Deals once moved quickly, with structure often taking a back seat to winning the asset. Over the past three years, that dynamic has reversed. In today’s commercial real estate market, deal structure plays a much larger role in shaping risk-adjusted outcomes, and simply offering the highest price is no longer enough.

Aviation real estate generally refers to the physical assets located inside the fence around an airfield, where land is finite and inherently constrained. The category includes hangars, terminals, ramps, aircraft parking, and storage or office space, as well as fixed-base operations, or FBOs.

Picture the scene. A refinancing is in progress. The lender wants a full beneficial ownership pack across the structure. Legal is pulling together director lists from the company secretarial system. Finance has its own version of the group chart, built two transactions ago in PowerPoint, updated once, then updated again by someone who has since left. The title company has slightly different records for one of the holding vehicles. Nobody is lying. Everyone has just been working from a slightly different version of the same reality.

When people paint the office sector with a broad brush as challenged, we push back. The sector is in a sustained recovery, not a temporary rebound. Improving fundamentals, stronger investment activity, both equity and debt, and renewed institutional interest are driving this shift. According to JLL’s latest Office Chronicle, the “four pillars of recovery” are starting to emerge: firmer space fundamentals, limited new supply over the next five years, increased seller capitulation and the return of debt. Together, those trends are helping close pricing gaps and revive transaction momentum.

Real estate can play a role in defined contribution (DC) plans — but only a limited, carefully designed one. While decades of academic research support real estate as a diversifier in institutional portfolios, that evidence translates unevenly into participant-directed DC environments.

Americold Realty Trust has formed a new joint venture with EQT’s Active Core Infrastructure fund focused on the ownership, operation and potential development of high-quality cold storage warehouse facilities in North America.

KingSett Capital and University Pension Plan Ontario (UPP) have launched a strategic partnership focused on acquiring income-generating industrial real estate assets across Canada’s major urban markets.

Anheuser-Busch has sold its former facility in Newark, N.J., to Goodman Group for $360 million. Newmark Group advised Anheuser-Busch on the deal.

Blackstone Real Estate Debt Strategies (BREDS) has launched a lending platform that will provide capital and flexibility to homebuilders and is expected to enable the construction of more than 50,000 for-sale homes across the United States annually.

KKR has plans to make a $1.5 billion equity investment in Vertical Bridge REIT to support its future growth.

Broe Real Estate Group, the real estate affiliate of The Broe Group, has committed $100 million to grow its industrial rail real estate platform into a national network of industrial outdoor storage (IOS) and multimodal logistics hubs that serve evolving domestic supply chains.

Kern County Employees’ (Calif.) Retirement Association committed $125 million to the HBC Financing Partners Fund, managed by Hudson Bay Capital Management, according to the IRE.IQ database. The real estate debt fund primarily provides financing for U.S. multifamily and retail properties, with a smaller allocation targeting student housing transactions.

Defined contribution (DC) plans now dominate the U.S. retirement landscape. With more than $12 trillion in assets and growing, DC plans have eclipsed private-sector defined benefit (DB) pensions as the primary vehicle for retirement savings. Yet despite pursuing the same end goal — income replacement in retirement — DC and DB plans remain meaningfully different in how they allocate capital, particularly to private real estate.

In a sponsored report published in the June issue of Institutional Real Estate Americas, Kevin Kabnerna, co-head, and Sam Moore, senior managing director of Greystar's Americas Principal Business, convey their strong conviction in the future of multifamily, discuss the many overlapping indicators pointing them in a positive direction, and detail how Greystar’s scale, data infrastructure, and operational expertise position them to take the lead in a recovery cycle.

In a sponsored report published in the June issue of Institutional Real Estate Americas, Nuveen’s Dan Manware, director of research, makes the case that institutional portfolios are still underallocated to alternatives, highlighting the diversification benefits and strong NOI growth they generate, which will be increasingly important as we head into a slow-growth cycle when investors can no longer expect cap rate compression to drive returns.

In a sponsored interview published in the June issue of Institutional Real Estate Americas, Mike Keating, managing partner, portfolio management, talks about the importance of discipline, difficult conversations and a team mentality for successful portfolio management, and about how healthy debates and sometimes brutal honesty contribute to success in his professional development as a leader, in relationships with investors, and in the collaborative, decisive culture at BGO.

In a sponsored interview published in the June issue of Institutional Real Estate Americas, LaSalle’s Jen Wichmann, U.S. head of research and strategy, and Russ Ginise, executive managing director and affordable housing portfolio manager, describe  the stable growth, bipartisan support, and nationwide demand that has long characterized the U.S. affordable housing sector, and how a new class of developers, institutional investors and professional operators are taking notice.

In a sponsored report published in the June issue of Institutional Real Estate Americas, Larissa Belova, chief investment officer at UBS Asset Management, and research economist Frances Osei-Bonsu, delineate the persistent advantages commercial real estate holds in comparison to Treasury bonds, how structural shifts present an emerging opportunity for high returns in the sector, and what it will take to achieve them.