In this exclusive interview, Henry Chin, PhD., Global Head of Research at CBRE, breaks down the forces shaping commercial real estate in 2026 and reveals why he’s betting big on the U.S. market. From surging data center demand fueled by the AI boom to record-breaking industrial absorption and a surprising retail comeback, Dr. Chin shares data-driven insights on where the smart money is heading. He also unpacks the uneven office recovery, explaining why prime CBD assets are thriving while suburban space struggles — and what it all means for investors navigating today’s uncertain global economy.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
We’re going to welcome back to the program Dr. Henry Chin. He’s a global chief operating officer for CBRE’s research team. Excuse me, it’s great to see you.
Henry Chin, Phd., CBRE
By the way, sorry to interrupt, my job title is a global head of research.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Oh, okay, my bad, global head of research. Easy for you. Third time’s the charm.
Here we go. 3, 2, 1. We’re going to welcome back to the program Dr. Henry Chin. He is the global head of research for CBRE. Dr. Chin, it’s always great to see you. Welcome back to the program.
Thank you for having me here, Jeffrey. Always a pleasure. I know you’re out with you and the team, I should say.
It’s not always just Dr. Chin. You have a pretty diverse team there at CBRE, so no slight to them. But you’re out with your mid-year real estate report.
Give us the top line. What are some of the takeaways?
Henry Chin, Phd., CBRE
Okay, it’s very simple. I think the mid-year outlook, I just want one tagline for all of you to take away is the U.S. commercial real estate market continue to recover despite all those noises coming from a geopolitical perspective. We are seeing the leasing market is gathering the momentum to recover.
Funnily enough, the capital market shows strong activities also here today, and we expect the momentum will continue.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
I want to ask you about sectors in a second, but you mentioned the geopolitical events. Last time we chatted, we had the war in the Ukraine. I think we were just beginning the war with Iran.
Those have not created a headwind, at least here in the U.S. when it comes to commercial real estate?
Henry Chin, Phd., CBRE
To be frank, that’s to everyone’s surprise. If you look at it from a macro point of view, I think the U.S. economy continues to show the signs of resilience. The GDP is going to be 2 plus percent.
It’s such a strong resilience performance. The only thing we have changed for the macro perspective is the inflation is trending up. As a result, the policy probably not going to see any rate cuts for the rest of the year.
That has a profound impact on the 10-year Treasuries. You can see all those noises coming through the macro conditions. It has minimal impact into the commercial real estate space here in the U.S. Certainly, a lot of eyes are always on the Federal Reserve.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
I feel like that’s almost an episode of Real Housewives, where we’re trying to figure out where the Fed’s going to go. Consensus-wise, I think you’re probably right. We’re not going to see another rate cut, at least maybe for this next upcoming term.
Let me ask you about some of the sectors. The office sector, obviously, is the commercial real estate. It’s a big part of commercial real estate.
I remember during the COVID shutdown, office leases went way down. Have they returned to normal or at least above where they were pre-COVID maybe?
Henry Chin, Phd., CBRE
I have to say it’s quite hard to compare pre-COVID and now because the structural changes you and I have experienced during COVID has changed the entire dynamic for the offices. I really want to highlight here for the leasing activity for the office market across the U.S., we are expecting to see the continuous momentum. Last year, the leasing activity was up by just 2%.
We saw the recovery, particularly led by New York and San Francisco. This year, the leasing activity across the nation is going to increase by another 4%. Clearly, the leasing activity has bottled out.
I also want to highlight one thing. It’s quite interesting. I think the reason I don’t want to compare to pre-COVID is because the requirement for occupier has become very, very different.
As of now, every single occupier they want to apply to quality means the best quality get this out. Also, CBD is outperforming some suburban locations. That’s why I want to say before COVID, people were talking about hub and spoke, but now it’s all about CBD and best quality.
Because of that, we are seeing a stronger momentum about the leasing activity across the U.S. Yeah, that’s a good sign.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
I know a lot of corporate back after COVID subsided, there was that debate about remote work versus office work. It looks like a lot of businesses are bringing workers or have brought their workers back. Maybe they’re compromising a little bit and letting people work remotely.
Let me shift gears and ask you about another big topic. It’s a hot topic. It’s a quasi-political topic.
We won’t talk about the politics, but data centers, artificial intelligence. I don’t know. You can’t go anywhere without talking about AI, but they require large data centers.
How’s the data center real estate market?
Henry Chin, Phd., CBRE
I have to say data center on a global scale. We are facing the challenges for under-supply situation because you can see the advancement innovation coming from the AI side. That’s a required substantial investment into the data center.
U.S. is pretty much on a similar story as well. Demand is greater than supply, and we do not have enough development pipeline to meet for that demand. As a result, you can see pretty much all the rents they are asking is shooting out to the roof.
And another dynamic what we are seeing, even with the supply kick in moving into the market, 80% of them has already pre-lent. And then the biggest hurdle, not only here in the U.S., globally, it’s all about the accessibility to the power. And that’s become a major, major issue that we are facing.
But nevertheless, funny enough, the data center hub in the U.S. traditionally has been Virginia region, but we are expecting to see Texas going to be a very important hub because the regulation accessibility to the power takes us on a rise. So therefore, we are going to see some more hubs coming through for data center.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Do you think we’ll ever get to a point, this is more hypothetical, but we get to a point where we’re able to meet demand or will we always just because of the nature of AI always growing and evolving, we’re always going to be behind, not just the U.S., but China and other countries?
