Seizing Power: Who Jumped Onto the Power 100 List in 2026?
Data centers and industrial outdoor storage drove the newcomers home
America is a land of immigrants. (We’ll try to avoid drawing too much political inference from that last statement.) That means welcoming the stranger. That means advertising itself as a land of opportunity and promise.
Commercial Observer welcomes new arrivals, too!
Every year Power 100 seeks out the newcomers — the people who work hard to get ahead, in the best national tradition. That means people who are doing things we hadn’t seen before, and who embody the future’s possibilities.
Like, say, data centers. When a company has formed a partnership with Microsoft, Nvidia, MGX and xAI to buy billions of dollars worth of data centers around the country, that’s a company sought out for the Power 100 list. (We’re looking at you, BlackRock.)
One newcomer took a bankrupt, half-finished project on the far West Side of Manhattan and turned it into a plush condo and one of the hottest hotel brands in the world: Faena. (We’re talking about Jonah Sonnenborn.)
For a very long time industrial outdoor storage was seen as nothing more than a boutique asset class that no one could ever make any real money on. But one honoree saw that with enough patience (and the right conditions), IOS could be wildly profitable. (Justin Horowitz might as well change his name to Mr. IOS.)
One honoree combined pretty much every residential real estate advisory company in the country not named Douglas Elliman into one, big behemoth the likes of which has never been seen before. (Hello, Robert Reffkin!)
A lot of honorees have returned after a stint away. One of these names built one of the greatest real estate advisory firms in the world and sold it for $1.1 billion. (If you don’t know the name Roy March, you should really go back a few lists and learn more about the names of commercial real estate. March is evergreen for any Power 100, but especially this year.)
A number of newbies looked at older, vacant office buildings and said, “Hey, let’s turn that into apartments!” Same with affordable housing. Those are probably too numerous to mention here.
One honoree won a casino license and is using it to revamp Flushing Meadows into a multibillion-dollar community of housing and entertainment. (We’re as pissed off about the Mets as you are, Mr. Steve Cohen.)
There are many more. To paraphrase a great sentiment: Give us your energetic, your inventive, your wily real estate operators yearning to break out.
Max Gross can be reached at mgross@commercialobserver.com.
