🤵 Private clubs are the hot new mall anchors

👋 Hello, Best Ever readers! A biotech company just reserved payload space on a commercial space station to manufacture artificial retinas in zero gravity. Imagine the lab buildout costs…

In today’s newsletter, private clubs hit retail, ICE lifts industrial, banks get ‘dumb,’ SF rents go wild, and much more.

Let’s CRE!

🗞️ NO-FLUFF NEWS
CRE HEADLINES

🏭 ICE Dilemma: The federal government has committed $38.3 billion to convert vacant warehouses into detention centers, paying premiums as high as 33% above purchase price — a windfall for developers, though bipartisan pressure has killed at least eight deals.

⚠️ ‘Dumb’ Banks: JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has raised concerns that financial firms are "doing dumb things" as rising asset prices and aggressive competition echo pre-2008 conditions, flagging credit and technology as potential flashpoints.

🏠 BTR Country: The South has emerged as the nation's build-to-rent beltway with nearly 42,000 units underway, according to RealPage, leading all regions in a nationwide pipeline of 68,700 units. Phoenix tops individual markets with over 9,000 units in progress.

🌆 Austin's Reversal: Once ranked the most affordable rental market in the U.S., Austin is poised for a comeback as new supply drops 72% from its 2024 peak and transaction volume climbs 18% YoY, signaling rent increases ahead.

🏨 Hotel High: The global hotel construction pipeline has reached a record 15,922 projects and roughly 2.4 million rooms in Q4 2025, up 1% YoY, with the U.S. leading all countries at 39% of the total.

🏆 TOP STORY
PRIVATE CLUBS ARE THE HOT NEW MALL ANCHORS

The American mall has spent a decade searching for its next act. The answer, it turns out, might be a velvet rope.

Private social clubs — once confined to London's Mayfair or Boston's Back Bay — are moving into vacant anchor spaces across U.S. shopping centers, filling the cavernous footprints left behind by departed department stores. It's an unlikely pairing, but for retail landlords staring down an 8.7% mall vacancy rate and a projected 15,000 store closures in 2025, unlikely is starting to look pretty good.

The clubs filling those boxes aren't cheap. Park House, nestled among Hermès and Fendi at Dallas's Highland Park Village, charges a $7,000 initiation fee and $292 in monthly dues. The Club at The Moore in Miami's Design District runs $5,000 to join with monthly dues over $400. These aren't amenity plays — they're destinations, and that distinction matters enormously to landlords trying to drive consistent foot traffic.

• The traffic case is real: Private clubs can draw double the foot traffic of a typical retail tenant. Membership-based operators also tend to sign longer-term leases, visit during off-peak hours, and spend at surrounding tenants — a halo effect that a vacant box simply can't provide.

• The model is spreading: The Social House recently opened in Cincinnati, and a vacant Grand Rapids building — empty for over a decade — is being converted into The Commerce Club, a 55,000 SF private club with a café, coworking space, and speakeasy, slated to open in November 2026. Mid-sized cities are seeing the fastest growth in the private club market.

• It's one tool, not a solution: Floor plate, center character, and tenant mix all determine whether a private club is the right fit — or whether a grocery anchor or value retailer makes more sense. Not every empty Macy's becomes Park House.

The broader shift is less about private clubs specifically and more about what it means to anchor a retail center in 2026. Consistent, predictable foot traffic is the goal — and increasingly, that's coming from membership models, fitness concepts, grocery, and entertainment rather than department stores.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The private club trend is worth watching less as a curiosity and more as a leasing strategy. Vacancy in anchor spaces is a solvable problem, but only for landlords willing to rethink what an anchor actually is. The question isn't whether the old anchor model is dead. It's whether you've found its replacement.

✍️ BEST EVER BLOG
STOP STARTING WITH THE DEAL

Most independent capital aggregators (ICAs) wait until a deal is live to get their infrastructure in place — and that's exactly what's holding them back.

The scramble isn't caused by the deal itself. It's caused by everything that wasn't built beforehand.

The best ICAs don't operate that way. They establish credibility, structure, and investor trust long before a deadline appears.

The result? Capital raising becomes a repeatable, confident process — not a last-minute sprint. If you're ready to stop improvising and start operating like a professional, this article is your starting point.

💰 CRE BY THE NUMBERS
RENTS RISE AND FALL, MOBs SURGE, AND MORE

🏠 $1,499 

The national median one-bedroom rent fell 1.7% YoY to $1,499 in February, per Zumper, though the pace of decline has slowed for a second straight month. San Francisco bucked the trend, posting 15.6% annual growth as AI-driven demand tightens an already supply-constrained market.

🏥 122% 

Medical office investment totaled $12.6 billion in 2025 — up 35% from 2024 and the highest annual total since 2022. Q4 alone surged 122% QoQ to $6.1 billion, driven largely by a $2 billion Welltower portfolio sale, per CBRE.

🏢 $32.55 PSF 

The national average office asking rent reached $32.55 PSF in January, down 2.5% YoY, even as average sale prices rose 6.1% in 2025 — the first increase since 2021. Office pricing still sits 32.7% below pre-pandemic levels, per Yardi Matrix.

☁️ $12 Billion 

Amazon will invest $12 billion to build advanced data center campuses across Caddo and Bossier parishes in Louisiana, partnering with Stack Infrastructure on construction. The project is expected to create 540 full-time jobs and support 1,710 additional local roles.

🎙️ THE BEST EVER CRE SHOW
INSIDE A SEASONED MHP INVESTORS UPDATED BUY BOX

Chad Freeman sat out 2023 while everyone else overpaid for mobile home parks. Now he's back, and he knows exactly what he's looking for.

Freeman, a mobile home park operator since 2017, joined Amanda Cruise and Ash Patel on the Best Ever CRE Show this week to walk through his buy box as he re-enters acquisition mode in 2026. With a pipeline of nearly 1,000 properties and hard-won lessons from a market that got away from itself, his filter for what makes a deal worth pursuing is more precise than ever.

• Location first: Freeman targets the Sun Belt and Midwest, within 90 minutes of a city center and in the path of growth. He watches highway plans and city utility expansion maps as early signals — if the dirt is being pushed around nearby, he's interested.

• Mom-and-pop, under 200 spaces: Anything larger is likely already institutional. At 100+ lots with city utilities, Freeman says competition is intense — family offices, individual investors, and large operators are all chasing the same assets. He prefers smaller, harder-to-find parks where seller financing is a real possibility, since most mom-and-pop owners carry no debt.

• The one-point spread rule: Freeman underwrites to a one-point spread between the cap rate and his interest rate, targeting just over 10% cash-on-cash from day one while satisfying lender debt coverage requirements.

• Messiness welcome: City utilities are preferred, park-owned homes and septic systems are manageable, but wastewater treatment plants are a hard no. A failing system can mean a $500,000 repair bill with no financing options and an unsellable asset — the kind of problem that ends careers.

The best opportunities, Freeman says, are the ones that look like work. If a park scares off the competition, that's usually a feature, not a bug. And if the seller isn't ready yet? Freeman's fine with that too — the MHP asset list only shrinks, which means the right deal is worth waiting years for. In this asset class, the oven always beats the microwave.

🎙️ Listen to Chad's full episode here.