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After years on the sidelines, the institutional giants are buying office again. SL Green, BXP, Vornado, and Nardis are back in the market, and Q1 2026 office investment sales hit $20.5 billion, up nearly 40% year over year. So is office finally back?

Not exactly. Greg and Chase break down why nearly every one of those dollars is flowing to the same 10% of stock, widening the K-curve split between trophy assets that earn the commute and the buildings being left behind. The signal isn't desks, it's rooms: conference and collaboration space is booking at more than twice the pace of desk reservations, because the entire reason to come in is to be around other people. This is the Experience Gap playing out in real time, and it's reshaping how landlords underwrite, lease, and design space.

From there, the guys get into NEOM as a $500 billion cautionary tale in central planning, the end of "extend and pretend" as $100 billion of office CMBS comes due, SpaceX compressing its data center build from 122 days to 66, and the water-rights land grab quietly becoming AI's next hard constraint.

In this episode:

The thread running through all of it: capital, talent, and compute are concentrating fast, and the cities and buildings that win will be the ones that close the experience gap instead of waiting for the old playbook to come back.

Sponsored by HqO - the leading tenant experience platform for commercial real estate.

TIMESTAMPS: 

00:00 Intro and Real Comm field report 

02:55 Anchor: Smart money is buying office again 

06:30 REX U: The office isn't back, the meeting room is 

15:55 Quantum Review: NEOM, a $500B cautionary tale 

25:10 Quick Hits: The end of extend and pretend 

29:00 JP Morgan winds down a 24-year-old core fund 

30:00 SpaceX, build speed, and the IPO road show 

35:15 Power, water, and Project Stratos 

41:00 One More Thing: The World Cup infrastructure test

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China just opened the largest train station on earth. 1.2 million square meters. 7 years to build. LIDAR robots working three times faster than humans. Trains doing 220mph.

Boston took 17 years to extend 4.7 miles of Green Line. New York spent $5 billion on 1.8 miles of subway tunnel. California committed $100 billion to high-speed rail and hasn't broken ground.

This isn't a money problem. It's an incentives problem. And until we're honest about that, we're not even on the field.

Meanwhile NVIDIA just posted $81.6 billion in revenue. Up 85% year over year. Data centers growing faster than the company itself. AI is paying rent now… literally. Anthropic is paying SpaceX $1.25 billion a month for compute. SpaceX just filed for the largest IPO in history with a $28.5 trillion TAM. And it's not really a rocket company. It's an infrastructure play. A real estate company. With rockets.

The most expensive event in a CRE portfolio isn't a default. It's the lease expiration nobody saw coming. And the industry still doesn't have the metrics to catch it.

In this episode:

Is the US infrastructure problem about money, politics, or culture? We have a take. What's yours?

TIMESTAMPS:

00:49 Biggest News Week of the Year

01:31 China's Train Station Stats Are Insane

03:26 Why America Can't Build Anymore

07:27 The Real Reason US Infrastructure Fails

12:32 Transit Is a City's Greatest Force Multiplier

13:22 The Most Expensive Event in Any CRE Portfolio

16:14 Why Landlords Always Miss the Signals

19:56 The 4 Drivers of Tenant Non-Renewal

21:35 Will AI Finally Force CRE to Change?

28:13 Houston: America's Most Underrated City

31:45 Why Nobody Talks About Houston

32:41 Houston's Culture, Food and Sports

33:41 NVIDIA Posts $81.6B — The Numbers Are Absurd

35:30 AI Is Now a Rent-Paying Tenant

36:47 How Jensen Huang Runs NVIDIA

37:52 SpaceX Files the Largest IPO in History

38:21 Anthropic Pays SpaceX $1.25B a Month

42:26 SpaceX Is Letting Retail Investors In

43:29 OpenAI vs Anthropic: Who Goes Public First

46:52 Blackstone and Google's $25B AI JV

48:01 Why Stadiums Are Infrastructure

49:19 Boston Tech Week: Great Idea, Terrible Name

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120 million square feet leased in Q1 2026. Best quarter in a decade. First time since before the pandemic that volume cleared its historical average.

