🏛️ Senate housing bill threatens build-to-rent
🤝 Savills snaps up Eastdil for $1.2Bs
🌴 Zuck drops $170M on Billionaire Bunker
🔧 Upcoming Workshops: Using AI to Find Land, AI in AEC
📚 Upcoming Courses: Fundamentals of Real Estate Development

Data Viz of the Week: BTR No More?

Last week, the Senate passed the Road to Housing Act, which (among other things) aims to ban institutional investors from purchasing single family homes.

The problem? It also effectively bans build-to-rent development by forcing builders to sell homes to individuals within 7 years, a challenge given how BTR is typically structured. 

Build-to-rent is a small but growing part of single-family development, and it provides a path for people who can't afford a down payment to live in a single-family development.

Upcoming Thesis Driven Courses & Workshops

• 📣 LAST CALL - March 19: Workshop: Using AI to Find Land (💻 Online): An interactive workshop for ground-up developers who want to find better sites, faster—using modern software and AI tools - $299

• March 23: Course: Fundamentals of Real Estate Development (💻 Online): A five-week ​bootcamp for aspiring real estate entrepreneurs that simulates the underwriting, design and financing of a local real estate project - $1,299

• March 26: Workshop: AI in Architecture, Engineering & Construction (💻 Online): An interactive workshop for owners, operators, developers, architects, and builders exploring how AI is reshaping the AEC stack—from design to delivery.- $299

• March 26-27: Workshop: Raising Capital from Family Offices (💻 Online): A two-day interactive workshop designed for real estate sponsors, entrepreneurs, and capital raisers looking to raise capital from family offices - $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) Senate Passes Housing Bill That Threatens To 'Shut Down' Build-To-Rent Industry The Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act on an overwhelming 89-10 vote, but buried inside the bipartisan package is a provision that could upend the build-to-rent sector. The bill would require institutional investors owning 350+ single-family homes built specifically for rent to sell those properties to individual homeowners after seven years. 79 industry trade groups have pushed back, warning the provision would effectively eliminate BTR production — a segment that now accounts for roughly 7% of new single-family construction. The bill still faces significant hurdles in the House, where leaders have signaled they're unlikely to accept the Senate version as-is.

2. (The Real Deal) Savills Buying Eastdil in $1.2B Deal London-based brokerage Savills agreed to acquire Eastdil Secured, the blue-chip CRE investment bank, in a deal valued at roughly $1.1B including debt — a landmark transaction in CRE services M&A. The $921M purchase price will be funded through debt and new share issuance, with Eastdil's shareholders owning about 16% of the combined company. Eastdil's 650 employees will keep the firm's name and its distinctive profit-pooling structure, while CEO Roy March shifts to executive chairman and president Mike Van Konynenburg steps into the top role. The combined firm expects revenue of approximately $4B, with 23% coming from North America.

3. (The Real Deal) Mark Zuckerberg Drops $170M for Billionaire Bunker Estate Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan closed on a $170M waterfront mega-mansion at 7 Indian Creek Island Road — Miami-Dade County's most expensive residential sale ever, shattering the previous $120M record. The two-acre estate, originally listed at $200M, sits just a few doors down from Jeff Bezos's expanding compound on the guard-gated island known as "Billionaire Bunker." The deal comes amid a wave of ultra-wealthy tech founders decamping from California, widely linked to proposed billionaire tax legislation in the state — while Florida continues to court high-net-worth residents with no income tax.

Developer of the Week: Silverstein Properties

Silverstein Properties — the firm behind the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site after 9/11 — is finally closing the book on that decades-long project. 

Construction kicks off this spring on 2 World Trade Center, a 55-story, nearly 2-million-square-foot tower at 200 Greenwich Street, with American Express signed as anchor tenant and global HQ occupant. Designed by Foster + Partners, the fully-electric tower will include over an acre of outdoor terraces and is targeting LEED certification. 

AmEx will bring up to 10,000 employees to the site when the building opens in 2031.

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

Know about a developer doing something cool? Reach out to [email protected] with the tip!

Investor of the Week: Cirrus Real Estate Partners

Cirrus Real Estate Partners is an SEC-registered investment adviser and opportunistic real estate platform based in New York City, focused on credit-to-equity conversion, structured credit, and workforce housing through public-private partnerships. Founded in 2020 by principals Frank Tufariello and Joseph McDonnell — who collectively bring $150B+ in credit origination and $10B+ in equity deployed across cycles — the firm runs a lean, high-conviction operation out of 555 Madison Avenue with an institutional LP base.

Cirrus deploys across CRE credit, ground-up workforce housing, large-scale urban infill, and special situations. The firm's marquee play has been at Pacific Park, the 22-acre Brooklyn mega-development, where Cirrus acquired nearly $350M of Greenland USA's defaulted debt and partnered with Fortress, U.S. Immigration Fund, and LCOR to take over six rail yard development sites through foreclosure — a textbook distressed-debt-to-equity conversion. On the housing side, Cirrus launched a $400M workforce housing fund with an initial $100M close backed by 11 BCTC union pension funds, targeting new construction for households earning 80–140% of AMI on city-owned sites with union labor. In partnership with Resorts World New York City, the firm has committed to a pipeline of up to 50,000 units of workforce housing across the five boroughs — a first-of-its-kind structure where union pensions finance, union labor builds, and union members live in the resulting housing.

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

—Brad and Paul