While many real estate professionals are trained to be optimists (and this is not necessarily a bad trait) we have a feeling that if you hooked them up to a lie detector and asked them for the state of the real estate landscape, the truest answer would be:

“Weird.”

Not bad, necessarily. It’s certainly bad if you bought a string of aging office properties back in 2019, sure. It’s bad if you borrowed money five years ago and your rate is set to adjust. It’s probably bad if you saw the exploding multifamily rents in the Sun Belt and decided as you penciled out your offer that those kinds of increases would exist in perpetuity.

But, if you’re sitting on a pile of cash, this is a great market. If you’re a debt broker who was praying desperately for some semblance of stability for the last 18 months, your prayer is (albeit slowly) being answered. If you’re repping one of the companies that decided to take a wait-and-see approach to making their real estate decisions, it’s decision time, and therefore a decent market. If you’re a retail broker it’s … a pretty good market! (When was the last time we said that?!) And if you’re an architect who knows something about green development, it’s a good market.

All in all, it’s not a boring time to be young and in real estate.

The names chosen for Commercial Observer’s Young Professionals this year are the ones who have already been through the fire. They are the ones who endured four years of uncertainty in a way that not all of their mentors and elders did. For those who kept their heads down and kept the faith, they have earned the right to belt out for all the world to hear: “I’m still here!”

And, while they spent the last four years absorbing the lessons of their mentors, the mettle that they have shown during this extremely trying time proves that they have something to teach those same elders, too.

Anyone who is interested in commercial real estate should read this list closely. These are the people who will be running the show one day. —The Editors