So why does Class B still feel like a completely different market?

AI firms are signing massive leases. Trophy assets are doing fine. The best buildings in the best markets are printing record quarters. But Class B is staring at a debt wall that doesn't care about good headlines. CMBS delinquencies are above 5%. The loans coming due in the next 18 months aren't going to refinance themselves. And the Fed just got a new chair who made it very clear he's not cutting rates to make anyone feel better.

Meanwhile Dubai just launched a $5.6 billion metro line, 100 driverless taxis, air taxis with a six year exclusivity deal, and The Boring Company is breaking ground on the loop. Their stated goal is 80% of daily destinations reachable within 20 minutes. They're not debating it. They're building it. And while we argue about everything else, they're directly connecting infrastructure to GDP output and nobody in the US seems to care.

The real story right now isn't whether CRE is recovering. It's who the recovery is actually for.

In this episode:

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Back in February, the AI panic ripped through CRE stocks and everybody bled. CBRE, JLL, BXP, Newmark — absolutely hammered. The bear case was simple: AI was gonna “destroy” office demand, gut the brokerage business, and that was that. Q1 2026 earnings just came in. It wasn't even close.

Owen Thomas got on the BXP earnings call and said the exact opposite. AI and tech leasing in San Francisco went from 50% of demand to nearly 80% in a single year. SL Green posted a record quarter. CBRE printed $10.5 billion against a $9.5 billion expectation. Their data center business alone did $950 million in Q1, a number that was literally zero five years ago. The bull case for commercial real estate isn't a thesis anymore. It's paying the rent.

We break down why AI isn't a vertical, it's a horizontal, why innovation always clusters in cities, and why the next wave of business process automation has barely started. The CapEx flowing into compute and energy is showing up directly on brokerage income statements and the Q1 numbers suggest the runway is longer than most people think.

In this episode:

Drop a comment if you have a city for the Quantum City Index scorecard or a guest we should have on the show.

Sponsored by HqO - the leading tenant experience platform for commercial real estate.

TIMESTAMPS: 

00:00 Intro: F29 And April Numbers Up And To The Right 

01:33 Owen Thomas And BXP On AI Driving Leasing Activity 

02:49 Why Innovation Still Clusters In Cities 

08:03 Are We Still Early On AI Adoption 

11:03 Is The CapEx Ahead Of Real Demand 

14:27 Q1 Earnings: BXP, SL Green And The AI Tenant Surge 

20:13 CBRE And JLL Smash Estimates: $950M In Data Centers Alone 

23:44 Big Tech CapEx And Where The Money Is Going 

24:56 Jamie Hodari, Industrious And The $800M Move 

28:16 BOE: CBRE Unifies Operations And Experience 

31:15 What's Happening With Yardi And WeWork 

32:13 Power Is Still The Bottleneck. Follow The Permitting Map 

34:05 The Politics Of AI Growth 

36:34 Why Citizens Push Back On Data Centers 

40:43 The Fed Holds And Powell Refuses To Leave 

42:53 Fidelity Goes Back Five Days A Week 

45:01 Equity Residential And AvalonBay In Merger Talks 

46:19 Career Advice: How To Use AI To Win In Brokerage 

49:45 The Wall Street Story That Went Viral 

52:16 Wrap: AI Is Paying The Rent

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If you've been watching office vacancy hit record highs while office leasing also hits record highs and wondering what is going on, this one's for you.

Episode 28. We're back. And we have a lot to catch up on.

The Microsoft-Chevron deal just told you everything you need to know about where big tech is heading. Behind the meter power, 2.5 gigawatts in West Texas, and a very clear signal that energy is the new supply chain bottleneck. The companies that figure out verticalization first are going to own the next decade. And no, this is not a bubble. The demand is real. The infrastructure just isn't there yet.

