Nick Pipitone

While geofencing is not new, more traditional retailers are perfecting it to stay competitive with online retail giants like Amazon. New geofencing techniques have been adopted to power in-store navigation and provide other pivotal benefits for brick-and-mortar stores that continue to adapt to the digital-first retail industry landscape.

Multifamily companies are embracing centralization to streamline operations, reduce costs, and improve resident satisfaction. Centralized leasing, maintenance, and marketing drive efficiency and empower onsite teams to focus on service. While centralization comes with challenges, leading firms like AvalonBay and Equity Residential are setting the pace.

The multifamily industry has closely watched the litigation against RealPage for the past few years. As the industry decides how to react, some legal experts say the cases against RealPage may not be as strong as some believe. In the meantime, some states and local governments are taking matters into their own hands and banning revenue management software.

The debate over rent control continues to gain attention, driven by recent political shifts, ballot measures, and concerns within the multifamily industry. From the defeat of California's Proposition 33 to local rent control victories and Florida's new housing laws, this issue is shaped by a complex mix of factors impacting housing affordability and policy.

Many said Donald Trump was light on housing policy details on the campaign trail, but it didn’t dissuade voters. Now that Trump is poised to return to the White House, the housing industry is preparing for the President-elect’s policies. They include higher tariffs, opening up more federal land for housing development, and significant changes to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The incoming Trump administration has proposed strict immigration policies that could significantly impact the construction industry. The industry relies heavily on immigrant labor and suffers from a notable shortage of native-born workers, so policies such as mass deportations could potentially have a substantial impact.

As the life science real estate market recovers from an oversupply glut, an emerging trend for cost-conscious developers could be repurposing old hospitals into lab space. A hospital-to-lab conversion offers several benefits that could appeal to developers, including faster time to market and lower cost because of existing HVAC and other infrastructure.

Modular construction is steadily rising in the U.S., and Greystar is one of the multifamily firms that is fully embracing it. The nation’s largest owner and developer of multifamily housing has created a new subsidiary focused solely on modular construction, signaling what could be the start of a new trend in the multifamily real estate industry.

The U.S. manufacturing comeback is driving demand for industrial real estate nationwide. Supply chain vulnerabilities, rising labor costs, and federal policies are fueling this trend, reshaping industrial markets in the South and Midwest.

The financial struggles of pharmacy retail giants Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid are prompting a wave of nationwide store closures. The scale of the store closures is large compared to similar instances in the retail industry, but the impact on retail real estate may not be as dire as some believe.