management system, a separate accounting package, a leasing CRM, a maintenance app, and a handful of spreadsheets that quietly hold the truth. None of them talk to each other cleanly. The Integration Premium The companies winning in proptech…
Most development pro formas are built on comps and hope. A small group of developers has started treating site selection like player scouting: systematic, probabilistic, and ruthlessly indifferent to conventional wisdom. Finding the Undervalued Parcel The playbook starts with…
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…
Our annual list of the hundred people doing the most interesting work across real estate — founders, capital allocators, policy entrepreneurs, and operators rebuilding the industry from inside. How the List Is Built Nominations come from readers; selections come from the…
A cap rate is net operating income divided by price. That is it. The mystique comes from what it implies, not from the arithmetic. Yield Today, Bet on Tomorrow A low cap rate means you are paying more for each dollar of income — usually a bet on growth. A high cap rate means…
Leaving a stable seat to sponsor your own deals is the dream. Most who try it underestimate the same three risks, so it is worth pre-morteming them while you still have a paycheck. Capital, Runway, Loneliness First-time sponsors run out of fundraising runway before the first…
For most individual LPs, direct exposure to the land/infrastructure phase is genuinely too illiquid and long-dated — you're underwriting a decade-plus hold with negative cash flow for years. The sane exposure is one phase down: the vertical product (apartments, BTR, retail) built within a master plan once the anchor…
Read more →It's submarket-specific, which is the whole answer. A few Sunbelt submarkets are genuinely oversupplied on BTR for the next 18-24 months — you can see it in concessions. Others still have years of runway. Don't underwrite 'the Sunbelt.' Pull the permit pipeline for your specific submarket and overlay it on net…
Read more →Underwrite the operator, not the deck. Concretely: pull title on every deal they claim, call the lender on their last two deals (sponsors sign off on this if they're real), and ask for the capital call and distribution history — dates and amounts, not IRRs. Then the soft test that predicts everything: give them a…
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