JLL dropped their Q1 2026 Office Market Dynamics report and the numbers are hard to ignore. 10% of buildings are carrying 60% of national vacancy. Trophy and Class A leasing is 13% above pre-pandemic levels. 120 million square feet signed in a single quarter, the highest total since 2018. This was never a demand problem. It's a product problem. And the market is done waiting for landlords to catch up.

Boston gets a full Quantum City scorecard breakdown and the grades are not pretty. A city with MIT, Harvard, and Whoop in its backyard sitting at a C overall is a problem worth talking about.

Tim Cook stepping down, SL Green hitting 100% occupancy, AI companies accounting for 25% of Manhattan office leases, and one very brave guy hitting an eagle on 18 next to a 12-foot alligator.

TIMESTAMPS:

01:43 Behind The Meter Power Explained 

04:03 AI Is Breaking The Energy Grid 

07:00 Big Tech Verticalizes Into Energy 

09:15 Why AI Is Not The Dot Com Bubble 

13:16 Real Estate Developers And The Energy Opportunity 

16:01 JLL Q1 2026: The Office Experience Gap 

18:06 Why Office Class Labels Are Dead 

23:31 Office Leasing Rebound: What The Data Says 

26:20 Commercial Real Estate Distress Is Accelerating 

27:00 Boston Office Market Reality Check 

28:10 Boston Quantum City Scorecard 

28:51 Bad Leadership Kills Economic Momentum 

30:21 Massachusetts AI Coalition vs The UAE 

33:02 Can Whoop Put Boston On Its Back 

35:00 Office Vacancy vs Leasing: Q1 2026 Numbers 

36:48 AI Companies Now Drive Manhattan Office Leasing 

38:21 Tim Cook Steps Down: Good Run Or Not 

41:16 Mayor Wu, Ken Griffin And City Politics 

42:09 Podcast Numbers And The Hair Update 

43:37 Eagle On 18 Next To A 12-Foot Alligator 

45:12 What Is Coming Next On The Quantum City Show

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We've been talking about what makes a quantum city for a while now. Rob is in the middle of building one.

Rob Lair, co-founder of Hula Lakeside Investments, joined us this week and the conversation took on a life of its own. 

Eight years ago, Rob and his partner Russ Scully converted a vacant oven factory in Burlington, Vermont into what is now 150,000 square feet of coworking infrastructure — and layered on top of it a venture fund, a 100-investor network, and a thesis that private capital deployed by people who love their community is the most powerful force in economic development. Their portfolio grew from a combined $400 million in market cap to over $9 billion. One of their companies, Beta Technologies, just IPO'd at $7.5 billion. Their founder was Rob's neighbor.

The thread that ran through the entire conversation was leadership — specifically, the idea that GDP growth and business formation don't come from government or institutions. They come from private capital with a long time horizon and a genuine connection to place. Everything else, including housing, childcare, the zoning reform, follows from that.

In this episode:

Rob, thank you for joining us. This was one of those conversations we'll be thinking about for a while.

TIMESTAMPS:

04:19 Building Hula’s Engine

07:36 Can Burlington Scale

13:37 What Cities Need

17:02 Winning Over Government

19:23 Venture Time Horizons

28:15 Place Based Capital

30:59 CRE Future Challenge

32:04 Capital Flows Forecasting

33:15 Hula Model Spreading

34:22 Placemaking Beats Backward Data

36:22 AI Underwriting Heatmaps

39:31 Designing For Company Lifecycle

42:32 State Of Venture Today

47:43 Alts And Capital Allocation

49:56 Smart City Data Vision

54:12 Rapid Fire City Metrics

56:14 AI Prompting Workflow

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30% of office buildings in America are functionally obsolete. That's $1.1 trillion of commercial real estate sitting vacant, aging, and bleeding value. The question everyone is asking: what do you do with it?

Daniel English has an answer. And he just bet $40 million on it.

Daniel is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Legacy Investing and he just acquired the former Chicago Board Options Exchange headquarters at 400 S. LaSalle Street to convert it into a 33-megawatt AI data center. The building sold for $12 million 16 months earlier. He's putting hundreds of millions more in equipment in without a single tenant signed.

