📚 The quietest comeback story in CRE

👋 Happy Sunday, Best Ever readers! How’s that resolution going? Keep at it. You got this.

In today’s newsletter, bookstores are back, a $900 million World Cup projection, wages keep growing, industrial slows down, and more.

🎟️ GP-LP Speed Networking at Best Ever Conference is back! This exclusive event is divided into 4-minute structured introductions that help you meet more qualified capital partners in one hour than most people meet all year. Secure your conference ticket now to get your invite. Spots are limited and filling fast.

Let’s CRE!

🗞️ NO-FLUFF NEWS
CRE HEADLINES

📈 Growth Shift: Wages have grown 3.9% annually while inflation ran just 2.9% over the past three years, positioning non-Sun Belt markets like Los Angeles, Detroit, Providence, and Buffalo for job growth in 2026 after decades of decline.

🖥️ Data Doubt: Fed projections show U.S. data center investment could range from $360 billion to $930 billion annually by late 2027, reflecting doubt about whether current project announcements represent sustainable trends or a temporary surge.

⚽ World Cup Wave: The World Cup has prompted Tourism Economics to predict $900 million in hotel revenue, comparable to "10 Super Bowls within six weeks," with June room revenue impact ranging from 7% to 25% across host markets.

🔨 Copper Crunch: Copper prices have surged over 30% in 2025 to the biggest yearly rise since 2009, driving construction costs up 15% to 40% as Trump's 50% tariff compounds mine disruptions and rising electrification demand.

🏘️ Rent Control: Los Angeles has tightened rent controls for the first time in 40 years, capping annual increases at 1-4% down from 3-8% and impacting 651,000 apartments as landlords warn of stifled investment.

🏆 TOP STORY
BOOKSTORES WERE SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD. THINK AGAIN.

Independent bookstores are staging an unexpected comeback. Some 422 new locations opened across the U.S. in 2025 — a 24% jump from the prior year. This is, in part, due to landlords eager to fill pandemic-era vacancies offering flexible deals that have lowered barriers to entry for small businesses like bookstores.

The American Booksellers Association tracked membership climbing from a low of 1,951 stores in 2019 to sustained growth through 2025, reversing a decades-long decline that saw bookstore counts plummet from 7,000 in 1994 as Amazon reshaped consumer habits. Barnes & Noble opened more than 60 new stores in 2025, exceeding the total it opened collectively from 2009 to 2019.

The recent state of retail has created this opportunity:

• Rising Vacancies: National shopping center vacancy reached 5.8% in Q2 2025, up 50 bps YoY.

• Mass Closures: Roughly 140M SF of retail space could be freed up from 9,900 announced store closures over the past year.

• Flexible Terms: Struggling shopping centers are offering flexible lease lengths, partial fit-outs, and rent concessions to attract independent retailers.

• Regional Surge: New England saw more bookstore openings in the past four years than in the previous 15 years combined.

The shift caught many off guard. Pandemic-related vacancies were supposed to accelerate retail's decline, not reverse it. Instead, desperate landlords started cutting deals just to avoid the death spiral of empty storefronts. Turns out a quirky independent bookstore beats a papered-over window.

The demand side surprised people, too. BookTok and Bookstagram built massive online communities of readers, and those digital connections created appetite for real-world gathering spots. Remote workers, tired of staring at their kitchen walls, needed third places that weren't Starbucks. Bookstores evolved to meet them there, adding wine bars and cafés that turned browsing into an experience worth leaving the house for.

Some big players saw this coming. Elliott Investment Management didn't buy Barnes & Noble in 2019 to wind it down — they bought it to expand. And the bet has paid off. Barnes & Noble and its UK counterpart, Waterstones, generated roughly $400 million in profit and $3 billion in sales in 2025. The performance was strong enough that Elliott now plans to take the combined chains public through an IPO expected in 2026, all while further expanding their retail footprints.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The bookstore comeback isn't just about nostalgia. It's proof that physical retail can thrive when it solves for what e-commerce can't: the human need for community and discovery in actual space. For landlords stuck with struggling centers, that's not just encouraging — it's a playbook.

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4 MINUTES COULD CHANGE YOUR BUSINESS

Skip the Small Talk. Make Real Connections.

