After years of capital shifting toward secondary markets, international gateway markets are once again drawing attention from investors worldwide. Global gateway markets have seen a resurgence of megadeals this year. From the €850 million ($985 million) sale of the Capital 8 office complex in Paris to the ¥300 billion ($1.9 billion) purchase of the Dentsu Group headquarters in Tokyo, buyers are clearly back with the desire — and money — to acquire assets in primary markets.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has moved beyond experimentation in real estate investment, and the question is no longer whether AI will reshape investment management but how firms are putting it into practice. AI is reshaping internal investment research, operations, portfolio management and decision making, as well as transforming how managers organize information, analyze data and build on institutional knowledge.

The gateway city framework has structured institutional real estate allocation for the better part of four decades. It rests on durable premises: market depth, capital liquidity, institutional-grade tenant bases and legal certainty. None of those premises have disappeared. What has disappeared is the rate environment that made the returns available on gateway assets sufficient to justify their risks.

Commercial real estate capital markets are showing positive momentum. Transaction volumes rose 27 percent in 2025 and are tracking roughly 15 percent higher again through the opening months of 2026. Financing conditions are gradually normalizing, and institutional capital is reengaging after a prolonged period of constrained liquidity, wide bid-ask spreads and suppressed activity. Yet demand for bridge and transitional lending has not abated, and understanding why reveals one of the more compelling risk-adjusted opportunities available to institutional investors today.

In recent years, much of the conversation around student housing has focused on the equity perspective. Looking at the sector through a credit lens, however, changes the analysis, with time horizon emerging as the most important distinction. Equity owners typically underwrite a hold that may run 10 years or longer. That means taking a view of rents, operations, interest rates and demand well into the next decade. Many private real estate credit strategies underwrite short-term holds that can capitalize on near-term trends. Transitional loans typically have an average term of 24 to 36 months.

We believe now is an attractive entry point for investing in self-storage. Coming out of COVID-19, self-storage saw an uptick in demand and rent growth. This strong performance, combined with a very low interest rate environment and easy access to capital, resulted in compressed transactional cap rates and an increase in construction starts. The boom was followed by a period of correction stemming from the spike in interest rates and a for-sale housing affordability crisis. Storage demand from the robust post-COVID housing market plummeted just as new supply deliveries peaked, causing street rents, which had reached extraordinary highs, to fall 40 percent. Despite this perfect storm, storage still performed relatively well, with only modest declines in net operating income (NOI) and a still-strong income return, helping the sector maintain its outperformance of the NCREIF Fund Index – Open-end Diversified Core Equity (NFI-ODCE) in 2024 and 2025 by 350 basis points and 240 basis points, respectively.

There is strong investor interest across the broader real estate secondaries market. Appetite is robust, and institutional investors are allocating with conviction. The first close of Partners Group’s fifth real estate secondaries program reflects that demand, securing more than $650 million toward its $1.5 billion target in June 2026. The program will focus on investing in quality, income-producing assets by providing liquidity to both GPs and LPs through GP-led secondaries, LP-led secondaries and other liquidity solutions. The fund is seeded with an LP-led secondary portfolio that comprises three global real estate funds with investments across the residential, industrial and hospitality sectors.

Dr. Will McIntosh, one of the most recognized researchers and research executives in institutional real estate, has formed ArcBridge Research Group, a new joint venture with Institutional Real Estate, Inc. (IREI) that will provide outsourced research services, project-based consulting and independent third-party due diligence to a broad range of real estate professionals and organizations.

Barings and the North Carolina Investment Authority (NCIA) have expanded their partnership representing $2.1 billion in committed capital for Barings’ real estate debt and capital solutions strategies.

Members of the Real Estate Data Initiative’s (REDI) steering committee told Institutional Real Estate, Inc. (IREI) the initiative has a broader goal: moving beyond standardized reporting templates toward an implementation framework that can be used consistently across investors, managers, service providers and technology platforms. The focus has shifted from simply addressing fragmented investment data to creating a framework for how that data is used across the industry.

Real estate private credit is not replacing core real estate in institutional portfolios, but it is changing how investors think about defensive income, according to Greg Eudicone, head of global real estate client portfolio management at Barings, in an exclusive interview with IREI.

Blackstone expects the emerging market for long-term ownership of stabilized data centers could eventually surpass $1 trillion as artificial intelligence drives demand for digital infrastructure, according to the firm’s second-quarter earnings call on July 23.