That's not recklessness. That's a thesis.

In Episode 26 of the Quantum City Initiative Show, Greg sits down with Daniel to unpack why data centers are migrating from suburban campuses to NFL cities, why the building that launched electronic trading is now being rebuilt as AI infrastructure, and why the data center industry's biggest problem isn't power or latency — it's that we've built data centers that look like prisons.

There's also one idea in this episode that will reframe how you think about every building in your portfolio: data centers are not designed for people. They're designed for servers. And that distinction — something that sounds obvious — turns out to unlock an entirely new playbook for what to do with the office buildings no one else can figure out.

Also in this episode:

Data Centers as Civic Institutions: Every photo of your family, every iMessage, every digital memory you own lives in a data center. So why are we running political campaigns against them?

The AI Inference Explosion: Daniel explains why AI inference — the compute that powers your LLMs in real time — is expected to 10x in the next five years, and why that changes where data centers need to be located

The Amazon Package Analogy: The single clearest explanation of why data centers work exactly like logistics warehouses — and why that means more of them are coming to your downtown

The NFL City Rule: If your city has an NFL team, you're getting data centers.

The Minneapolis Proof of Concept: Legacy built an AI inference node on top of a mixed-use office tower in downtown Minneapolis — and nobody driving past it knows it's a data center

The Grid Is 100 Years Old: Daniel's historical argument for why the power conversation is being misframed — and why data centers may actually be the catalyst cities need to finally upgrade aging infrastructure

Data Centers in Space: Why this idea gets laughed at in every industry cocktail party Daniel attends (and why the maintenance problem is the real answer)

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 — Intro: Strata backstory, and the $1.1 trillion office problem

01:45 — Daniel's background: tech startups, going public, and the shift to infrastructure

03:35 — What is a data center? And why does everyone think they're prisons?

06:15 — The civic institution argument: your family photos live in a data center

08:05 — Data Centers Are Heading Downtown

09:55 — AI inference explained: the Amazon package analogy

13:05 — The NFL City rule: where data centers cluster and why

18:20 — Power and the grid: why the 100-year-old infrastructure argument changes everything

24:30 — Greg's snowstorm story and the moment you realize you take the grid for granted

26:40 — The CBOE building: vacant for four years, rats included, now being reinvented

30:45 — Why you can put servers in the middle of a 50,000 sq ft floor plate — and why humans won't go there

33:40 — Washington's role: zoning, policy, and why no one defined "data center" in building code until recently

38:10 — What Legacy looks for in a market

41:50 — Hottest data center markets

43:15 — Data centers in space

45:40 — Rapid Fire Segment

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When the AI panic hit Wall Street, the public markets went into an absolute whipsaw.

There’s just one problem with that "doom and gloom" story: CBRE just posted record annual revenue of $40.6 billion - up 13% year over year.

In Episode 25 of TQCIS, we break down why this selloff might be one of the most "oversold" moments in recent history. They dive into why the Luddite Fallacy is the most underused framework in CRE right now, proving that efficiency doesn't decrease demand for labor - it usually explodes it.

We also look at the ultimate "vibe shift": Coinbase. After paying $25 million to exit San Francisco and declaring themselves "remote-first," they’re officially back with 150,000 square feet. It turns out, when innovation cycles speed up, the smartest companies realize that digital communication is not the best form for learning.

Also in this episode:

Is the office dead? Or is the "passive landlord" the only thing actually going extinct?

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 - Intro: Three feet of snow, no power, and the case against Boston as a Quantum City 

02:00 - Anchor Story: The AI panic that hammered CBRE, JLL, and the CRE market 

18:40 - Coinbase paid $25M to leave San Francisco. Then came back with 150,000 sq ft. 

