Sunday Summary: Hello, Sunshine State!

Basta with the winter! How about some sand, sunshine and beautiful, beautiful real estate?

Specifically, we’re talking about South Florida.

Condos. The A1A. Pina Coladas.

To pay heed to the Sunshine State and its various brick-and-mortar glories, this week Commercial Observer published our annual list of the most powerful people in South Florida real estate, and it’s worth a deep dive.

Some of the names will be familiar (Soffer, Ross, Defortuna, Pérez), some will be less so, but all of them caught our eye over the last 12 months, and each entry paints a panel in the grand mosaic that is Florida real estate.

Take a look before we get overwhelmed and hop a flight even before March 20.

A bid too far

One of the big stories from 2023 was the sale of the Signature Bank loan portfolio.

For those of you whose memories have faded, back then the FDIC tried to offload a chunk of loans that were on Signature’s books for a stake in the bank’s $5.8 billion rent-regulated portfolio. It was one of the most enticing packages of real estate debt ever offered.

Related Fund Management and Neighborhood Restore, in concert with the Community Preservation Corporation (CPC), scored the winning bid.

But not everyone was happy with the result. Turns out there had been multiple other bidders that offered more than the 59 cents on the dollar that the chosen winners paid.

We found out this week just how much more the losing bidders had offered. Related, Neighborhood Restore and CPC paid $47.1 million less than the offer tendered by Brookfield Asset Management and Tredway.

Higher bids also came in from a joint venture between Skylight Real Estate Partners and Rithm Capital and another offer from Brooksville and Sabal.

Which is definitely cause for a mighty cry of: “WTF!”

The good, the bad and the wild cards

Real estate professionals across the world descended on Cannes last week for MIPIM, the global real estate convention, where the talk was on the good, the bad and the president of the United States.

First, the good: Banks are back, baby.

“It does feel like there’s a real opportunity to finance commercial real estate efficiently for the first time in awhile,” said Blackstone’s Michael Lascher on a panel last Wednesday. “The markets are open, so from our perspective, when you see a door, you need to walk through it. So we’re taking the opportunity to get ahead of some of our maturities coming up in `26 and `27.”

“There’s never been a better time to be a borrower,” said Kushner Companies’ Laurent Morali on a panel the next day. “If you’re looking to borrow money to refinance an asset or acquire an asset, you’re going to get a full array of proposals from all types of lenders.”

Plus, there was a sense of normalcy around the convention that CO picked up while speaking to various attendees.

“2024 was back to being like a normal year, like pre-COVID trends, meaning stable rent growth at around 3 and 4 percent,” said Lafayette Real Estate’s Thibault Adrien when asked about his dealings in the single-family rental market. “The outlook is we’re going to continue to see 3 and 4 percent rent growth in the next couple of years, and I think the build-for-rent new supply is likely to drop because the problems that multifamily developers face are the same that the SFR space faces.”

The bad news: Don’t expect interest rates to come down anytime soon.

“There is going to be a continuing tension between governments and central banks … on inflation,” said former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi during the convention’s opening keynote. “So central banks will find it difficult to cut, significantly, interest rates.”

Which isn’t good, but isn’t necessarily the end of the world.

“Stability in interest rates is better than instability, even if they’re higher,” said Newmark’s Barry Gosin during the second part of the keynote. “You could live in an environment where there’s underwriting that’s higher. So the key is for the banks to start selling some of this stuff.”

Which gets to the T card — and by “T” we mean both “Trump” and “tariffs.” (Alternatively, Rob Wilkinson of AEW Capital Management Europe called it “The big ‘T.’”)

“The conversation around geopolitical uncertainty is real,” said Michael Lehrman, president of the United Kingdom for Newmark. “Investors have told us they can’t remember a time when the market talked about geopolitical uncertainty so much and how this will be reflected in pricing.”

Here in the U.S. we saw similar mixed messages last week. The most recent inflation numbers were pretty good. There was a 4.2 percent increase in housing prices from February 2024 to February 2025, which was the smallest year-to-year increase since December 2021, according to the consumer price index.

And, when Citigroup held an open roundtable on office, retail, industrial and multifamily last week, the mood was pretty good, all things considered, with attendees agreeing that there was low supply across all asset classes and improved rent growth.

“Demand post-election has picked up, it has continued, and it is pretty broad based,” said Citigroup’s Craig Mailman on the industrial sector. “And so that has really been the focus for investors and us — the sustainability of this demand improvement — which we think bodes well for net absorption statistics in the second half of this year.” (Speaking of which, BlackChamber Group plunked down $190 million for a 65-acre industrial campus in Northern Virginia to develop a data center.)

Retail, on the other hand, has seen some prominent bankruptcies and closings. (Witness Forever 21 reportedly toying with closing its 300-plus brick-and-mortar operations and filing for bankruptcy.)

Office is another of those mixed stories. There are certainly big leases, like Amazon taking a whopping 193,000 square feet at RXR and Walton Street Capital’s 237 Park Avenue, or the law firm Morgan Lewis taking a seriously impressive 123,000 square feet at Michael Shvo’s Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco. But we also learned that office CMBS loans reached a record 19.3 percent distress rate in February.

Welcome back!

Lastly, we got some interesting news last week. After taking off from Newmark late last year, Dustin Stolly is reuniting with his old JLL crew (namely Aaron Appel, Keith Kurland, Jonathan Schwartz and Adam Schwartz) — this time at Walker & Dunlop.

Stolly, who has done $100 billion worth of deals over the course of his career, would be a major get for anyone.

“The addition of Dustin to our exceptional New York capital markets team is simply fantastic and will drive significant growth in our debt and equity placement across the country,” Willy Walker told CO. “Dustin’s experience, coupled with our existing team, will make W&D’s capital markets and structured finance team one of the very best in the industry.”

We expect to hear big things soon.

See you next week!