Franco Faraudo

Most cities say they want more development. Few have done the hard work of actually making it easy. The typical American municipal permitting process is a gauntlet of community meetings, zoning variance requests, environmental reviews, and political negotiations that can stretch a project from conception to groundbreaking across years of uncertainty. Developers price that uncertainty into their decisions, and the cities that created it wonder why the investment doesn’t come. New Rochelle, a city of roughly 80,000 people in Westchester County, about 25 minutes from Manhattan by train, decided more than a decade ago to do something different. What it built since then, more than a billion dollars in private investment, thousands of new housing units, and a pipeline of projects that keeps growing, is starting to look like one of the more instructive case studies in urban development policy seen so far.

A commercial complex in Hong Kong’s industrial Kowloon neighborhood has quietly crystallized something the entire Chinese real estate ecosystem has been running from for years. The 83 Wing Hong Street development, co-owned by Ares Management and New World Development, slashed prices by 57 percent from its 2024 launch. Even at those depths, sales barely picked up. But the real story isn’t about one building, it’s about what this collapse reveals about the structural damage running through Hong Kong’s financial system. This problem can also drag down many of mainland China’s banks, which are holding billions in property exposure they cannot mark to market.

The View at Lord Abbett pairs sweeping skyline views with warm finishes and hospitality-style design. (Credit: HLW International LLP, Photography: Mike Van Tassell, Carolina Madrigal, Caralarga, Lisa Stock)

Commercial real estate companies hold an enormous amount of sensitive data. Client financial records, tenant personal information, transaction histories, lease agreements, and the personal details of hundreds of thousands of individuals flow through the systems of large brokerage and property management firms every day. The industry has historically treated cybersecurity as a back-office concern, something to be managed by IT rather than understood at the business level. A cyberattack on Cushman & Wakefield last month is making that posture harder to defend, and the circumstances of the attack are instructive not just for what happened but for how it happened and who was responsible.

Plato's Cave, a hotel to housing conversion in Branson, Missouri paved the way for a series of similar redevelopments across the country. (Image: Repvblik LLC)

As lower-tier office vacancy climbs and housing demand intensifies, developers who have been doing office-to-residential conversions for years are refining a playbook that turns distressed buildings into viable apartments.

On the morning of July 7, construction workers at 235 East 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan noticed something wrong. Two structural columns on the 21st floor of the former Pfizer headquarters, which is in the middle of being converted into 1,600 residential apartments in the largest office-to-residential conversion in New York City history,

The race to integrate AI into real estate organizations is moving faster than most of those organizations are ready for. Across the industry, companies are deploying AI tools for everything from lease abstraction and financial forecasting to maintenance scheduling and tenant communication, often driven more by competitive anxiety than by a clear theory of where AI actually creates durable value. The tools are arriving faster than the strategic frameworks for using them well, and the gap between having AI and getting something meaningful from it is wider than most organizations want to admit. The companies that are closing that gap are doing so not by spending more on technology but by thinking more carefully about something most of them don’t yet have a name for.

Most of the technology that shapes how buildings function operates well below the level of visibility that attracts public attention. Nobody talks about the protocol that tells a door lock to engage or the wireless standard that relays a sensor reading to a building management system. These are infrastructure decisions, made by engineers and system integrators, that determine whether a building’s automation layer works reliably or becomes a persistent source of friction. Z-Wave is one of those decisions, and over the course of more than two decades it has become one of the most widely deployed IoT protocols in the world, installed across more than 100 million devices in tens of millions of homes and buildings globally. Understanding how it got there, and where it is going, matters for anyone responsible for deploying connected devices in the built environment.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law last week without President Trump’s signature, marking the most significant housing legislation in over three decades. The bill contains provisions specifically designed to address a financing crisis that the affordable housing industry didn’t see coming. Last year’s expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act created a structural problem that this year’s ROAD Act is meant to solve. More credits are available, but the value of each credit has declined. More housing can theoretically be financed, but the gap between what projects need and what equity financing can provide has widened. The ROAD Act’s primary affordable housing strategy is to unlock billions in new investment capital by raising the public welfare investment cap for banks from 15 percent to 20 percent.