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First Draft Live Ep 17: Inside CRE’s New Operating System (with Christian Ulbrich) Oct 24, 2025

Show notes

After years of cautious experimentation, CRE’s biggest players are finally scaling artificial intelligence.

JLL has been at the forefront of it, launching an in-house AI platform called Falcon that is cutting deal timelines from weeks to hours and automating the drudgery that once bogged down teams. The result is higher revenue per head, higher success rates when pitching and faster closings.

On this week’s show, CEO Christian Ulbrich gave a peek under the hood of how JLL is getting the most out of AI and how he sees it reshaping the industry.

It’s difficult to get an edge from AI, he said. Tools that drive productivity become table stakes within six months. The real differentiation only comes from new-to-market strategy, agentic AI that reinvents parts of CRE deal-making.

Still, the industry must act.

“Don’t wait too long,” he said. “The train has left the station and it is going at Japanese speed levels of train — very very fast.”

Special Edition: John Santora on WeWork’s Second Act (Live at CREtech) Oct 23, 2025

Show notes

Live from the CREtech main stage at New York’s Javits Center on October 21, WeWork CEO John Santora sat down with Bisnow Editor-in-Chief Mark Bonner to unpack one of CRE’s biggest comebacks — from bankruptcy to EBITDA positive, $2.2B in revenue and 550K members, including 47 of the Fortune 100. Occupancy has surged past 90% in Midtown Manhattan and hit 100% in key global markets.

This conversation dropped 24 hours early — in video form — for First Draft Insider Access subscribers. That's our daily briefing for people who want to see what's next in commercial real estate before everyone else. You can join them now for $9 per month at bisnow.com/firstdraft.

First Draft Live Ep 16: Paused, Not Canceled: Inside CRE’s Next Cycle (with Sally Ann Flood) Oct 10, 2025

Show notes

The optimism that permeated commercial real estate at the start of 2025 has died down as the year has gone on.

That's the headline from Deloitte's annual CRE executive survey, but Deloitte partner Sally Ann Flood said on this week's episode that the responses showed an increasingly bifurcated market. Some asset classes, like data centers and warehouses, are "red hot," while investors are still grappling with distress in office and multifamily.

But Flood said the most important theme to come out of this year's survey is the technological inflection point the industry has reached.

“The technology revolution is here for real estate. I really believe this is the time that we can embrace it and really see improvements to the bottom line by adopting the technology.”

From companies embracing AI to digitize leases, partnerships between big tech, real estate companies and energy providers and increased operational efficiency, Flood says this is the year the notoriously tech-averse industry leaps into the digital age.

First Draft Live Ep 15: AI Bubble Math Meets Real Estate (with Michael Pearce) Sep 26, 2025

Show notes

The AI trade is reshaping markets and CRE is riding shotgun.

A surge of capital into chips and data centers has turned AI into the backbone of U.S. growth — pushing tech spending to dot-com-era highs and doubling data center pipelines.

But will it pay off? Alarm bells are ringing that adoption may not match optimism. That could quickly mean swathes of massive data centers sitting vacant.

Michael Pearce, deputy chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, sees the opposite problem. On this week’s episode, he said adoption curves are running much closer to forecasts.

His concern: CRE can’t keep up.

“All the limits are on the supply side,” he said. “On the demand side it feels limitless.”

First Draft Live Ep 14: The Decision: What The Fed Just Told CRE (with Jim Costello) Sep 19, 2025

Show notes

The starting gun has gone off: The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates 25 basis points. Now CRE can be off to the races.

At least that’s the narrative.

In practice, CRE cares more about long-term debt, and the 10-year Treasury ran counter to expectations and actually rose 10 bps, Jim Costello, MSCI’s director of real estate economics, said on this week’s show. Besides, the industry’s problems go far beyond interest rates, and 25 bps isn’t large enough to make much difference.

“If you want to be successful in CRE, it’s not about that home run of capital market forces lifting the value tremendously,” Costello said. “It’s going to be a lot of singles and doubles.”

That means a focus on proper leasing, getting the right broker, careful analysis of tenants and focusing on operating expenses.

How about all that money waiting on the sidelines — will that finally loosen up with the drop in rates?

“Here’s the thing about dry powder: When you get a little wind, it can blow it away,” Costello said.

“If you don’t have a situation where managers can place money effectively and hit their IRRs, that dry powder will dissipate.”

First Draft Live Ep 13: Debt Meets The Housing Crunch (with Sharon Karaffa) Sep 12, 2025

Show notes

It’s a high-pressure year for multifamily. Looming maturities, tough capital markets, changing policies, a major shake-up of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on the horizon and intensified national attention are all converging to complicate the sector.

