⚛️ Cold War Site Gets $100B AI Makeover
🏗️ Data Centers Need Housing Too
🏢 Office Market Finally Finds Its Floor
Upcoming Workshops: 💸 Raising Capital from Family Offices & RIAs

Data Viz of the Week: The Schoolpocalypse

More than 1,000 public schools closed their doors for 2025–26, according to a Realtor.com analysis of NCES data. Texas led with 105 closures, followed by Minnesota at 79 and California at 74.

While many localities blame budgets, demographics are the real driver. US births peaked at 4.3 million in 2007 and have fallen every year since, down to roughly 3.6 million in 2023. That cohort is now working its way through elementary and middle schools, leaving underpopulated classrooms and empty lockers.

Schools are the first built asset to feel demographic contraction. They will not be the last: as student housing and multifamily are in the demographic crosshairs next.

Upcoming Thesis Driven Workshops

• Thursday, August 6: Raising Capital from Family Offices & RIAs (💻 Online): A two-hour interactive workshop designed for real estate sponsors, entrepreneurs, and capital raisers looking to raise capital from family offices and registered investment advisers. - $299

• Friday, August 7: 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

• Wednesday, August 12: 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

• Thursday, August 13: AI for Acquisitions (💻 Online): A hands-on, two-hour workshop on using AI to source, screen, and underwrite deals, including building a working acquisition agent with Claude, so a lean team can perform like one three times its size. - $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. (Bloomberg) NextEra, Brookfield to Build $100 Billion Kentucky Data Campus Brookfield and NextEra Energy announced plans for a $100 billion, privately funded AI data center campus at the Department of Energy's Paducah Site in western Kentucky — a facility originally built in the 1950s to enrich uranium. NextEra will develop 2 GW of natural gas generation and 2.6 GW of battery storage, while Brookfield will own and operate the 1.8 GW campus, which is expected to support over 1.2 GW of compute load at full buildout by 2032. The site's existing transmission capacity, water infrastructure, and fiber connectivity from its Cold War days will accelerate the timeline considerably.

2. (Propmodo) Manufactured Housing Makers See Orders Surge From Data Center Builders The AI infrastructure boom is creating an unlikely beneficiary: manufactured housing. A typical 100-megawatt data center requires hundreds of construction workers to build but only dozens to operate, and the rush to break ground on campuses across rural America has created a scramble to house those crews. Cavco Industries reported a surge in orders tied to data center construction and acquired American Homestar for $190 million to expand its Texas manufacturing footprint. Data center construction spending hit $36.9 billion year-to-date through February 2026, compared to just $1.4 billion over the same period in 2025.

3. (Cushman & Wakefield) U.S. Office Recovery Broadens National office vacancy declined year-over-year for the second consecutive quarter, with demand reaching its highest level in six years on a four-quarter rolling basis. Improving fundamentals now extend across more than half of the 92 U.S. office markets the firm tracks. Sublease vacancy is finally shrinking — five years after companies flooded the market with excess space, many of those sublease terms have expired or been re-leased. San Francisco and New York, both written off in the post-COVID exodus, are now leading the recovery.

Developer of the Week: JVP Development

JVP Development broke ground in early July on a four-story speculative office building in Frisco, Texas, committing $37 million of its own equity to the project, an unusually high level of developer skin-in-the-game at a moment when most spec office construction has ground to a halt nationally.

The Dallas-Fort Worth-based firm is wagering that Frisco's corporate relocation momentum and suburban office demand can support new construction without pre-leasing in place. The move stands out in a capital markets environment where lenders have largely abandoned office construction financing, forcing developers to lean heavily on balance sheet equity.

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

Investor of the Week: Brookline

Brookline Investment Group is an Aliso Viejo, CA-based family office founded in mid-2013 by Michael Narlinger, who previously built Valutech Outsourcing into one of the world's leading re-manufacturers of wireless handsets before pivoting into real estate with the same entrepreneurial, execution-first mindset. The firm acquires and operates multifamily and commercial properties using entirely discretionary family capital — no outside LPs, no fund structure — allowing it to close quickly and without financing contingencies, a positioning that has become central to how Brookline wins deals with sellers and brokers. Since founding, Brookline has acquired approximately 5,000 apartment units across Sunbelt and secondary growth markets including Atlanta, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Charlotte, Denver, Durham, Salt Lake City, and Seattle, targeting the full risk spectrum from core to value-add to opportunistic.

The firm punches well above its weight for a team of roughly 9 people: notable transactions include the 256-unit Brisa Luxury Apartments in St. Augustine, FL for $77 million ($300,781/unit). President Will Milligan — who previously helped acquire nearly $500 million across asset classes at MIG Real Estate — leads acquisitions and underwriting, while SVP of Asset Management Tanner Sheehan (formerly RPM Living and AIR Communities) oversees portfolio performance and capital planning.

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

—Brad and Paul