Real estate’s 1031-exchange industry is partying like its 1999 … well, 2004 maybe, when property markets pulsated in Princely fashion. Unlike yesteryear, the current boom appears to be good news for today’s investors, property brokers, purveyors of 1031 investment vehicles, the wider real estate market and, ultimately, the national economy. Today, the question is not so much where will the next 1031 exchange investors come from — because they are coming from everywhere — but what should the next investment be?

Institutional Real Estate, Inc., parent company of this magazine and six other titles, hosted a roundtable meeting in New York City with a cross section of executives from the infrastructure investment market, including U.S. and global pensions, funds of funds, placement agents, infrastructure investment managers and consultants.

Food tech is a small but growing segment of the startup and venture-capital universe, aiming to improve or disrupt the global food system. Worldwide, food and agriculture is a $7.8 trillion industry, responsible for feeding the planet and employing more than 40 percent of the population. It also represents more than 15 percent of global GDP. A range of demands are being put on the world’s food industry today that food tech companies want to solve, including:

The narrative around “hedge fund underperformance” should be taken with many grains of salt. Three immediate questions an adviser should consider when addressing that question are: (1) underperformance relative to what — e.g., equity markets, other alternative strategies, investor expectations, etc.; (2) over what time frame are we evaluating comparative returns; and (3) what are the historical and prospective drivers of performance for hedge funds in relation to other return sources in traditional and alternative asset classes.

A fundamental change is occurring in the investment world: Quality opportunities are found increasingly outside the public markets. One indicator of the trend is the continued rise of private unicorns (companies valued at $1 billion or more), along with a roughly 50 percent decline in the total number of U.S.- listed public companies in the past two decades.

By disrupting the way employees commute to work, autonomous vehicles are expected to fundamentally reshape the U.S. office market by 2030, according to a report from CBRE. Most significant, the primacy of commercial real estate’s traditional decision drivers — geographic location and access to talent — may decrease as the importance placed on the workplace experience and building amenities grows.

Festering trade wars, frenzied populism, faltering U.S. stocks, China’s bureaucratic fiddling, plummeting emerging-market currencies, geopolitical tensions — the list of hindrances to real estate performance in 2019 is long.

“Off we went,” recalls Noreen Beaman about the start of Brinker Capital. “There were eight of us, a little over $100 million under management and 91 clients.” Thirty years later, Beaman is CEO, and Brinker Capital has $23 billion in assets under management, 165 staff members and more than 50,000 clients. Brinker Capital serves fee-based financial advisers, and that group is divided between insurance-based broker/dealer advisers and traditional independent financial advisers, as well as advisers in the RIA community. The bulk of Brinker Capital’s clientele is individuals and families. A little more than half of its $23 billion in assets under management has come to the company from the “mass affluent” space, which Beaman defines as clients with less than $1 million of investable assets, not counting the value of their home.