🏗️ Senate BTR bill already freezing the market
🏨 World Cup hotel windfall fading fast
🌴 Miami's last mega dev site hits market at $500M
🔧 Upcoming Workshops: AI in Real Estate

Data Viz of the Week: Demographic Hits and Misses

Everyone talks about which states are growing vs shrinking. But which states outperformed or underperformed what demographers actually expected?

In 2005, the Census Bureau predicted the US population state-by-state in 2030. Now, we can look back and see how they did.

Nationally, they got close. The US is only 2.2% smaller than they predicted, mostly due to declining birthrates and slower immigration. But some states were way off.

The housing boom states that got crushed in the 2008 financial crisis (AZ, NV, FL) were badly overestimated. And nobody saw the Dakota fracking boom coming — or DC's resurgence.

Upcoming Thesis Driven Courses & Workshops

• 📣 Last Call - April 23: Workshop: AI in Real Estate (💻 Online): ​​A three-hour interactive workshop for owners, operators, and developers exploring how to use AI in the real estate sector - $499

• April 29: Workshop: LinkedIn Strategy for GPs (💻 Online): ​​A live, practical workshop for real estate GPs, operators, and fund managers who want to use LinkedIn intentionally—as a capital formation tool, not a vanity channel - $299

• April 30: Workshop: Building the Zero-Employee Property Manager (💻 Online): A live interactive workshop for owners, operators, and asset managers exploring how close we really are to running multifamily properties with little—or no—full-time staff - $299

• May 6: Workshop: Raising Capital from Family Offices (💻 Online): ​​A 2-hour interactive workshop designed for real estate sponsors, entrepreneurs, and capital raisers looking to raise capital from family offices. - $299

• May 12: Workshop: Building & Funding Student Housing (💻 Online): ​​A two-hour interactive workshop designed for real estate investors, developers, and capital allocators who want to understand—and invest in—the purpose-built student housing (PBSH) asset class. - $299

Three Articles We Loved from Last Week

It’s not easy keeping up with everything. Here are three articles we loved from the past week that you may have missed:

1. (Bisnow) The Senate Housing Bill Still Isn't Law, But It Has Already Paralyzed The Build-To-Rent Market The Senate's 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act hasn't even cleared the House yet — but the BTR market is already frozen. Research from John Burns Research & Consulting found that the bill's seven-year forced-sale provision has halted new BTR development and frozen capital across the sector. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac paused BTR deals in the week after the Senate vote, and lenders remain "pretty much pencils down." Even HUD has lined up against the provision, siding with industry groups that warn the bill would eliminate production of a housing type that now accounts for roughly 7% of new single-family construction. The bill remains stalled as Congress returns from recess — but the damage to the pipeline is already done.

2. (CoStar) Hoteliers' Optimism Weakens as U.S. World Cup Demand Softer Than Expected With fewer than 60 days until kickoff, hotel demand for the 2026 World Cup is tracking well below the industry's rosiest projections. RevPAR across U.S. host cities is expected to rise just 1.7% during the tournament period — a far cry from the windfall operators had banked on. The headwinds are stacking up: record-shattering ticket prices, visa restrictions for fans from competing nations, and the Iran conflict spiking airfare costs are all dampening travel plans. Hotels are now aligning pricing with typical peak summer demand rather than treating the tournament as a singular event. In Dallas-Fort Worth, hospitality professionals are calling it a "stress test for staffing, service, and infrastructure" — not the bonanza they once imagined.

3. (The Real Deal) E11even Residences Developers List Site for $500 Million Lion Development Group and Marc Roberts are looking to sell a 6.6-acre assemblage in downtown Miami's Park West neighborhood for $500M — one of the last major development sites in the city's urban core. The property at 1151 NW First Avenue, north of Miami Worldcenter, is zoned for 4.8M SF of development across property types with up to 3,300 residential and hotel units. CBRE has the listing. If it trades near ask, it would approach South Florida's record urban land deal: the $520M bayfront Brickell site purchased by Oak Row Equities and OKO Group in December. A bellwether test for just how much developers are willing to pay for Miami density.

Developer of the Week: WRS

Move over, office-to-resi. Mall-to-resi is here.

WRS began demolition this week on the 102-acre Lakeforest Mall in Montgomery County, Maryland, launching a $1.2 billion redevelopment. 

The project signals a maturing trend of dead-mall transformations at massive scale—converting suburban retail into dense, mixed-use communities. At 102 acres and $1.2B, it ranks among the largest mall redevelopments in the country, making it a landmark case study for developers and policymakers grappling with suburban land reuse and housing supply.

You can read more about WRS on the Thesis Driven GP database here.

Investor of the Week: Monument Bay

Monument Bay Capital Partners is a single-family office based in Boston, MA and Palm Beach, FL, deploying the evergreen capital of the Newton family into value-add real estate and lower middle market private equity across the United States. Founded in 2020, the firm's partners bring decades of experience across hundreds of private equity transactions — but Monument Bay operates very differently from a traditional fund shop. There are no closed-end vehicles, no institutional LP base, and no rigid mandates. Capital is deployed deal-by-deal from the family's balance sheet, with investment decisions made at the principal level, giving the firm unusual speed and flexibility on structure — whether that's control, minority, JV, or LP positions.

Within real estate, Monument Bay targets value-add and opportunistic acquisitions across hotel, retail, multifamily, and short-term rental, with a focus on legacy-quality, long-term holds. The firm leverages a network of co-investors, operators, and advisors for underwriting and low-friction closings, crafting tailored solutions per deal rather than forcing opportunities into a fund-mandate box. A distinctive edge is Monument Bay's 1031 exchange advisory channel, which provides access to non-brokered, institutional-quality replacement properties for tax-deferred sellers — generating continuous inbound deal flow and positioning the firm as an unusually adaptive JV equity partner for sponsors and operators seeking certainty of close. The operational footprint tilts toward the Northeast and South Florida, but the mandate is nationwide across the continental U.S.

Get more details on Monument Bay, including team contacts, deal activity, and investment preferences, inside the CapitalStack database.

—Brad and Paul