Franco Faraudo

A year after New York banned broker fees, a new paywall emerged. Brokers are now charging renters thousands of dollars just to view apartments that never appear on public sites

Nearly every building owner in the country is thinking about energy efficiency right now, driven by some combination of rising utility costs, tightening local regulations, and pressure from lenders and insurers. For a single owner with a clear capital plan, the decision-making process is relatively straightforward. You evaluate the options, run the numbers, and execute. Co-ops and condos have a fundamentally different problem. Before any upgrade happens, a board has to agree on a path forward, and then that board typically has to convince residents to accept an assessment or a fee increase to pay for it. The technical challenge of electrifying a building is significant. The governance challenge of getting a few hundred owners to agree to spend money on it is often harder.

Goldman Sachs is buying LCN Capital Partners for up to $410 million. LCN manages roughly $3 billion in assets and specializes in sale-leaseback transactions. In a sale-leaseback, an investor buys a property from a company and leases it back to the original owner. The tenant pays rent and typically covers taxes, insurance, and maintenance. Goldman will pay $260 million upfront with another $150 million contingent on performance. Roughly 80% of the total consideration will be paid in stock. The deal closes by year end. It’s Goldman’s second acquisition in a week and its third major real estate investment platform acquisition in months.

Record backlogs, surging applied bookings, and a shift toward intelligent thermal management dominate the latest earnings calls from Trane, Johnson Controls, Honeywell, and Schneider Electric, revealing where commercial building systems are heading next.

Most large-scale urban regeneration projects share a common failure. They deliver the buildings, the infrastructure, and the amenity mix, and they still feel like developments rather than places. The architecture is coherent to the point of monotony. The public spaces are technically adequate and emotionally empty. The history of the site, whatever it was, has been erased in favor of something cleaner and more marketable.

The multifamily industry spends an enormous amount of energy on renewals, and most of that energy gets deployed in the last quarter of a lease term. Renewal offers go out 90 to 120 days before expiration. Pre-renewal surveys get fielded. Retention teams start making calls. By that point, in a significant share of cases, the decision has already been made. Most controllable churn decisions form within the first 90 days of a tenancy, which makes move-in the most underutilized retention window in multifamily operations, and one that most operators treat as a logistical process rather than a strategic one.

Zillow's settlement with the FTC preserves its multifamily syndication partnership with Redfin while requiring Redfin to rebuild as an independent competitor, setting up a more crowded fight for rental advertising dollars.

Office investment surged 42% year-over-year globally in Q1 2026 as San Francisco and Chicago saw triple-digit growth, signaling that repricing in strong markets is attracting institutional capital back to the sector.

Roughly 70% of American households cannot access rooftop solar. They rent, they live in apartment buildings, their roofs are shaded, or they cannot afford the upfront cost of a conventional installation. That exclusion has been a persistent structural problem for residential solar adoption in the United States, and for most of the past decade there has been no obvious solution to it. Germany found one. Balcony solar, small panel arrays that hang from a railing and plug into a household outlet, has been installed in more than a million German homes, generating roughly 700 megawatts of distributed capacity from apartments and terraces. The technology is simple, cheap, and requires no ownership of a roof. The United States is now in the middle of deciding whether to allow it.

AI has reshaped one industry after another over the past three years. Customer service, legal research, software development, marketing, and financial analysis have all been reorganized around what the technology can do, often faster than the organizations doing the reorganizing anticipated. Property management has been slower. Not because the workflows are less suited to automation, since a business built on documents, communications, scheduling, and recurring processes is close to an ideal candidate, but because of a structural quirk in how the industry is organized that has muted the incentive to invest.