Most networking events waste your time with 20 minutes of pleasantries and business cards that go nowhere.

GP-LP Speed Networking at Best Ever Conference flips the script: 4-minute structured introductions. No fluff. Just you, a potential capital partner, and one question—should we work together?

✅ If you're a GP: Get your opportunities in front of high-quality investors who are actively looking to deploy capital.

✅ If you're an LP: Meet qualified sponsors in a short period of time and identify your next investment.

Meet more potential partners in one hour than most do in an entire conference.

⏰ Space is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Secure your ticket to the conference to secure your invite to this session.

💰 CRE TRENDS
INDUSTRIAL STARTS EXPLODED IN 2025, THEN COLLAPSED

Industrial construction starts collapsed in late 2025 after showing brief spring resilience, with November starts plummeting 62% to just 8.7M SF from 22.9M SF a year earlier, according to Yardi Matrix data.

The year began with modest optimism. Winter 2025 started nearly on par with the prior year at 60M SF, down just 3.2% from winter 2024's 62M SF. Spring momentum actually accelerated — March through May 2025 totaled 77.7M SF, up 3.9% from the same period in 2024, with April hitting the year's peak at 30.5M SF.

Then the floor dropped out:

• Summer Slowdown: June through August starts fell 41.7% YoY to 45.8M SF as financing tightened and speculative projects stalled.

• Fall Collapse: September through November starts crashed 40.7% to 49.6M SF compared to 83.7M SF in fall 2024.

• November Low: November's 8.7M SF represented one of the weakest monthly totals since the sector began contracting from its 2022 peak.

Proceeding with Caution: The consistent double-digit YoY decreases throughout 2025 point to developers taking a more cautious approach after years of aggressive growth, recalibrating the pipeline as demand for new space cooled.

🎙️ THE BEST EVER CRE SHOW
HOW TO BUILD A 2026 SUCCESS ROADMAP

Setting goals for the new year is easy — the hard part is following through. Joe Fairless, founder of Best Ever CRE and cofounder of both Ashcroft Capital and the Best Ever Conference, has some tips for turning aspirations into outcomes.

These aren’t “hacks” — they’re proven strategies that have worked for Joe over the past 13-plus years and have helped him become a best-selling author, achieve $2.7 billion AUM, and much more. He joined host Matt Faircloth this week on the Best Ever CRE Show to share his framework for building a 2026 success roadmap that actually works.

🚫 Why most goals fail (and how to fix it): Complexity kills follow-through. Fairless has seen goal spreadsheets with multiple tabs and dozens of metrics — systems so elaborate they guarantee failure. His solution: radical simplicity. Write goals that are high-level enough to understand and explain easily, with clear yes-or-no outcomes. "You want something that you can conveniently track," he said. No justifications, no wiggle room. Did you hit it or not?

📋 Vision boards: A 13-year case study

Fairless started with traditional vision boards covered in aspirational images. Over time, he evolved to pure text — specific, measurable goals printed on a four-foot by three-foot poster board. Examples from 2025: read 19 books, complete 12 hospice visits, regular dad-daughter nights. He switched from pictures to words because clarity beats inspiration when it comes to tracking progress. His system has worked for over a decade because it's evolved with what actually drives results.

🏆 Make your goals unavoidable

Here's Fairless's secret weapon: omnipresence. He prints his goals on a massive poster board for his office, then makes the same image his phone background and computer screensaver. The goals are literally inescapable. When family and colleagues see them, they ask questions. Those conversations create natural accountability. His daughter places stickers on the board when family goals get completed, turning individual pursuits into shared experiences.

🎯 The 50-50 mindset shift

This might be the most liberating concept: half of a goal's value comes from achieving it, half comes from learning through pursuit. Fairless doesn't treat his vision board as commitments carved in stone — they're goals. "Even if you don't accomplish it, you get good stuff from the process and learning," he explained. You're better off having pursued ambitious goals and fallen short than never stretching at all.

Joe and Matt kept returning to one specific phrase throughout the conversation: "The journey is the joy." Achievement itself is often anticlimactic — the real reward is who you become in pursuit of the goal. Joe has facilitated continued growth by following the same systematic approach for 13 years: visible, simple, shared. Because execution isn't magic — it's method.

🎙️ Listen to Joe's full episode here.