It can be surprising what a phone call and a casual coffee meeting can mean to a person’s professional career. Take Kristen Bauer as an example. She was managing director for the northwest region at Tiedemann Advisors when her phone rang. On the other end was a representative from an executive search firm attempting to interest her in the CEO’s post at Laird Norton Wealth Management, a 56-year-old wealth and advisory firm — with significant investments in real estate and operating companies — founded by two high-net-worth families to serve families like their own.

Multifamily rents have soared in recent years, but as the economy shows signs of downturn, it remains unclear how much higher rents will go in the future. According to Derek Graham, principal and founder of private real estate investment firm Odyssey Properties Group, the outlook for multifamily real estate overall remains strong, notwithstanding the prospect of recession.

What is it that investors hope to achieve by placing capital in closed-end real estate funds? Most would say it is to generate attractive risk-adjusted returns, but relative to what?

Shares of global airline stocks advanced more than 12 percent during the week ended Jan. 13, indicating that investors were unfazed by the service outage that temporarily grounded planes in the United States. United Airlines was the best performer for the week, up 22 percent, followed by American Airlines (20 percent) and Frontier Airlines (17 percent).  

Stellantis, the Netherlands-based manufacturer of Jeep and Chrysler vehicles, is collaborating with Archer Aviation to begin making electric air taxis. Archer is a San Jose-based company seeking to commercialize electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOLs) with a range of up to 100 miles, traveling at speeds up to 150 mph.

More than three-quarters of North American families who invest through a family office grew their wealth in 2022, according to a new report by London-based Campden Wealth and Royal Bank of Canada. The report found that North American family offices achieved a 15 percent average portfolio return at a time when the stock market had an annual return of –18 percent and the Total Bond Index lost 13 percent.

The way we move electricity around in the United States isn’t designed to meet modern energy needs. Since the beginning of the electric grid, power companies have placed most power plants close to cities. Railroads and pipelines were used to ship fossil fuels from wherever they were extracted to the power plants where they would be burned to make electricity.

Uranium prices have been climbing into the new year as plans to shut many nuclear power plants around the world reversed course in 2022. Many utility operators are now more interested in extending the lifespan of existing plants well beyond 40 years. Germany and Japan are two key nations that have seen public sentiment toward nuclear shift in a positive direction over the past year, coinciding with a significant reconsideration of energy policy.

The reason we founded Real Assets Adviser, ultimately, was to serve the interests of individual investors around the globe, particularly those who are advised by financial professionals like the people reading this publication.

The International Space Station is no longer the only place where humans can live in orbit. On Nov. 29, 2022, the Shenzhou 15 million launched from China’s Gobi Desert carrying three taikonauts — the Chinese word for astronauts. Six hours later, they reached their destination, China’s recently completed space station, called Tiangong, which means “heavenly palace” in Mandarin. The three taikonauts replaced the existing crew that helped wrap up construction. With this successful mission, China has become just the third nation to operate a permanent space station.

The banking sector is at a turning point. Key measures for banks are at a historical low point. The sector’s price-to-book value has fallen to less than one-third the value of other industries. That gap is less the result of current profitability and more about uncertain profit growth in the future. While banks have pushed for great improvements recently, margins are shrinking — down more than 25 percent in the past 15 years and expected to fall to 30 percent (another 20 percent decrease), in the next decade.

From steam power and electricity to computers and the internet, technological advancements have always disrupted labor markets, pushing out some jobs while creating others. Artificial intelligence remains something of a misnomer (the smartest computer systems still don’t actually know anything), but the technology has reached an inflection point where it’s poised to affect new classes of jobs: artists and knowledge workers.

Tech giants are racing to throw their hats into the mix of new artificial intelligence chatbots that will vie to compete with OpenAI’s highly successful ChatGPT program, now the fastest application to ever reach 100 million monthly users. Following Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI in January, and a potentially imminent expansion of its implementation in Microsoft’s products, Google and Baidu each announced the rollout of their own AI bots.

Like the office and hotel property types, student housing appeared to be in the crosshairs of the COVID-19 pandemic. Students were sent home to be educated virtually and their return was anybody’s guess. Fortunately, in-person classes are back in session, students are back on campus and looking for a place to live. Anna-Marie Lieb is head of multi-housing at CrowdStreet, a commercial real estate investing platform.

Remote working has given many of the country’s office workers a hall pass to work from home, and these days, that home can be anywhere. People have taken full advantage of the freedom of remote working to make a move to a new city or state. According to Redfin, more homebuyers are looking to relocate to a new metro. Based on Q3 2022 sales activity, nearly one-fourth of homebuyers (23.3 percent) were looking to move to a different city compared to about 18 percent prior to the pandemic.

The Tax Foundation, an independent tax policy nonprofit, reports that in a coordinated effort, lawmakers in seven states that collectively house about 60 percent of the nation’s wealth — California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New York and Washington — introduced wealth tax legislation. The campaign is part of a broader national focus on new taxes on investment, entrepreneurship and wealth. The proposals include taxing unrealized capital gains and expanding estate taxes. In some states, lower estate tax thresholds would impose the tax on the upper middle class and not just the very wealthy, including the small businesses and farms policymakers have long worked to protect from estate taxes to avoid forcing them to break up to pay the tax. And the wealth taxes themselves would vary across the seven states, partly due to differing state constitutional constraints.

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple: “We call it intelligence, but we don’t know how the brain really works. We pretend we do, but we don’t. I was at a company where the engineers did figure out how to make a brain. It takes nine months.”