Mosaic Real Estate Investors CEO Ethan Penner, the latest guest on the AFIRE Podcast, doesn’t believe the office sector has hit bottom.

https://www.afire.org/podcast/202407cast/

Yet, at the beginning of 2024, Penner and his business partner Chad Carpenter announced a new US office-focused real estate finance company, Reven Office REIT, that intended to raise $1 billion to provide office owners and investors with bespoke financing solutions.

“Office is a very complicated investment asset today,” Penner says. “It’s something that has inspired fear in investors, and rightly so. But what’s interesting is that when fear becomes pervasive, markets are abandoned. And of course, babies are thrown out with bathwater.”

Penner and his partners are trying to find those “babies”—the office investments that continue to have upside, despite ongoing challenges for the sector.

In this episode of the AFIRE podcast, Penner explains his sometimes counterintuitive take on the health of the office sector with podcast host and AFIRE CEO, Gunnar Branson. Aside from his enthusiasm for finding overlooked gems in the sector, Penner holds concerns about the effect of AI on the future of office. “The [threat] that looms largest, that’s on the horizon, that people are in denial about,” Penner says, “is the impact of AI on jobs, period. I think that there’s a real threat— technology happens faster than people can imagine.”