Franco Faraudo

BDT & MSD Partners is buying a majority stake in Sunrise Senior Living, the fifth-largest operator in the sector with more than 230 communities across the United States and Canada. The seller is Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Board. Terms were not disclosed, though a source familiar with the deal said the buyer values it at more than $1 billion. What makes it notable is the buyer. BDT & MSD, the firm managing Michael Dell’s fortune, runs roughly $20 billion and has built its real estate exposure almost entirely in hospitality, with investments including The Boca Raton, Four Seasons Hualalai, and a stake in the Auberge Collection. This is its first move into senior housing.

The Securities and Exchange Commission adopted climate disclosure rules in March of 2024 by a three-to-two vote, following two years of rulemaking and more than 20,000 public comments. Public companies would have been required to report greenhouse gas emissions, describe climate-related business risks on a forward-looking basis, and detail whatever steps they were taking to mitigate those risks.

The volume of video content real estate agents produce is about to increase by an order of magnitude. Content production has always been the constraint. Filming takes time, editing takes more, and both compete directly with the work that actually generates commissions. Ryan Serhant’s new project is the clearest signal yet that the constraint is gone. He has partnered with HeyGen to launch @HeySerhant, a channel publishing original content daily for the next twelve months through an AI avatar built on his likeness and voice. He approves the topics and signs off personally on anything tied to the market. “For an agent, every hour spent filming is an hour you’re not with a client, at a showing or working on the business,” he said, which is the entire argument in one sentence and also why this will not stay confined to one channel.

AREA15, Fisher Brothers’ Las Vegas entertainment district, offers a technology-forward example of how purpose-built infrastructure can simplify AI integration across a property. (Image: Fisher Brothers)

Residential property management runs on repetition, which makes it unusually suited to automation, but the limits of what AI should handle are becoming clearer as adoption accelerates.

Toronto-based H&R Real Estate Investment Trust is losing support for a breakup and sale agreement it signed in August, as a widening group of institutional holders objects to the share of value going to assets controlled by the family of its chief executive. The transaction would split the company apart, sending the industrial portfolio to Blackstone Inc. and a group of co-investors while New York-based GO Residential Real Estate Investment Trust takes the residential assets, most of them in the US sunbelt. Stockholders would receive a combination of cash and GO shares. A separate company called CRAL, controlled by the family of executive chairman and chief executive Tom Hofstedter, would acquire roughly C$2 billion worth of properties from H&R, and the price it is paying for them has become the central issue ahead of a November 13 vote.

While the antitrust fight over RealPage has dominated attention, a quieter case against Yardi Systems, Inc. has been working its way through federal court in Seattle for three years, and it just took a turn that could make it the more consequential of the two. A Washington renter named McKenna Duffy sued Yardi and a group of property managers in September 2023, alleging that they used the software now called Revenue IQ, formerly RENTmaximizer, to coordinate rents across competing properties by routing non-public pricing data through a common algorithm. The proposed class covers leases dating back to September 8, 2019. On October 13, Judge Robert S. Lasnik of the US District Court for the Western District of Washington denied Yardi’s motion for summary judgment and lifted a stay that had kept plaintiffs from taking discovery against the landlords named alongside it.

AI investment is translating into office demand faster than previous tech cycles did, though the growth is concentrated in a small number of submarkets rather than lifting the sector broadly.

Industrial outdoor storage rents are climbing as data center construction competes for scarce staging ground, though hyperscale campuses may outgrow the parcels available.

With federal rental protection efforts stalled, cities and states are writing their own fee transparency rules, leaving multifamily operators to track an expanding patchwork of local requirements.