The Expansion of Real Estate

Abstract

The definition of commercial real estate for institutional investment purposes is undergoing a change in two ways. First, real estate is increasingly being absorbed upward into more broadly defined asset buckets, such as real assets or private markets, in which the distinction between real estate and the other asset types is becoming increasingly fuzzy. Second, the asset class is expanding downward to include more specialty property types that were previously not considered suitable for institutional investors. In this article, the authors discuss these trends and their causes and consequences and relate them to the other articles contained in this special real estate issue.