But multifamily fundamentals are strong, Sharon Karaffa, president of multifamily debt and structured finance at Newmark, said on this week’s episode.

“Absorption has been very high and vacancies are very low. Most of the supply wave is behind us,” she said. “So we think we’re on the upswing.”

The ending of the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could disrupt the market, depending on how exactly it happens.

Karaffa said it is critical that the privatized organizations have a line to the Treasury to maintain affordability, that a strict regulatory framework is put in place to avoid the mess of the Global Financial Crisis and that the agencies are not combined — the market needs both to keep competition alive.

First Draft Live Ep 12: The Bond Market’s Warning To Real Estate (with Chris Stanley) Sep 05, 2025

Show notes

Global bond markets are under siege and CRE is caught in the crossfire.

UK 30-year gilt yields surged to their highest level since 1998, and volatility in U.S. Treasuries has repeatedly brushed them against 5%.

For commercial real estate, that means more expensive debt, climbing cap rates and global investors second-guessing allocations.

Christopher Stanley, banking industry practice lead at Moody’s Analytics, said the tightness of the spread shows increased competition in the market, but the entire yield curve has moved up considerably.

That’s going to hit net operating income, and Stanley said staying on top of liquidity and forecasting out volatility all the way through the life cycle of the project have become crucial.

“When we’re in a nervous economy like we’re in right now, everyone immediately jumps to what kind of credit problems are there going to be,” Stanley said on the show. “Credit is a part of it, but we’re really playing a balance sheet management game.”

First Draft Live Ep 11: CMBS Pain Is Only Beginning (with Ethan Penner) Aug 22, 2025

Show notes

This episode of First Draft Live is presented by Agora.

The godfather of the CMBS market issued a warning that commercial real estate is not out of the woods of its downturn, which is a potential problem for the U.S. economy.

“The losses in CRE are so big that the rippling effect of those losses to the economy are so big that they could be quite harmful,” Ethan Penner, the founder of Mosaic Real Estate Investors, said on this week’s First Draft Live.

Roughly $23B of CMBS loans have matured without a resolution, and more than 10% are delinquent or in special servicing. Yet the CMBS lending market is roaring, with $60B in new debt issued in just the first six months of this year.

“The truth is there are massive, massive losses in real estate,” said Penner, who is credited with inventing the commercial mortgage-backed security in the early 1990s. “These are breathtaking losses, and I think that clearly the system hasn’t recognized that on any level.”

Penner also spoke about his candidacy for the California governor’s race in 2026, with a platform focused on deregulation and a radical new approach to the homelessness crisis in the state.

“I don’t know where the toilets are in the state house, that makes me an outsider,” he said. “But I do know that the systems are broken.”

First Draft Live Ep. 10: Inside The Construction Danger Zone (with Les Hiscoe) Aug 15, 2025

Show notes

This episode of First Draft Live is presented by Agora.

It’s been a chaotic year for the construction industry.

Between a volatile tariff regime, elevated interest rates and increased pressures on its labor force, contractors have had to navigate one of the most difficult environments in recent memory.

On this week’s First Draft Live, Shawmut Design and Construction CEO Les Hiscoe breaks down the impacts of the uncertainty and how his $2B Boston-based company is handling the turmoil.

“When things aren’t known and you can’t really plan on them in our industry, you can’t give our clients predictability,” he said on the show.

While many developers are responding to the moment by delaying projects — Hiscoe said one of his clients won’t start building until interest rates fall a full percentage point — Shawmut is advising them against it as the impacts of tariffs have yet to fully be realized.

“Waiting is a mistake,” he said.

First Draft Live Ep. 9: Opportunity Zones: We're Not In 1.0 Anymore (with Steve Glickman) Aug 08, 2025

Show notes

The original Opportunity Zone program drove more than $100B into real estate and business investment, but it also faced criticism it missed its mark, failing to spur development in the areas that needed it most.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act just made OZs permanent and it aims to fix all that, tightening the rules on what areas may be designated OZs, lowering the area median income threshold and heavily incentivizing rural development.

On this week’s First Draft Live, Steve Glickman — co-author of the original OZ program and CEO of Statt — said OZs have been a wild success, especially at spurring much-needed housing.

“You’re talking bang for the buck that’s unparalleled,” he said.

Glickman said the new rules will make OZ 2.0 even better, though how much it drives rural development all comes down to designating sites at “the nexus between need and investability.”

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