Attendees of NAIOP’s I.CON Cold Storage this week in Phoenix had the opportunity to tour a trio of commercial real estate properties showcasing the breadth of the industry.
Vulcan Real Estate was recently named NAIOP's 2025 Developer of the Year, the association's highest honor for leadership and innovation. Leading the company's success is Ada Healy, Chief Real Estate Officer. Healy joined NAIOP’s Inside CRE podcast to share what it takes to deliver developments that truly change communities – including the core values that drive Vulcan’s success.
At CRE.Converge in Toronto this week, global strategist Parag Khanna, founder and CEO of AlphaGeo, painted a bold picture of how shifting geopolitics, climate pressures and technological change are reshaping the commercial real estate landscape across North America and beyond. His central theme: Investors must look beyond risk and lean into resilience to identify the markets best positioned for long-term growth.
“Data centers, for latency reasons, had to be located near certain customers, certain population hubs. So, we saw these markets emerge where there was a lot of data center concentration [such as] Northern Virginia, Dallas, Phoenix,” explained Elissa Wilson during a panel discussion this week at CRE.Converge in Toronto. But the artificial intelligence-driven surge in demand over the past two years has opened opportunities in new markets where power is still abundant and grids are less constrained.
The Canadian and U.S. real estate markets continue to move on distinct but parallel trajectories, shaped by interest rates, investor sentiment, capital structures and local regulation. That distinction is due to the delta between interest rates in both countries, said Jeff Wagner, senior managing director, IPA markets, Marcus & Millichap, during a session this week at CRE.Converge in Toronto.
Weather and climate disasters result in catastrophic insurance losses, from wildfires to floods, winter storms and tornadoes. They’re increasing in frequency, with so-called 100-year floods now happening several times in a decade. In a CRE.Converge panel this week in Toronto, four climate and sustainability experts gathered to discuss how commercial real estate assets are impacted in an era of climate change.
Commercial real estate has faced challenges in the last year due to an uncertain macroeconomic environment and demographic shifts, said Peter Norman, vice president and economic strategist, Altus Group, at NAIOP’s CRE.Converge conference this week in Toronto.
Since the first wave of the data center boom in the early 2010s, when fiber optic technology separated from copper and could carry large amounts of data, this evolving sector of commercial real estate has become an area of major focus today, especially when it comes to building with sustainability in mind.
