COVID-19 has served as an accelerant to certain demand drivers that were in place pre-pandemic, impacting occupier usage. Uncertainty exists among real estate investors regarding future space utilization resuming at pre-pandemic “normal” conditions. How and what can investors do to ensure they are capturing future occupier and investor trends that will shape real estate, from ESG to ecommerce?

“DIGITAL” themes driving real estate demand

Principal Real Estate has developed a proprietary tool to track real estate demand drivers via its DIGITAL framework — trends driven by demographics, infrastructure, globalization, and innovation and technology — to help determine resilient investment strategies. This framework has been important for understanding the dynamic changes affecting real estate demand and has been critical in assessing growth in traditional and nontraditional property types. Using our framework, we believe the following trends are