As the U.S. economy has improved during the past few years, so has the industrial sector — the warehouses where so much economic activity is housed.

It’s not even close: Today, the world’s most powerful economy belongs to the United States. While the nation’s recovery from the 2008 financial crisis isn’t complete, much of the lost ground has been recovered.

We all need to eat, and we all need to stay clothed. To the uninitiated, retail real estate seems like an easy defensive play, relatively resistant in any downturn. It is anything but, however, and the Great Recession has laid bare the shortcomings of any managers who thought they could simply buy and hold.

No different from other economic sectors, commercial real estate markets are cyclical — tracking the broader economy, albeit on a lag basis. Economic cycles affect the supply and demand for both the use of commercial real estate (the space market) and for investment in real estate (the asset or capital market).

Property assessed clean energy, or PACE, is a new financing mechanism that works like a special assessment district bond, but one that benefits only a specific property. Using PACE, cities and counties promote on-site renewable-energy projects, energy-efficiency upgrades and, in some places, water-efficiency upgrades.

Across the United States, PACE program design and administration vary widely. All programs involve a public-private partnership.

Quantitative easing by the European Central Bank is likely to have global capital market implications, including real estate. We now are contemplating a period in which real estate yields/cap rates may well trend even lower in many markets in the short term. Important changes to the macroeconomic and financial outlooks have emerged over the past six months.

U.S. investors are projected to commit $46 billion in new capital this year, slightly below the previous year’s projection, according to the 2015 Institutional Real Estate Trends report, an annual investor survey conducted by Kingsley Associates and Institutional Real Estate, Inc.

For the past 14 years, Barbara Cambon and her daughter, Megan, have been spending a good deal of their time in the tiny Himalayan country of Nepal. Barbara and Megan were visiting Nepal when the earthquakes struck at the end of April, and experienced firsthand the devastation, death and destruction these events have wrought on the Nepalese. And, of course, despite the fact you aren’t seeing much anymore on the front page of your newspaper, it’s not yet over for the people of Nepal.

I once heard someone say, “You can’t pay pension benefits with unrealized gains.” But the current market’s focus on benchmarking and, by extension, time-weighted returns may be driving attention to unrealized gains when it would be better to focus on cash to pay benefits.

U.S. hotels are hot properties this year, with another luxury hotel changing hands recently. Host Hotels & Resorts has acquired the 643-room Phoenician resort in Scottsdale, Ariz., for $400 million.

A number of U.S. public pension funds have made decisions regarding their real estate and investment consultants.

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System will be reducing the number of its outside money managers by about 50 percent over the next five years, from 212 to 100.