The office market is increasingly behaving like a two-tier system. At one end, a relatively small pool of best-in-class assets in prime locations continues to attract attention, capital and premium rents. At the other end, a much larger stock that no longer meets today’s technical, energy-related or functional requirements sits in district and secondary locations. In recent months, industry commentators have often implied that this group of secondary locations are a dead end. But that conclusion is too simplistic, in Germany’s case at least.

For institutional investors, transaction capability has long been closely linked to organisational scale. Complex deals were considered manageable only with large internal teams, specialised functions and extensive external advisory support. Size was seen as a prerequisite for control, governance and risk mitigation. Today, this logic is increasingly under pressure.

INREV has strongly criticised government residential real estate policy in Europe, warning many aspects of current legislation can extinguish long-term viability and deter investment into the sector.

Over three quarters of European institutional investors have seen a decline in value of their commercial real estate assets of between 20 percent and 40 percent during the past three years due to poor energy performance metrics.

The logistics market across Germany’s top eight locations returned to growth in 2025, with take-up reaching 2.78 million square metres (29.9 million square feet), an increase of 21 percent on 2024.

Spain’s care bed capacity must increase from approximately 384,000 to around 616,000 by 2033 to meet the needs of its ageing population. The shortfall in provision has been underlined by Octopus Capital in a new report called Shaping the future of care in Spain. In the paper, the manager points out how Spain's care infrastructure has not kept pace with its demographics.

The real estate industry has a data problem — and almost no one wants to talk about it. Every quarter, managers publish IRRs, equity multiples and time-weighted returns. Databases aggregate these numbers and sell them to investors and investment managers. Wealth advisers use them to guide investment programme selection and client decisions. And yet, behind the scenes, everyone knows the truth: Most real estate performance numbers are not comparable. Not even close.

Classifying real estate by category, or by theme, is an imperfect art. This is particularly true for the buildings and environments designed to support science and technology businesses, which are often grouped under the term “life sciences real estate”, which I would describe as clumsy shorthand. Most of us delivering the infrastructure needed for innovation know that this is an unfit definition. Life sciences as a catch-all label bundles together occupier types with very distinct operational needs. It is also reductive.

Based on supporting fundamentals and decent valuations, the global listed real estate sector is set up to provide for a year of decent high-single-digit returns, in line with longer-term historic averages. Moreover, the defensive and diversification qualities of listed real estate could increasingly be appreciated by investors who wish to limit risk associated with the possibility of further tech sector volatility in 2026.