Deep in Arizona's Yuma Desert, Gil Michel-Garcia has spent the past four years trying to develop one of the first U.S. cobalt processing facilities.

Michel-Garcia, a co-founder of EVelution Energy, has already lined up a major customer to buy $850M of the cobalt products the plant will produce, a critical mineral used in electric vehicle batteries, microchips and jet engines. The $450M project has commitments for $345M of debt financing, but EVelution wants to tap a renewed federal tax incentive to attract equity investors.

So Michel-Garcia and his partners put together a presentation to tout their project to local officials, hoping it would be included in the latest round of nominations for the federal opportunity zone program...

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Drone photography can give buyers a perspective that traditional real estate photography cannot. Aerial photos and videos can showcase acreage, waterfront, outbuildings, landscaping and the relationship of a property to its surroundings.

But before launching a drone to get the perfect listing photo, REALTORS^® should remember that drones are aircraft regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). And when a drone is being used to create real estate advertising, the flight generally is not considered recreational.

It's the purpose of the flight that matters

A common misconception is that the FAA rules for non-recreational drone operations apply only when someone is paid to operate the drone. That is not the case...

The U.S. hotel industry reported a 21st consecutive week of positive year-over-year comparisons, according to CoStar’s latest data.

For the week of Aug. 30-Sept. 5 (percentage change from comparable week in 2025):

• Occupancy: 63 percent (+9.4 percent)
• Average daily rate: $159.19 (+6.1 percent)
• Revenue per available room: $100.31 (+16.1 percent)

Year-over-year growth was elevated by the Labor Day calendar shift.

Week over week, occupancy was down 1.7 percent, ADR increased 1.3 percent and RevPAR declined 0.4 percent. The rate growth offset most of the occupancy decline, and the $2.05 increase in ADR helped limit the decrease in RevPAR.

Top Markets

Among CoStar’s top 25 markets, Minneapolis saw the largest gains in occupancy (+23.2 percent to 64.9 percent) and RevPAR (+35.7 percent to $87.52)...

A former startup CFO explains why the real investment isn’t the beer. It’s the real estate.

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The commercial real estate industry does not lack for market data. Vacancy rates, absorption figures, rent growth, cap rate movement, and transaction volume all get tracked closely and published on a reliable cadence. What most of that data has in common is that it describes conditions that already exist. By the time a vacancy rate moves, the leases driving it were signed months earlier, and the decisions behind those leases were made earlier still.

The National Association of REALTORS launched a Commercial Real Estate Demand Index in August that attempts to work further upstream. Rather than measuring the property market, it measures the local economic activity that eventually produces demand for space, covering 306 metropolitan statistical areas on a quarterly basis with history back to 2022.

“We are not measuring vacancy, transactions, or rent growth. Those are important but we want things that are leading up to those,” said Nadia Evangelou, Principal Economist and Director of Real Estate Research at the National Association of REALTORS. “Two markets might have the same vacancy rate but one might be growing and one might be completely stagnant.”...

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I’ve spent my career telling you not to be afraid of technology. I meant it when the desktop computer and then the internet showed up. I meant it when smartphones arrived. And I mean it today when I tell you artificial intelligence may be the most important thing humans have ever built. I use it every single day.

Something is happening right now that you need to understand. Some of the people building the most powerful AI on Earth are warning that one day we could lose control of it. 

Not villains. Not doomsday YouTubers. The engineers.

The guy who walked out

On September 8, a researcher named Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic, the company behind Claude. He spent about three years between Anthropic and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, most of it at OpenAI. He quit before his stock vested. That’s like walking out the week before your bonus hits.

His goodbye post got more than 90 million views in a day. The line everyone shared: the big AI companies are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”...

CARW Deal of the Year Awards and Annual Meeting

Microsoft is targeting 38GW of capacity in 2032, currently operating around 12GW of data centre capacity, according to a report from Bloomberg

A footprint built for growth

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A report predicts electricity demand on the regional grid will nearly double by 2040, due almost entirely to data centers.

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The initiative, dubbed “Project Mercury,” would expand Amazon's same-day fulfillment center network to more than 1,000 locations by 2031, up from around 85 facilities today, Business Insider reported, citing internal planning documents reviewed by the outlet.

The project would create shorter distances between Amazon customers and same-day delivery distribution centers, aiming to create a network that is within a 10-mile straight-line radius from 80% of Amazon’s Prime customers, BI reported. That puts inventory closer to customers, including Amazon's grocery items, which generate more than $150B annually...

Nearly $3B of CMBS loans are tied to 174 U.S. industrial properties where FedEx is the anchor tenant, according to a Trepp analysis. There is $837M of debt, or 29% of that balance, backed by properties where FedEx’s leases are set to expire before the loans mature.

The report highlights how much of the securitized industrial debt market is tied to two companies: FedEx and Amazon.

Combined, they anchor properties tied to $6.6B of CMBS loans, nearly 10% of the $68.9B total outstanding CMBS debt backed by warehouses that are leased to identifiable tenants, according to Trepp. That is more exposure than the next 10 tenants combined...

Nike signed a 43,000-square-foot lease for two floors at the Shops at North Bridge at 540 North Michigan Avenue, which was vacated by fast-fashion retailer Forever 21 in 2018.

Nike is going to be moving out of 663 North Michigan Avenue, its larger current location, soon.

The deal comes at a time when the availability rate on the Magnificent Mile is dipping amidst a rebound for Chicago's luxury retail corridor. The Mag Mile's availability rate was 26.1 percent in July, down from all-time highs of 33.8 percent that were notched in 2023, according to Crain's. Availability rate differs from vacancy rate, but only slightly: it denotes the empty space and the space that will soon lose its tenant with nothing else lined up.

          

	The Gialamas Company, Inc.	RFA Asset Management Madison, WI	Key Commercial Real Estate, LLC
Madison Commercial Real Estate LLC	St. John Properties	IA Management, LLC	Wisconsin Commercial Real Estate
Park Towne Realty LLC	Mullins Group, LLC	Crown Commercial	Flad Development & Investment Corp.
Evans Properties, LLC	Keller Real Estate Group		MIG Commercial Real Estate, LLC
First Weber Group, Inc - West Towne	Opitz Realty, Inc.	First Weber Group, Inc - Prairie Du Sac	Peterson Management Company Inc.
The Lenhart Company, Inc	Scott Faust & Associates	Shamrock Real Estate Services, LLC	Targa, Inc
Executive Management, Inc	Stark Commercial - East	Urban Land Interests	Slinde Realty Company
Assist-2-Sell/Pohlkamp & Associates	Berkshire Hathaway Home Services Matson Real Estate	Artisan Graham Real Estate

Hovde & Hovde, Inc