Franco Faraudo

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.

When S&P 500 companies are ranked by R&D spending as a percentage of revenue, real estate sits at the bottom alongside utilities and basic energy, effectively at zero. The pharmaceutical industry invests roughly 19% of revenue in research and development. Software and ICT services companies invest around 14%. Even industries not traditionally associated with heavy technology development, consumer goods, industrials, and financial services, are committing meaningful percentages of revenue to innovation. Real estate is not, and has not been for as long as the data has been tracked.

RealPage has acquired Cherre, a New York-based real estate data intelligence company, in a deal that may prove to be one of the most strategically important in RealPage’s 28-year history. According to RealPage, Cherre’s platform resolves more than four billion real estate entities representing approximately $4 trillion in assets, turning fragmented information from disparate systems into standardized, governed datasets that can support analytics and artificial intelligence at institutional scale. For RealPage, which serves more than 42,000 customers managing approximately 24 million housing units worldwide, the acquisition fills a critical gap in a platform strategy assembled through decades of acquisitions.

Greystar is facing 114 documented fair housing violations filed across seven states and Washington DC by the Housing Rights Initiative. The nonprofit organization’s testers called Greystar properties starting in October 2025 and inquired about using Section 8 housing vouchers. According to HRI, Greystar agents declined to accept vouchers in states where such refusal violates fair housing law. The organization has recordings of these interactions filed as evidence with state attorneys general and civil rights agencies.