Institutional real estate has always been anchored in fundamentals — location, supply and demand, tenant credit, cap rates, and long-term capital flows. Those first principles have not changed. What has changed is the way they are analysed, interpreted and governed. In today’s environment, investors are no longer satisfied with static reporting or backward-looking metrics. They increasingly expect real-time data, analytical consistency, and forward-looking insight that can withstand macroeconomic volatility and heightened scrutiny.

In the securities world, terms like “liquidity” and “marketability” are often used interchangeably, but they’re fundamentally different. Liquidity means you can convert an asset into cash at or near its fair value. Marketability simply means there’s a market where the asset can be sold — eventually — at some price that may or may not be close to fair market value and often at deep discounts, particularly when the markets are approaching or at bottom.

European private real estate credit is capturing heightened interest from US institutional investors at a pivotal moment in the credit cycle. From Zenzic Capital’s interactions with US LPs during the past 18 months, the consistent feedback is that European credit offers strong relative value and diversification from domestic markets. Relative value is largely a function of European capital market inefficiencies. Credit obeys supply/demand dynamics like any other good: When it is scarce, pricing and protections shift in lenders’ favour and vice versa.

Europe continues to dominate destination preferences for real estate investment, accounting for seven of the top 10 preferred markets among global capital allocators, according to the latest Investment Intentions Survey from INREV. Overall, global investor confidence in real estate has strengthened significantly heading into 2026, reaching its highest level in the survey since 2019. 38 percent of investors globally expect allocations to increase over the next two years, compared with 28 percent anticipating a decrease.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as the dominant force influencing institution’s investment strategies, according to Nuveen’s sixth annual EQuilibrium Global Institutional Investor survey. The study questioned 800 institutions from 30 countries, with 63 percent of respondents identifying AI as the biggest megatrend impacting their decisions over the next five years. Energy transition ranks second at 40 percent, followed by deglobalisation at 36 percent.

Some alternative property types struggled to achieve increases in value during 2025, according to the Green Street Commercial Property Price Index.The data and analytics firm says hotel values increased by 1 percent during 2025, while self-storage saw a drop of –0.5 percent. Data centres saw an uptick of 3.7 percent, but in the final quarter of 2025 this dropped to 0.9 percent. Overall, data centre values are down –0.7 percent since the trough of the third quarter in 2023.

The residential market has always been subject to public sector intervention. Yet in the 2020s, that intervention has reached new highs. That is the trend. And of course, the 2020s are about the rise of populism (on the left and on the right). And populists like intervening in housing markets. Even in moderate governments such as the United Kingdom, intervention is escalating. The residential sector is never subject just to supply and demand, but even less so now. And of course, there is a logic behind it all. When rents start eating up 40 percent or 50 percent of household income and families cannot buy a dwelling, housing stops being an asset class and becomes a social issue. At that point, governments do not sit back and admire market efficiency. They intervene.