The PERE Podcast

The real estate investment management market is coming to terms with its latest hurdle this week. The cost of debt has been on the rise for some time, as select managers have told affiliated PERE titles. And in today’s market, the cost of doing business may now be outweighing borrowers’ ability to keep pace and hold their investment strategies steady heading into this market cycle. Though the impact to date has been moderate, as highlighted earlier this week in analysis shared by PERE, central banks are moving toward more defensive positions. The possibility of rate cuts has diminished as a result, as noted in a March episode of The PERE Podcast. All this sets the table for how borrowers will need to reshape their own tack to keep lines open with debt capital markets while they have liquidity to keep capital moving. In this episode, PGIM’s head of real estate credit strategies Bryan McDonnell provides his perspective on the situation at hand. Be it at the Newark-based manager or beyond, real estate fund managers and investors are having to recalculate their basis and re-order how they navigate the next wave of acquisitions, holds and exits arriving in their pipelines.

In this episode, the team looks at the preliminary findings of PERE's Q1 2026 fundraising report. Listen as host Lucy Scott discusses the trends behind these numbers with PERE senior reporter Christie Ou, Real Estate Capital Europe editor Daniel Cunningham, and PEI research manager Kristina Savcenkova, who worked on the data. Among the headline themes is that fundraising is down, with managers raising just under $44 billion globally in Q1 2026, down from $81.4 billion a year earlier. While the drop partly reflects the absence of the mega-fundraisings seen in early 2025, it also points to a more selective market. Another key shift this quarter was the resurgence of value‑add strategies, which accounted for more than half of all capital raised. Debt strategies also remain in favor. However, despite subdued volumes, there were encouraging signs beneath the headline numbers. Funds are closing faster, and a growing proportion are meeting or exceeding their target sizes – suggesting that the market is finding its footing, even amid ongoing macro uncertainty.

The institutional real estate fund management world is taking this market cycle as a moment to recompose itself. And over the last week, a clear theme of reflection has emerged: industrial portfolios will need to be fine-tuned to prepare for a real estate reset over the next five years. The days of simply buying, financing, holding and selling have long been gone even within the most favorably viewed asset categories. The industrial sector is currently presenting a compelling case study for how the most scaled names are actively revisiting their holdings. Often, a blend of acquisitions, debt packages and exits are being assembled any given week to continually sharpen industrial sector exposure. Last week, EQT Real Estate’s industrial reconfiguration was on display. As reported in PERE Deals, the firm bought nine industrial buildings across Southern New Jersey from New York Life Investment Management for about $309 million – adding about two million square feet of prime industrial space to its portfolio. By the end of the week, EQT found itself on the other side of the table. The firm closed a $650 million sale to Ares Management that included 36 industrial assets across 13 states, offloading equally prime pieces in its portfolio. The net result: a more concentrated stateside industrial footprint in what is still regarded as one of the best categories for Class A trades and financings. EQT’s recalibration is not happening in a vacuum compared with other real estate equity managers. Blackstone, alongside its Link Logistics subsidiary, closed a $163.1 million purchase of a four-warehouse portfolio from Clarion Partners in South Florida this week. As seen in previous reports, Blackstone had been reducing its industrial concentration across the region and was arguably in a selling stance – having shed more than $1 billion-worth of industrial assets across South Florida from 2024 onward. Aasif Bade, founder and chief executive officer at Ambrose, joins us this week to further unpack how industrial sector investors are approaching the sector to land prime opportunities across primary, secondary and tertiary geographies. As he notes, even within individual cities, industrial investment opportunities can look vastly different because of the most familiar refrain for evaluating industrial deal potential: location. All this sets the stage for a sector that is now having to compete for investor attention and electrical grid capacity alongside data center strategies, the latter of which took the top spot for sector-based strategy raises according to PERE's full-year fundraising report for 2025.

The global real estate market has hinged its outlook of resurgence on maintaining relatively stable financing market conditions, but pressure is building up that may force global central banks to hold off on interest rate relief for longer – in turn forcing more stalls on dealmaking. Select real estate fund managers in the US were predicting anywhere from two to four interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve in 2026. However, economic pressure stemming from the Iran war is expected to dampen how the Fed, European Central Bank and Bank of England will approach any changes in the coming quarters. With each central bank converging last week, commercial real estate investment managers received clear signals that any hopes for an industry rebound may need to be delayed, with interest rates holding steady and the possibility of future increases still on the table. In the US real estate market, the ever-present maturity wall is looming and asset owners and sponsors are finding themselves re-sourcing debt at a significant premium to the days of low to no interest rate pressure. Across the US market, there is an estimated $936 billion of maturing loans due this year – an almost 20 percent jump compared to 2025 according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association. The commercial mortgage-backed securities market, as an example, has an estimated $76.6 billion of debt due to mature in 2026 with extension options wearing thin. The road ahead is by no means smooth for institutional real estate investment managers, and global central banks’ next response to macroeconomic pressure could determine if 2026 will truly be the year of the fix as market participants have postulated.

