It is one of the commercial real estate industry’s latest buzzwords, but what exactly is “resiliency,” and how does it figure into an investor’s commercial real estate portfolio? These were some of the questions that panelists discussed at Building the Resilient City: Risks and Opportunities, a conference hosted by the Urban Land Institute in San Francisco on 4–5 September.

“Resiliency is understanding how a product is going to last over time,” said Nicholas Stolatis, senior director, global sustainability and enterprise initiatives, with TIAA-CREF, speaking as a panelist at Inside the Investment Committee: How Capital Providers Weigh Resilience. “From my experience, it’s absolutely essential [to think about resiliency],” he added.

With commercial real estate vehicles having increasingly longer lifecycles and buy-and-hold strategies lasting as long as 10 to 20 years, it is becoming even more important from a financial perspective to think about how