❌ Atlanta becomes America's eviction capital
🏗️ C-PACE goes mainstream at $3.5B
🛒 SoCal mega-mall trades for $530M
🔧 Upcoming Workshops: AI in AEC, Raising Capital from Family Offices, AI in Capital Raising

Data Viz of the Week: Low Hire, Low Fire

Over the past year, American firms have found themselves in an odd quadrant of the employment matrix: they're not hiring many people, but they're not firing them either.

To many analysts, this reflects the uncertain impact of AI.  Artificial intelligence's rapid pace has made hiring new roles seem unwise — they may be obsolete in 6-12 months, after all — but most firms are also not ready to begin outright replacing humans with robots. So the labor market is, in a sense, frozen in place.

Upcoming Thesis Driven Courses & Workshops

• 📣 LAST CALL - 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

• March 31: Workshop: AI in Capital Raising (💻 Online): A one-day interactive workshop designed for sponsors, bankers, capital advisors, and investor relations professionals on how AI 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. (Bisnow) Why Atlanta Has Become the U.S. Capital of Eviction Filings Atlanta multifamily owners filed more than 144,000 eviction cases in the 12 months through February — more than New York City and most individual states — according to data from Princeton's Eviction Lab. Roughly one in four renter households in metro Atlanta faced an eviction filing over the past year. Experts point to a cocktail of rising rents, minimal renter protections, and a wave of rental fraud using fraudulent pay stubs that became an epidemic in the metro two years ago. With new apartment construction slowing and rents projected to jump 4%+ this year, the pressure on Atlanta renters isn't easing anytime soon.

2. (CoStar) C-PACE — The Unfamiliar Name That's Now Serious Money in CRE Financing C-PACE originations hit a record $3.5B in 2025, pushing cumulative national volume past $10B as the once-niche financing tool goes fully mainstream. Deal sizes have ballooned — led by a $465M C-PACE financing for The Geneva, a DC office-to-resi conversion that set a new U.S. record. With programs now active in 40 states plus DC, industry leaders expect to hit half of last year's volume in Q1 alone. The drivers remain intact: long-term rates are elevated, banks are cautious, and a wall of maturing debt is creating steady demand for creative, flexible capital solutions.

3. (The Real Deal) Brookfield Unloads Rancho Cucamonga Shopping Center in $530M Near-Record Sale Brookfield and Queensland sold Victoria Gardens, a 1.2M SF open-air shopping center in Rancho Cucamonga, to a JV of Redwood West and Panattoni for $530M — one of the highest prices ever paid for a retail property in Southern California. The mall is 98% leased with nearly 15 million annual visitors and roughly 160 tenants including Apple, Chanel, and Macy's. The buyers, backed by acquisition financing from Ares Real Estate, plan to invest another $50M+ in upgrades. A strong signal that well-located, high-traffic open-air retail is commanding premium pricing even in a choppy capital markets environment.

Developer of the Week: Align Real Estate

Where should we build housing in the Bay Area? On top of Safeway, of course.

Align Real Estate is pursuing a systematic strategy of redeveloping Safeway grocery store sites into mixed-use housing across the Bay Area, with a pipeline now hitting 4,000 units. Their latest pitch in San Mateo combines a new grocery store with residential development on the same parcel.

This supermarket-to-housing model represents a compelling and replicable approach to infill development—converting underutilized retail land in high-demand markets without displacing essential services, signaling a broader trend of creative adaptive reuse to address California's housing crisis.

You can read more about Align Real Estate 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: Proficio Capital Partners

Proficio Capital Partners is a multi-family office headquartered in Newton, MA, managing approximately $3.6B in discretionary AUM across 145 client families. Founded in 2014 by Bob Haber, a former Fidelity fund manager, and Matthew Wosk, a former Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs banker, the firm builds bespoke portfolios spanning liquid and illiquid assets — with real estate accessed through a CIO-driven alternatives sleeve via direct deals, fund vehicles, and co-investments sourced through GP, PE, and family office networks. Partners co-invest alongside clients at identical terms, and after-tax return is the explicit filter on every position.

The firm has partnered with Peachtree Hotel Group on Opportunity Zone hotel developments near universities, hospitals, and airports, and with LAZ Parking on direct asset-level parking garage deals in Boston, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, and Nashville. On the industrial side, Proficio invested in a cold storage warehouse roll-up that has grown into the #2 player in the U.S. and is currently pursuing REIT status with a potential public listing on the horizon. The firm also holds exposure to Pacific Northwest and California farmland via a sale-leaseback fund focused on non-commodity agriculture, a Canadian diversified RE fund spanning student housing, long-term care, data storage, and industrial, and a Florida apartment-to-condo conversion developer. It's a tax-sensitive, co-investment-first approach that prioritizes portfolio-level diversification and correlation screening over any single asset class bet.

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

—Brad and Paul