This episode is sponsored by Deutsche Pfandbriefbank In recent years, alternative lenders have satisfied an increasing proportion of the European property market’s financing needs. But banks still account for the lion’s share of activity. In this episode of The PERE Podcast, Duncan Pearson and Charles Balch, managing directors at Deutsche Pfandbriefbank (pbb), explore the new avenues for cooperation between the different classes of lender. They argue that today, both banks and debt funds are established as essential and complementary elements of the lending ecosystem, with the relationship between them evolving beyond simple rivalry. Pearson explains the rationale behind pbb’s Originate and Cooperate program, which promotes collaboration between the bank and alternative finance providers. He suggests that the initiative will lead to more sustainable capital structures and lower financing costs for borrower clients, while enabling the bank and its partner lenders to access a wider range of business opportunities. The lending environment has changed, notes Balch, so banks need to position their balance sheets to meet the needs of the new cycle, serving a wide range of borrowers, who in turn are seeking to make real estate assets fit to meet the rapidly evolving requirements of today’s end users. The pair conclude that while 2026 is unlikely to be a “soaraway” year, and financing remains expensive for transitional projects, liquidity is beginning to return to European real estate markets, bringing with it improved prospects for transaction activity.

This week on The PERE Podcast, focus is turned to Singapore, where a lively docket of PERE Asia keynotes and panels have just concluded. The event saw record attendance across its three days, with some 600 delegates in attendance across the event including institutional investors, managers and advisers. PERE has been active in tracking perspectives from leading institutions and firms onsite, including analysis on how Adu Dhabi Investment Authority and Australian Retirement Trust are navigating fund investment activity in 2026. For this episode, PERE editor Evelyn Lee’s keynote interview with Starwood Capital Group president Jonathan Pollack takes center stage. Pollack is a primary driver of the manager’s overarching strategy and daily business operations, and as PERE reported in a September 2025 cover story, he is also the chosen successor to Starwood founder and chief executive officer Barry Sternlicht. Pollack covers a broad range of topics, all spanning from his first year in as the operational overseer for Starwood. The firm is angling to work more closely with insurance capital partners; continue clean-up and related asset management work linked to Starwood’s $7 billion take-private of ESR Group in 2025; and take a more cloud computing-centric tack to its data center investment pipeline. All this is under the backdrop of global geopolitical issues, which are expected to force financial market participants to recalibrate for US policy as military escalations take place in Iran and select neighboring countries.

We return to the familiar territory of real estate investment trust take-private deals this week, as host Randy Plavajka uncovers how private real estate managers aiming to capitalize on listed market dislocations may face a reshaped landscape as REIT market health gradually returns. Even as take-private efforts are actively launched this week – such as an agreement between Affinius Capital and Vista Hill Partners to take Veris Residential REIT private in a deal valued at $3.4 billion – the outlook ahead for similar opportunities could shift, as some market analysts suggest. Joining Randy from London are Jonathan Brasse, PEI’s editor-in-chief, real estate, and Sarah Marx, reporter at PERE Deals, who bring in recent commentary and prior-year data on REIT take-private deals to cast more light on the factors set to impact future opportunities in the space. Changes in valuation processes, increasingly available dry powder for listed real estate businesses and updated private-side scaling initiatives are all expected to reconfigure how private managers target take-private deals in the next cycle of the real estate market. The team is joined by Matthew Norris, head of real estate securities at Gravis, later in the episode. His firm, a regular commentator on REIT capital markets activity, sees more signs of inflection in today’s market, including public-to-public mergers, valuation reconsiderations, and the potential return of steadier initial public offerings throughout REIT categories.

This episode looks at the relationship between artificial intelligence risk and private real estate investing. Major firms including Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft are projected to spend approximately $650 billion on AI and related infrastructure. Amazon alone says it intends to spend $200 billion on AI, chips, robotics and satellites. Will these plans prove to be sustainable long-term strategies, or is this a sign of a bubble? How an AI-driven correction could impact institutional private real estate – in terms of capital flows, asset pricing and demand assumptions – is a pertinent question. This is especially the case in light of the industry's push into the data center sector, both in the US and Europe, across equity and debt strategies. But the impact of a correction would not necessarily stop there. This week, we ask Goodwin Gaw for his perspectives on the subject. Listen as the co-founder and chairman of Gaw Capital Partners, one of Asia's most prominent private real estate managers, addresses how investors might position themselves to capture AI-related growth while remaining defensive against cyclical volatility. For real estate, data centers may be the most obvious way to ride the AI wave. But they’re not without risk. If sentiment shifts or capital tightens, that part of the market could feel it first. What may emerge instead is a two-pronged approach to investing: doubling down on the fundamentals of necessity-driven assets on one end, and high-conviction luxury and lifestyle assets on the other. Gaw says this is a moment for the industry to stay nimble, to anticipate disruption and to be firmly on the front foot. This episode is an excerpt from a wider interview between Gaw and Jonathan Brasse, PEI Group's real estate editor-in-chief. The discussion was recorded as part of a webinar for PERE Network members, designed to share insights emerging from PERE's Advisory Board conversations.

