For decades, institutional real estate was neatly organized into four buckets. Today, those buckets are overflowing — and the industry is better for it. But navigating what’s inside them now requires a fundamentally different lens.
Ask any institutional allocator to describe their real estate portfolio, and the answer will likely come back in four words: office, retail, industrial, multifamily. Affectionately referred to as “the four food groups,” they have served as the organizing framework for institutional capital for the better part of five decades. Clean. Simple. Understandable. But the world is no longer clean, simple or entirely understandable — and the product landscape of real estate reflects exactly that.
Demographics have rewritten the user manual. A changing consume
