🏠 Berkshire Bets $6.8B on Homebuilding
🏢 Office-to-Apartment Conversions Hit Record High
💾 PE Data Center Deals Surge to 5-Year Peak
Upcoming Workshops:  ⛺️ Building & Funding Micro-Resorts

Data Viz of the Week: The Rise of “Other”

Multifamily and industrial still top the institutional shopping list, but the most telling line in AFIRE's 2026 survey is the one labeled "Other." It now ranks third for share of global investors planning to add exposure, ahead of office, retail, healthcare, and single-family rental.

Translation: data centers, life science, self-storage, manufactured housing, and the rest of the alternatives bucket have graduated from niche to consensus. Office remains the sector everyone wants to shed, with more respondents cutting than adding for the second year running, though the gap narrowed from 2025.

Multifamily appetite cooled a bit (49% planning increases, down from 66%), and industrial held strong.

Upcoming Thesis Driven Workshops

• 📣 Last Call - June 9: Building& Funding Micro-Resorts (💻 Online): ​​​​​​A two-hour interactive workshop designed investors, developers, and entrepreneurs who want to understand—and build—the micro-resort asset class: purpose-built experiential lodging properties, typically 5-20 keys, founder-led, story-driven, and located within drive distance of a major metro. - $299

• 📣 Last Call - June 11: 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

• June 18: 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

• June 19: AI in Capital Raising (💻 Online): ​​​​​A two-hour 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

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. (CNBC) Berkshire Hathaway Buys Taylor Morrison for $6.8 Billion In one of the first major strategic deals under new CEO Greg Abel, Berkshire Hathaway agreed to acquire Scottsdale-based homebuilder Taylor Morrison for $72.50 per share — a 24% premium to the builder's closing price on May 29 and an enterprise value of roughly $8.5 billion including debt. Abel described the move as an effort to "unify our site-built homebuilding operations into a combined platform" alongside Berkshire's existing Clayton Homes business. Taylor Morrison serves entry-level, move-up, and resort-lifestyle buyers across its family of brands, and the deal is expected to close in the second half of 2026.

2. (The Real Deal) U.S. Office-to-Apartment Conversions Hit New High The adaptive reuse pipeline just hit a milestone: 90,300 apartments are now under construction in former office buildings nationwide, a 28% year-over-year increase and nearly four times the 2022 total. New York leads the conversion pipeline with 16,358 rental units — a 97% jump from last year — followed by Washington, D.C. (8,479 units) and Chicago (4,360 units). Conversions now account for 47% of all future adaptive reuse units in the U.S., fueled by persistent remote work, government tax breaks, and zoning changes that have made the economics increasingly pencil.

3. (S&P Global) Private Equity Investment Surge Sends U.S. Data Center Deals to 5-Year High PE-backed investment in U.S. data centers hit $45.7 billion in 2025, a five-year record that accounted for 72% of the sector's total $63.35 billion in deal volume. The headline number was driven by the planned $40 billion acquisition of Aligned Data Centers by a consortium including MGX, Microsoft, xAI, NVIDIA, and BlackRock. Meanwhile, Blackstone's total data center portfolio now exceeds $150 billion globally — with an additional $160 billion in prospective development pipeline — underscoring how AI infrastructure has become the hottest capital magnet in real estate.

Developer of the Week: Formativ

Denver-based Formativ broke ground on Rowan, a 16-story multifamily project in the River North (RiNo) neighborhood of Denver. Construction is expected to take 28 months, with residents moving in fall 2028. The project signals continued developer confidence in RiNo as a high-density residential market despite broader multifamily construction headwinds in Denver.

Formativ is a regional Denver developer pushing vertical density in one of the country's hottest urban infill neighborhoods, a signal worth watching as RiNo matures beyond its arts-district roots.

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

Investor of the Week: Pittco

Pittco Management is the Memphis-based single-family office for AutoZone founder Joseph R. "Pitt" Hyde III and his wife Barbara. Hyde founded AutoZone in 1979, growing it from three stores in two states into an international auto-parts retailer with more than 3,200 locations — and when he turned to managing the family's wealth in 1991, he brought the same institution-building instinct. Led by President and CIO Henry Guy, Pittco deploys evergreen, patient capital across three pillars: allocations to best-in-class fund managers, direct investments in venture and buyout opportunities (recent bets include AI data center operator Nscale and nuclear developers Alva Energy and Valar Atomics), and a significant real estate portfolio anchored by two long-standing relationships.

On the real estate side, Pittco's capital flows through two channels. The first is a captive relationship with Meta Real Estate Partners (originally launched as Worthington Hyde Partners), which serves as the family's primary vehicle for fund-level allocations across multifamily, hotel, office, and retail — primarily in the Southeast. The second is a 30+ year co-GP partnership with Atlanta-based Tirrill-Hyde, co-founded by John Tirrill and Hyde himself, which focuses on apartment community development, acquisition, and repositioning as well as hotel acquisitions and recapitalizations across the Sunbelt. Together, the Tirrill-Hyde partnership has developed more than 10,000 multifamily units. Pittco's evergreen capital structure — unconstrained by fund timelines or LP redemption cycles — gives operators a rare long-hold partner with institutional scale and family-office flexibility.

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

—Brad and Paul