Right around January of this year, a lot of landlords in the nation’s major metropolises were practically dancing the Charleston.

It felt for them like the dawn of a new age. Looking at the biggest city (New York) and the most battered asset class of the COVID era (office), it was as if we had returned to the good old days. Approximately 33.3 million square feet of leases were signed in Manhattan alone in 2024, according to Colliers. It was the best year since 2019.

SL Green’s mammoth bet on its office tower One Vanderbilt was paying off beyond the company’s wildest dreams. When the Japanese company Mori last fall wanted to buy an 11 percent stake in the property, it was valued at $4.7 billion.

When Tishman Speyer around the same time wanted to refinance Rockefeller Center, the once moribund CMBS market rallied to the tune of $3.5 billion.

After years of punishingly high interest rates, the Federal Reserve indicated that inflation had been reasonably tamed. Rates would no longer be going up.

Companies were no longer allowing office employees to work from home. Large investors were putting billions of dollars toward multifamily, data centers, industrial outdoor storage — even retail was having a moment with shrinking vacancies and rising rents. It looked like we were entering an age reminiscent of the one best described by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Then came April.

Of course, the mood remains buoyant among many of the names on Power 100, but plenty of them are also conscious of the era following the Jazz Age — much as they’re probably aware that said Jazz Age followed a pandemic. (Fitzgerald was acutely aware, too. Fans of The Great Gatsby — which was published exactly 100 years ago last month — might want to look at his 1931 story Babylon Revisited.)

And plenty of our honorees are hedging against whatever comes out of tariffs, or a recession, or anything else that might pop up.

There is little stopping the revolution in the works in artificial intelligence, and many of the names on this list are preparing for it. Billions of dollars are being allotted to data center development by some of these honorees.

Some have seen the green light in San Francisco or South Florida, recognizing that there is no single geographic hub where real estate is centralized. Development, talent, and bricks and mortar are a valuable asset everywhere, and the Power 100 names are catering to it.

Housing remains something that will outlive an office craze, or a retail fad, and many of the names here are developing, designing and selling this asset in a nation starved for the stuff.

So join us in raising a glass to this year’s Power 100. These are the names who have run faster, stretched their arms out farther, and are beating their boats against the current — in their case, ceaselessly into the future.