🏛️ Landmark Housing Bill Becomes Law Without Trump's Signature
🏢 Hines Pays $151M for Austin Office Tower at $734/SF
🏗️ Housing Starts Surge 19% in June — But It's All Multifamily
Upcoming Workshops: 💸 Raising and Structuring Programmatic JVs

Data Viz of the Week: Sentiment Keeps Flying

Fund managers have never been this optimistic. BofA's latest Global Fund Manager Survey shows 54% now expect "no landing," or continued economic growth without a recession or sharp slowdown, for the global economy over the next 12 months, the highest reading in the survey's three-year history. 

Rewind to spring 2025, when hard-landing fears spiked to 49% amid tariff panic, and the reversal is stunning. Hard-landing views have collapsed to 2%. Soft landing sits at 39%. Put simply, capital has stopped bracing for a slowdown and started pricing in an economy that just keeps running.

Upcoming Thesis Driven Workshops

• Wednesday, July 22: Raising and Structuring Programmatic Joint Ventures (💻 Online): A tactical workshop on finding the right JV partner, structuring the deal, and negotiating operator-friendly terms. - $299

• Thursday, July 23: AI for CRE Brokers (💻 Online): How top-producing brokers are using AI to build their brand, win more pitches, and source deals their competitors can’t find. - $499

• Tuesday, July 28: AI in Capital Raising (💻 Online): A one-day interactive workshop designed for sponsors, bankers, capital advisors, and investor relations professionals who want to understand how artificial intelligence is reshaping the mechanics of capital raising. - $299

• Wednesday, July 29: Raising Capital from Large LPs (💻 Online): A live, interactive workshop designed for real estate sponsors, fund managers, and capital raisers looking to access institutional-scale capital, including pensions, endowments, OCIO platforms, large family offices, and RIAs. - $299

• Thursday, July 30: AI in AEC (💻 Online): An interactive workshop for owners, operators, developers, architects, and builders exploring how AI is reshaping the AEC stack, from design to delivery. - $299

NEW: Real Estate Finance Fact of the Week

Thesis Driven’s Real Estate Finance Fact of the Week is sponsored by Cost Segregation Guys. A fully engineered, IRS-compliant cost segregation study accelerates your depreciation so you lower your taxes, increase cash flow, and keep more of every property. Click here to get a free proposal in 5 hours.

This week's Real Estate Finance Fact: A stock market crash can freeze private real estate deals that have nothing to do with real estate.

Pensions and endowments run to target allocations, say 10% real estate. But real estate is illiquid and can't be repriced daily; public stocks and bonds can. When equities and bonds crater, the denominator, total portfolio value, shrinks fast while the real estate number barely moves. That 10% allocation mechanically becomes 13%, and the fund is suddenly overweight real estate without buying a single building.

Now it has to rebalance: pause commitments, halt acquisitions, or sell into a market with no buyers. Multiply that across hundreds of institutions and private transaction volume seizes up. Nothing changed in real estate, just on a screen in the public markets.

It's why both the 2008 freeze and the 2022 rate shock hammered private fundraising. The LPs weren't reacting to buildings, but to their own math.

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. (CBS News) Bipartisan Housing Bill Automatically Becomes Law After Trump Refuses to Sign It The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act — the most comprehensive housing legislation in decades — became law at midnight on July 11 after President Trump declined to sign it in protest over the Senate's inaction on an elections bill. The law passed the Senate 85-5 and the House 358-32 before Trump called it "a yawn" and refused to pick up the pen, but also declined to veto it, letting the constitutional 10-day clock expire. The package spans 12 titles and more than 45 provisions, including limits on institutional investors purchasing single-family homes, a pilot program for converting vacant commercial buildings to affordable housing, streamlined environmental reviews for new development, and expanded funding for factory-built homes.

2. (The Real Deal) Hines Snags Downtown Austin Office High-Rise for $734 per Square Foot Hines Global Income Trust paid $151 million for 405 Colorado, a 25-story, 206,000-square-foot trophy office tower in downtown Austin — a price of roughly $734/SF that more than quadrupled the metro's average. The tower, delivered in 2021 and 100% leased to tenants including JPMorgan Chase, Bain & Company, and AllianceBernstein, was sold by Brandywine Realty Trust as part of a broader disposition program. The deal is the latest signal that institutional capital is re-entering the office market — but only for the best-in-class product.

3. (Bloomberg) U.S. Housing Starts Surge on Rebound in Multifamily Construction New residential construction jumped 19% in June to an annualized rate of 1.43 million units — the highest since March and above every estimate in Bloomberg's economist survey — driven almost entirely by a 76% surge in multifamily starts to an annual rate of 532,000 units. Single-family starts, meanwhile, declined 0.2%, slipping again after a slow spring weighed down by elevated mortgage rates and high prices. The whipsaw in apartment starts (which plunged nearly 40% the month prior) underscores the volatility of monthly data, but the broader takeaway is clear: new housing supply is increasingly an apartment story.

Developer of the Week: Oldham Goodwin Group

Oldham Goodwin Group and Fort Worth Housing Solutions broke ground this week on The Exchange, a $71 million, 296-unit affordable apartment complex located north of the historic Fort Worth Stockyards. 

Oldham Goodwin, a Bryan/College Station-based developer active across multifamily, retail, and commercial asset classes throughout Texas, has built a reputation for navigating complex public-private partnerships. Pairing with Fort Worth Housing Solutions — a local public housing authority affiliate — signals a growing trend of regional developers collaborating with municipal entities to unlock affordable housing at scale in high-cost, high-demand Texas markets.

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

Investor of the Week: Fillmore

FFC Capital Corporation is a Pittsburgh-based single-family office founded in 1998 by the late Milton Fine, who built Interstate Hotels Corporation (IHC) from a single motel in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1960 into the largest independent hotel management company in the United States — 222 hotels and more than 45,400 rooms across 25+ brands, including flagship properties like the New York Palace, the Hay-Adams in Washington, D.C., and the Sawgrass Resort in Ponte Vedra Beach. After taking IHC public in 1996 and selling it to Wyndham Hotels and Resorts in 1998, Fine formed FFC Capital with his family and a select group of former IHC executives to continue acquiring and developing real estate directly.

Today, led by President Fred Branovan — a former IHC VP of Finance and Acquisitions who has been with the firm since inception — FFC operates as a multi-asset-class family office (securities, private equity, venture, hedge funds) with a distinct, hands-on real estate sleeve encompassing over 40 properties nationwide. The direct portfolio is diversified across hotels, drugstores, retail, warehouses and industrial, apartment buildings, office, multifamily, and condominiums, with FFC targeting cyclically low, relative-value property types where it can drive returns through repositioning, brand changes, capital improvement, and re-leasing. FFC typically provides JV equity to experienced operating partners who source opportunities and execute value-add business plans — as it did in a notable joint venture with Interstate Hotels & Resorts to acquire and rebrand 22 select-service hotels (2,397 rooms) across the Midwest — though it also acts as managing member and majority economic investor on select ground-up developments. The firm relies on third-party management companies for day-to-day operations but maintains rigorous asset-management oversight, a model rooted in decades of hands-on hospitality operating experience. FFC's approach is selective and focused rather than programmatic, prioritizing realistic return targets and proprietary deal sourcing over scale.

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

—Brad and Paul