Real Estate's Banquet of Consequences
The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.
Release Date: 10/15/2025
Affordability Is Now Structural, Not Cyclical
The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.
Mark Zandi is one of the few economists who can do two things at once: explain what is happening in the data, and explain why households experience it so differently. He is the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, and in our conversation, the last of my podcast series this year and the second of two Holiday Specials, he connected inflation, affordability, market structure, and geopolitics in a way CRE professionals will recognize immediately. The theme was simple, but not comforting: affordability is no longer a “cycle” story - it is becoming structural. And the US economy is...
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“This Time Is Different” – Yet Again
The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.
Ken Rogoff does not trade in headlines or market timing. He trades in history. As Professor of Economics at Harvard and co-author of This Time Is Different, Rogoff has spent decades studying what happens when societies convince themselves old rules no longer apply. His latest book, Our Dollar, Your Problem, extends that lens to today’s economy – and to the quiet assumptions underpinning U.S. financial dominance. In our conversation, Rogoff unpacked why the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege” still matters, why it is slowly eroding, and why the real risks facing the...
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A Family Office Playbook for Real Estate
The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.
What do the most disciplined investors in real estate have in common right now? They’re not chasing themes. They’re not waiting for perfect headlines. They’re buying when pricing resets and protecting capital at all costs. That’s why my conversation with Onic Palandjian, partner at Group RMK, is worth your time. Onic helps steward a family office platform that has grown from $500 million to $2.5 billion by doing something increasingly rare in CRE: investing with patience, low leverage, and long-duration discipline. Their model is built on loss...
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Tax Certainty in an Uncertain Market
The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.
In this week’s episode, I spoke with Lisa Knee, Managing Partner of Real Estate Services at EisnerAmper, one of the largest tax and advisory firms serving institutional owners, funds, developers, and family offices across the country. Lisa works with clients who “touch dirt, own dirt, work with dirt” and her view is clear: the tax landscape has stopped moving, but the real estate market hasn’t found its footing. She breaks down what the One Big Beautiful Bill actually settled (199A permanence, 100 percent bonus depreciation, renewed Opportunity Zone rules), and why...
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Winning Big in Retail
The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.
Jeff Rosenberg brings a multi-generation perspective to open-air, retail shopping centers, a sector most investors once wrote off. His family built and operated supermarkets and the centers around them starting in the 1940s. Big V Property Group grew out of that platform and today controls a $2.5 billion, 9 million square foot national portfolio of open-air shopping centers anchored by the likes of Target, TJX brands, Ross, HomeGoods, Sierra Trading, and others. That background matters: Big V understands how retailers actually make money, how store-level performance drives...
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What RIAs Really Want From Real Estate
The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.
Jeff Brown has spent the last 15 years building exactly the kind of platform most sponsors say they want and very few actually execute: niche, disciplined, and trusted by the wealth-management channel. As founder and CIO of T2 Capital Management, he’s grown a $1bn platform focused on three things: bridge lending, student housing, and B/C multifamily ‘on the banks of the Mississippi.’ Most of his capital comes from RIAs – a channel many sponsors talk about but rarely crack. In our conversation, we talked about what it really looks like when investors are bruised,...
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Retail Capital Is Rewriting CRE
The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.
My guest today, Tim Bodner, doesn’t just analyze capital markets - he helps shape them. As Partner at PwC and Global Leader of its Real Estate Deals business, Tim advises some of the world’s largest investors – pensions, sovereign wealth funds, REITs, private capital firms - on transactions exceeding $300 billion. He also is a contributor to PwC’s Global Real Estate and Real Assets Deals Outlook, giving him a uniquely panoramic view of how capital, policy, and real assets now intersect. In our conversation, Tim explains why the capital stack is being redrawn. ...
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Why Small Shops Beat Big Boxes
The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.
Richard Tucker has seen every phase of retail, from enclosed malls to mixed-use, and still chooses the least glamorous corner of the sector: small-bay, necessity-driven strip centers. As CEO of Tucker Development, a 10MM square foot development company, he’s now systematizing that playbook into a Midwest portfolio with modest leverage, steady cash, and an exit designed for institutions. In a market obsessed with timing the rate cycle, this is an operator’s strategy: buy centers with proven tenancy, fix physical frictions (depth, access, service lanes), keep leverage low...
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Building Multifamily When Others Pause
The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.
Michael Procopio runs a fourth-generation, vertically integrated ground up multifamily development company, Procopio Companies, that’s active across the Northeast, Carolinas, Texas, and Florida, 10–12 ground-up projects at a time, from entitlement through construction and hospitality-style management. In other words: he’s shipping when many sponsors can’t. In my conversation with Michael, we talked about how to get deals done in a market where institutions say they’re “active” but still hesitate, why capital structure, not just cap rates, decides feasibility,...
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Cautious Optimism for Multifamily
The Real Estate Market Watch - current events through a real estate lens.
Sean Burton runs one of the most integrated multifamily platforms on the West Coast. As CEO of Cityview, he oversees development, construction management, and property management across ~40 assets in supply-constrained markets. That full-stack view matters right now because capital is moving—and underwriting discipline will separate winners from passengers. Theme: Debt is back, development capital is selectively returning, and OZ 2.0 arrives in 2027. But the only rate that really matters for valuations is the 10-year, not the headline cut. If you build your thesis on structure, not...
info_outlineMy guest today is David Lynn, PhD — CEO of Unity Investment Management, a private-equity real-estate firm with nearly $1 billion AUM across 74 medical outpatient buildings nationwide. A London School of Economics PhD and MIT MBA, David cuts through macro confusion with a steady, data-driven view of where capital and demographics are really pulling the market.
Driving Thesis:
America’s aging population and the rise of personalized medicine, longevity science, and AI diagnostics are reshaping health-care real estate. Telehealth doesn’t kill in-person visits — it creates more of them. And as construction costs rise and MOB supply stays tight, low-beta sectors like medical outpatient buildings are poised to outperform high-volatility multifamily and office assets.
Why it matters:
We’re entering a post-banquet cycle — after 15 years of ultra-cheap debt and compressed cap rates. David argues that the “easy-money era” is over, but patient investors still win through cash-flow discipline and blend-and-extend lender relationships. Medical tenants are non-discretionary and financially stable; that stability will anchor returns as rates ease and capital markets thaw.
Five questions David answers:
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Why MOBs held their value while multifamily stumbled.
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How telemedicine actually drives physical visits.
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What AI and genomics mean for future space demand.
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Where we are in the cap-rate cycle (and why this may be the bottom).
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How tariffs, immigration, and Fed policy feed through to CRE pricing.
Takeaways for sponsors & LPs:
• Favor low-volatility sectors with durable cash flow.
• Shorter leases can beat inflation without adding risk.
• Blend and extend — don’t panic-sell distress.
• Watch employment and energy as deflationary signals.
• AI and aging will drive demand more than interest rates.
If you believe steady beats speculative, this episode maps how to navigate the new cycle with a scientist-investor’s lens — one rooted in data, discipline, and durable demand. David Lynn is that rare voice who bridges macro economics and boots-on-the-ground real estate with clarity and calm.
- Straight talk on what happens when confidence meets correction - no hype, no spin, no fluff.
- Real implications of macro trends for investors and sponsors with actionable guidance.
- Insights from real estate professionals who’ve been through it all before.
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