24:50 - SF's bifurcated office recovery and the AI clustering effect 29:55 - Placer.ai data: Tuesday and Wednesday are the new Monday 

32:00 - What hybrid work really means for lease structures and concessions 

35:10 - SpaceX IPO: poised to raise more than all of last year's IPOs combined 

38:00 - Elon Musk as a city-maker  -  Austin, gigafactories, and the Mars thesis 

42:20 - Techstars Boston goes on hiatus. Bedrock Detroit picks up the slack. 

44:50 - Agentic AI in the real world: 3-year account expansion plans in 2 minutes

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#CommercialRealEstate #AI #CRE #OfficeMarket #SanFrancisco #Coinbase #ArtificialIntelligence #SmartCities #QuantumCity #RealEstate #PropTech #FutureOfWork

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In this episode, we sit down with Dominic Endicott, author of "Knowledge Towns" and has been thinking about how secondary cities can win in a world where Silicon Valley takes everything.

One stand out point: real estate has $380 trillion in value but only $3 trillion in market cap. Meanwhile, tech went from $3T to $30T in the same period. Are we “stuck at the kids table while tech eats at the adults table” as Dominic phrased it? If so, why?

Dominic breaks down how places like Burlington, Vermont are beating major metros at their own game. They invested $200M at seed level, attracted $800M in follow-on capital, and just had their first $7B IPO - from a company that started in Boston but couldn't get funded there.

We wanted to understand how this actually works and whether it can be replicated. Turns out, it can. But American cities have to get over being "embarrassed" to want growth.

On this episode we dig into:

This conversation challenged a lot of our assumptions about where capital should flow and what cities should optimize for. If you're interested in how venture capital, placemaking, and talent attraction can actually rebuild American cities, pick up the book “Knowledge Towns.” 

Huge thanks to Dominic for coming on and sharing his vision for future cities. 

---

BEST MOMENTS:

00:00 Introduction

03:46 What is a Knowledge Town vs. Smart City?

07:25 Burlington's $7B Success Story 

13:50 Why Put Philanthropy Into Venture Capital?

17:40 Universities Are Functionally Bankrupt 

29:05 Amazon's $1T AI Infrastructure Play

37:20 The $10T Housing Opportunity Nobody's Talking About

44:50 Pittsburgh's Embarrassing Growth Plan

55:20 Why Real Estate Is Stuck at the Kids Table 

56:50 How Apple Ate AT&T's Lunch 

1:02:56 The Single Most Important Metric for Healthy Cities

1:03:15 Ban Cars, Get Babies: The Pontevedra Miracle

---

ABOUT DOMINIC ENDICOTT:

Co-author of "Knowledge Towns"

Director at North Star Ventures

Co-founder of 4Gen Ventures ($500M raised)

Sold consulting firm for $100M

Best exit: Jitterbug (sold to Best Buy for $800M)

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominicendicott/ | Book: Knowledge Towns

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Most know him as the author of The Experience Economy, but his newer work on The Transformation Economy is what we really wanted to dig into, especially given the "global AB test" the real estate industry has been forced into lately.

We start with Joe’s "nerd" origins at IBM and how he moved from applied math to defining the Progression of Economic Value. We wanted to get past the "fluff" and talk about why the current real estate model feels so stuck in the past or as we discuss, stuck in the year 1100.

On this episode we talk about:

Huge thanks to Joe for coming on the show and sharing his time with us. His perspective on why we need to move beyond simple services to focus on actual human results is exactly the push this industry needs right now. We highly recommend picking up both The Experience Economy and his newest work, The Transformation Economy, to get the full roadmap for what’s coming next. You definitely don't want to miss the shift.

Timestamps:

01:09 The Experience Economy and Transformation Economy

03:37 Commercial Real Estate and the Experience Evolution

05:58 Personalization in Commercial Real Estate

17:31 AI and the Future of Customization

27:06 The Purpose of Business: Fostering Human Flourishing

29:51 The Long-Term Vision: Investing Like Amazon

31:03 AI's Role in Enhancing Human Flourishing

35:42 The Role of Cities in Human Flourishing

42:33 The Future of Commercial Real Estate

45:27 AI in Writing and Personal Development