🏗️ Ken Griffin Supercharges Citadel's $2.5B Miami Campus
💰 Tariffs Push Construction Costs to Fastest Rise Since the Pandemic
🌴 Bob Zangrillo Revives $3B Magic City AI District in Little Haiti
Upcoming Workshops:  🚀 AI in Real Estate

Data Viz of the Week: An Energy Story

Headline inflation hit 4.2% in May, the highest reading in three years. But without energy and the picture is almost boring: core inflation sits at 2.9%, barely budged. 

This is almost entirely an energy-driven supply shock: gasoline ran up 40.5% year-over-year once the Iran conflict choked the Strait of Hormuz; that one factor accounted for over 60% of the monthly increase.

The Fed has no reason to over-tighten into a shock. And the shock may already be unwinding; crude has fallen roughly 20% from its 2026 peak on ceasefire optimism. If the US's surrender to Iran holds, the blue bars shrink, and the path back to rate cuts reopens.

Upcoming Thesis Driven Workshops

• Thursday, June 25: 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

• Friday, June 26: Building a Capital Markets Agent (💻 Online): ​A two-hour interactive workshop designed for real estate GPs, capital raisers, investor relations professionals, and fund managers who want to build and deploy an AI agent that runs your capital raising operation—from investor research and outreach to content creation and LP communications. - $299

• Monday, June 29: How to Build and Fund Data Centers (💻 Online): ​A two-day interactive workshop designed for real estate investors, developers, and capital allocators who want to understand—and invest in—the data center asset class. - $499

• Wednesday, July 8: Brand Building for GPs (💻 Online): ​An interactive workshop for real estate sponsors, GPs, and emerging managers who want to build a brand that accelerates capital raising—whether you’re raising your first fund or scaling an established platform. - $299

• Thursday, July 9: AI in Due Diligence (💻 Online): ​​An interactive workshop for owners, operators, developers, acquisitions teams, asset managers, and the legal and finance professionals supporting them—exploring how AI is reshaping due diligence from LOI to close. - $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. (Commercial Observer) Ken Griffin Expanding Office Footprint at Planned Miami HQ Citadel and Citadel Securities will occupy roughly 561,000 square feet — a full third — of the 1.7 million-square-foot office tower that founder Ken Griffin is developing in Brickell, significantly more than the 300,000–400,000 SF originally contemplated. Site work is already underway on the $2.5 billion tower, with vertical construction expected to begin in Q4 2026. Griffin also revised plans for an adjacent 2.5-acre site at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive, adding a 300-unit apartment building and 1,420-space parking garage — turning what started as a corporate headquarters relocation into a neighborhood-scale mixed-use campus.

2. (ENR) Tariffs Drive Construction Material Prices to Fastest Rise Since 2022 Input prices for nonresidential construction surged at a 12.6% annualized rate in early 2026 — the fastest clip since pandemic-era supply chain disruptions — driven almost entirely by federal tariff policy. Steel, aluminum, and copper now carry a 50% tariff, softwood lumber sits at 10%, and derivatives at 25%. Aluminum mill shapes jumped 33% year-over-year, steel products rose 20.7%, and framing lumber is hovering around $872 per thousand board feet, up 13% amid reduced Canadian timber yields and anti-dumping duties. Aggregate construction cost escalation is running at roughly 8% under current policy — a headwind that helps explain the starts data above.

3. (Bloomberg) Miami Tech Investor Revives $3 Billion Real Estate Development Tech investor Bob Zangrillo is resurrecting the Magic City Innovation District, a 7.8 million-square-foot mixed-use megaproject in Miami's Little Haiti that was first proposed over a decade ago. Partnering with Miami-based Plaza Equity Partners, Zangrillo envisions an office campus anchored by AI, asset management, and venture capital tenants — plus more than 2,600 residential units, a hotel, and ground-floor retail. The first phase calls for the office hub and a 25-story, 349-unit rental tower. Zangrillo's firm, Dragon Global, would anchor the office campus, and the team has committed $31 million to Miami's Little Haiti Revitalization Trust to fund affordable housing and economic development in the surrounding neighborhood.

Developer of the Week: Obrecht Properties

Maryland-based Obrecht Properties is making its first foray into North Carolina with plans to develop The Gateway at Military Business Park, a six-building industrial park totaling 325,550 square feet near Fort Bragg.

The project represents a significant geographic expansion for the regional developer, which has built its track record primarily in the Mid-Atlantic. The Fort Bragg adjacency is a deliberate strategic choice: defense-adjacent markets have demonstrated durable industrial demand driven by contractor logistics, government supply chain activity, and the steady employment base that military installations provide.

Obrecht's move into the Carolinas reflects a wider pattern of mid-size industrial developers pushing beyond their home markets into secondary and tertiary markets where large national players have been slower to penetrate, and where land costs and entitlement timelines remain more favorable.

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

Investor of the Week: Demetree Global

Demetree Global is a Winter Park, FL-based multigenerational family office with a 75-year track record as one of Central Florida's most prolific owner-operators. The Demetree family helped build the Orlando skyline — and, in a deal that reshaped the region's trajectory, sold 12,500 acres to Walt Disney. Today the firm is chaired by Mary Demetree, with Managing Partner Seth Heller and Director of Development & Acquisitions Corey Dean leading the investment operation. Demetree deploys family balance-sheet capital as a principal investor across real estate, private equity, and liquid assets — no blind-pool fund, no LP vehicle — with a portfolio spanning roughly 1.5 million square feet of commercial space, more than 6,000 residential units, over 1,200 hotel keys, and 1,600 acres of raw land.

The real estate strategy runs through direct acquisitions and a deep bench of JV partnerships. On the hospitality side, a 30-year relationship with Pinnacle Hotel Management has produced investments in five Marriott-branded properties, plus The Celeste Hotel — a Tribute Portfolio hotel and the first upscale hotel built on a university campus, at UCF. The multifamily portfolio includes Windermere Cay (380+ units in Winter Garden), the Carlton Arms communities in Lakeland, Ocala, and Winter Haven (totaling nearly 2,800 units), and Woodlake Villas (284 units near downtown Orlando). Recent activity includes the April 2025 acquisition of a 44,478-square-foot Baldwin Park office building for $11.3 million and the ongoing buildout of The Paseo at Collegiate Village, a 63-acre mixed-use development at UCF's main entrance. Demetree is a generational holder — Orlando is what they call "the diamond in our backyard" — with additional positions in Jacksonville, Coral Gables, and Tallahassee.

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

—Brad and Paul