The PERE Podcast

This week on The PERE Podcast, focus is turned to Singapore, where a lively docket of PERE Asia keynotes and panels have just concluded. The event saw record attendance across its three days, with some 600 delegates in attendance across the event including institutional investors, managers and advisers. 

PERE has been active in tracking perspectives from leading institutions and firms onsite, including analysis on how Adu Dhabi Investment Authority and Australian Retirement Trust are navigating fund investment activity in 2026.

For this episode, PERE editor Evelyn Lee’s keynote interview with Starwood Capital Group president Jonathan Pollack takes center stage. Pollack is a primary driver of the manager’s overarching strategy and daily business operations, and as PERE reported in a September 2025 cover story, he is also the chosen successor to Starwood founder and chief executive officer Barry Sternlicht. 

Pollack covers a broad range of topics, all spanning from his first year in as the operational overseer for Starwood. The firm is angling to work more closely with insurance capital partners; continue clean-up and related asset management work linked to Starwood’s $7 billion take-private of ESR Group in 2025; and take a more cloud computing-centric tack to its data center investment pipeline. All this is under the backdrop of global geopolitical issues, which are expected to force financial market participants to recalibrate for US policy as military escalations take place in Iran and select neighboring countries.

This episode is sponsored by Knight Frank and Reed Smith

Back leverage has emerged from the shadows to have its moment in the sun. Not long ago, taking on debt to partly fund loans was a practice frowned upon by many European investors and borrowers. But today, it is increasingly used and accepted.

In this special episode of The PERE Podcast, Jess Qureshi, an associate in Knight Frank’s capital advisory team, and Josh Hughes, a partner at law firm Reed Smith, review the use of back leverage in European real estate finance. How does it work? Who is using it and why? And what are the risks and rewards involved?

Jess lays out the results of Knight Frank’s latest research on the space, which reveals how extensive European lenders’ employment of back leverage has become. Meanwhile, Josh analyzes the technicalities of structuring loan-on-loan and repo line arrangements in the most effective manner. The pair emphasize the crucial importance of alignment between alternative lenders and their back leverage providers.

While it involves increased risk, the pair conclude that using back leverage creates more liquidity for borrowers because it enables lenders to originate more loans while juicing the return on capital achievable for investors in real estate credit markets.

We return to the familiar territory of real estate investment trust take-private deals this week, as host Randy Plavajka uncovers how private real estate managers aiming to capitalize on listed market dislocations may face a reshaped landscape as REIT market health gradually returns.

Even as take-private efforts are actively launched this week – such as an agreement between Affinius Capital and Vista Hill Partners to take Veris Residential REIT private in a deal valued at $3.4 billion – the outlook ahead for similar opportunities could shift, as some market analysts suggest.

Joining Randy from London are Jonathan Brasse, PEI’s editor-in-chief, real estate, and Sarah Marx, reporter at PERE Deals, who bring in recent commentary and prior-year data on REIT take-private deals to cast more light on the factors set to impact future opportunities in the space. Changes in valuation processes, increasingly available dry powder for listed real estate businesses and updated private-side scaling initiatives are all expected to reconfigure how private managers target take-private deals in the next cycle of the real estate market.

The team is joined by Matthew Norris, head of real estate securities at Gravis, later in the episode. His firm, a regular commentator on REIT capital markets activity, sees more signs of inflection in today’s market, including public-to-public mergers, valuation reconsiderations, and the potential return of steadier initial public offerings throughout REIT categories.

The PERE Podcast heads to Las Vegas this week as host McKenna Leavens breaks down one of the splashiest capital markets moves of the year: Blackstone’s planned $3.05 billion CMBS refinancing of The Cosmopolitan. The deal taps into powerful forces shaping today’s credit landscape, from the growing appetite for top-tier hospitality assets to the resilience of destination markets in a post-pandemic environment. 

Joining McKenna in New York are PERE Credit deputy editor Randy Plavajka and PERE Credit senior reporter Shihao Feng, who unpack why this transaction is resonating so strongly in today’s lending market. The team traces the long-running attraction of institutional capital to Las Vegas, dating back in modern markets to the billions in hospitality trades made in 2020 and 2021, and why that conviction is now spilling over onto the debt side. They also explore Blackstone’s deep footprint in the market.  

From the surge in securitized refinancing activity to the growing role of SASB structures and the rise of C-PACE as a flexible capital tool, the episode digs into how Vegas has become a proving ground for refinancing activity heading further into 2026. Later in the episode, listen as founder and managing partner of Brighton Capital Advisors, Michael Cohen, shares how The Cosmo refinancing ranks within today’s CMBS landscape and what it signals for hospitality financing more broadly.

This episode looks at the relationship between artificial intelligence risk and private real estate investing.

Major firms including Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft are projected to spend approximately $650 billion on AI and related infrastructure. Amazon alone says it intends to spend $200 billion on AI, chips, robotics and satellites.

Will these plans prove to be sustainable long-term strategies, or is this a sign of a bubble? How an AI-driven correction could impact institutional private real estate – in terms of capital flows, asset pricing and demand assumptions – is a pertinent question. This is especially the case in light of the industry's push into the data center sector, both in the US and Europe, across equity and debt strategies. But the impact of a correction would not necessarily stop there.

This week, we ask Goodwin Gaw for his perspectives on the subject. Listen as the co-founder and chairman of Gaw Capital Partners, one of Asia's most prominent private real estate managers, addresses how investors might position themselves to capture AI-related growth while remaining defensive against cyclical volatility.

For real estate, data centers may be the most obvious way to ride the AI wave. But they’re not without risk. If sentiment shifts or capital tightens, that part of the market could feel it first. What may emerge instead is a two-pronged approach to investing: doubling down on the fundamentals of necessity-driven assets on one end, and high-conviction luxury and lifestyle assets on the other. Gaw says this is a moment for the industry to stay nimble, to anticipate disruption and to be firmly on the front foot.

This episode is an excerpt from a wider interview between Gaw and Jonathan Brasse, PEI Group's real estate editor-in-chief. The discussion was recorded as part of a webinar for PERE Network members, designed to share insights emerging from PERE's Advisory Board conversations.