The rapidly institutionalizing industrial outdoor storage sector is back in the spotlight this week thanks to an agreement struck by Brookfield Asset Management to take real estate investment trust Peakstone Realty private for $1.2 billion in cash. The deal marks a dramatic return to the IOS space for Brookfield, which sold a portfolio of IOS properties it had aggregated in the US for $277 million a year ago, and highlights investors’ growing conviction for a hot subsector of the broader industrial market. With that mega-deal setting the tone, The PERE Podcast takes a deep dive into the industrial outdoor storage market – including the most basic question: What actually constitutes IOS? What is driving investors’ and fund managers’ aggressive pursuit of scale in the fragmented sector? And what do their varying approaches suggest about the outlook for the category? Host Greg Dool sits with PERE Credit deputy editor Randy Plavajka and PERE Deals reporter McKenna Leavens to discuss all of these questions and more. Later in the episode, we hear from Price Booker, chief investment officer at Maryland-based manager and industrial outdoor storage specialist Realterm, for his perspective on the risks, opportunities and growing investable market associated with IOS strategies. Citations: Brookfield takes Peakstone private in $1.2bn deal - PERE Deals Realterm reels in €470m for second European IOS fund - PERE

Net-lease strategies have long occupied a distinct niche of the broader commercial real estate market as a stable, low-risk, long-term inflation hedge. But after a string of billion-dollar deals involving some of the world’s largest private real estate firms, the net-lease sector is anything but boring. On this episode of The PERE Podcast, host Greg Dool sits with PEI’s real estate editor-in-chief Jonathan Brasse and PERE Deals reporter McKenna Leavens to discuss the latest high-profile capital formation event: a $1.5 billion logistics joint venture between Singaporean wealth fund GIC and Realty Income, the largest listed US net-lease REIT. Listen as the team discusses several unique aspects of the deal, including its role in the ongoing convergence of public and private real estate portfolios, as well as the precedent set by GIC’s previous push into the US net-lease sector with a $15 billion privatization of STORE Capital three years ago. We also shine a spotlight on net-lease strategies generally: what they are, how they work and why they are an area of growing conviction for private real estate investors. Later in the episode, we are joined by Scott Merkle, managing director at sale-leaseback and M&A advisory firm SLB Capital Advisors, who shares his own informed perspective on the net-lease sector and what market participants can expect there in the year ahead. If you're a regular listener, tell us what you think. We are currently inviting feedback via this survey as we seek to improve our podcast output. We would love to hear your feedback on what you enjoy about these weekly episodes and to better understand what we can improve.

For the year’s first episode of The PERE Podcast, the team lays out some of the major themes likely to impact the private equity real estate market over the next 12 months. Join co-host Lucy Scott, PERE editor Evelyn Lee and PEI real estate editor-in-chief Jonathan Brasse as they look at how geopolitical turbulence continues to unsettle the real estate industry as its re-opens after the holiday break. The team also digs into how financial disruption caused by the bursting of an AI bubble could overshadow optimism. In addition, hear from David Steinbach, global chief investment officer at Hines, as he chats with co-host Greg Dool about his expectations for the year ahead, including his forecasts for dealmaking and capital deployment. If you're a regular listener, tell us what you think. We are currently inviting feedback via this survey as we seek to improve our podcast output. We would love to hear your feedback on what you enjoy about these weekly episodes and to better understand what we can improve.

As the year draws to a close, we will spend the next two weeks breaking down the top private real estate headlines from 2025, as well as the trends that defined market activity. Next week, equity is in the spotlight. This week, the team is zeroing-in on debt, the engine room of the industry. Lucy Scott sits down with PEI real estate debt gurus Daniel Cunningham, editor of Real Estate Capital Europe, and Samantha Rowan, editor of PERE Credit, to discuss the best-read content of the year, the standout themes and their takes on what these stories tell us about the forces shaping the European and US credit markets. The team also give their insights on how these themes will play out in 2026. Will competition, a defining feature of the debt markets today, intensify? And if so, where will lenders go to deploy capital and find fresh ways to stay competitive? The team also breaks down the topic of back leverage lending – one of the biggest stories this year – and looks at how this theme might evolve as more lenders seek to use the tool in Europe.