Henry Chin, Phd., CBRE
I won’t say it’s very difficult to quantify how much you supply in order to meet that demand because the technology is changing on a daily basis. But nevertheless, the structural tailwind continues. The structural tailwind is creating a new demand.
Create a new demand, we do not have a supply. So I can see for the next few years, we are going to continue to involve the data center design and also the power supply could be shifted from A to B as well. So therefore, this all the structural tailwind is happening in those spaces.
As a result, I think fundamentally, data center is strong.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
That’s good. Let me ask you about retail because we live right near a shopping mall. I go in there, it’s packed.
Now, this is a bit of a higher end mall, but how are our retail spaces doing? Are they still renting at the same pace? I would imagine Americans still want to buy.
They’re doing a lot of buying online, but you can’t beat the mall food these days, doctor.
Henry Chin, Phd., CBRE
I have to say, personally, probably you know that I love shopping because I was coming from Asia. Asians love shopping. And I want to highlight here for the U.S., I think real estate is all about demand and supply. And forget about the demand side for now. The supply, I think you and I know retail has been facing some tough challenges during the COVID. And no one wants to touch retail.
As a result, there’s no supply coming to the market. So availability rate is very low. When we are talking about retailer demand side, you can see all the retailers are trying to find a suitable spaces to create a touching point for the consumers.
So you can see no supply kicking to the market and then they’ll find a suitable site. As a result, availability is remaining relatively low. It’s a historical low as well.
So retailers also fly to quality and talking about the best location, closer to the consumer, closer to the market is their strategy. And as a result, you will see some markets pretty much across all the U.S. retail market. We do see the rental growth and for 2026.
So clearly, retail was zero during COVID. But I have to say, going forward, I deeply believe retail is on the way to be one of the stronger performance markets going forward in the immediate term.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah. So maybe they get smaller spaces or maybe they share. I mean, I guess a lot of strategies to best use retail space.
Let me shift gears and ask you about healthcare and life sciences, both very important sectors of the economy. They’re important for a lot of reasons. We want to be healthier in the U.S. How about those sectors? How are they doing?
Henry Chin, Phd., CBRE
I think our medical offices is doing well. We know that all patients, the facilities, that people are taking more spaces. We continue to see the medical offices is, you know, the fundamental is moving to the right direction.
So that’s why we can see the vacancy rate drop and the rent start to recover. Life sciences is an interesting topic. On a very, very contrarian view, I do think about real estate, it’s all about cyclical and structural.
I think we’ve been through the structural changes, the tailwind for the life sciences during COVID. But now we need to go through the cyclical headwinds, the cyclical headwinds, the oversupply situation. Unfortunately, oversupply situation is not going to go away for the life sciences sector.
However, the positive sign is that we see that demand is coming back. So therefore, demand is gradually moving upwards. So therefore, you know, although the supply is an issue, we are hopeful the market is going to turn around in the next few more years.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah. Well, I mean, look, there’s a lot of drug development, Alzheimer’s, cancer, heart disease, a lot of progress being made, but a lot of progress needs to be made. They’re going to need places to conduct the research.
Let me, I forgot to ask you about manufacturing. And I know this is something that I think President Trump talked about when he was campaigning and in terms of invoking policy, bringing some of the manufacturing back to the US. How are we doing from a manufacturing point of view?
Are rents, are people renting, you know, industrial spaces?
Henry Chin, Phd., CBRE
I have to say, if you look at all the leasing demand coming from the industrial logistics spaces, the one sector which created new organic demand is coming from manufacturing activities, manufacturing sectors, and as well as advanced manufacturing industry as well. It’s all thanks to the re-showing activities. And that you can see historically, probably we are in a higher single digit of market share from that particular segment.
By year today, it’s around 13% of the share of leasing activity coming from that sector. So that’s why I call it actually organic new leasing demand coming to the spaces. But for industrial logistics, I really want to highlight one key point.
2026, we are going to hit the historical leasing activities. So we are going to reach a billion square feet of a leasing activity in 2026. I can tell you that last year, we were worried about oversupply because of the huge development came through.
And I can tell you in a 12-month time, in the second half of 2027, we might go into facing some undersupply situations, particularly for those modern facilities which was built after 2020.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
So it sounds like, you know, it’s, you know, just kind of tie everything together. It sounds like commercial real estate really has weathered these geopolitical storms. It’s actually, more than that, it’s really recovered.
It’s doing well. This might be something for investors, whether you’re a pension fund, an endowment, or even a personal investor, you may want to take a look at this asset class, of course, with someone who can give you the correct investment advice.
Henry Chin, Phd., CBRE
Agree. And when we are reading on the newspaper all the time, Jeff, you can see people overly emphasizing on the demand, how negative the war, how negative inflation. You and I know we cannot forecast the geopolitical tension, but what we can do is look at the supply.
You know, real estate is a function of demand and supply. We got a headwind for the demand side. However, supply to the median turn across all the asset classes, we are on the supply.
Even people worry about demand for the macro conditions that you and I talked about earlier, you can see all the leasing demand across all the asset classes continue to recover. So therefore, I do think it’s a quite interesting time to look into the investment opportunity in the U.S. And a final thought I want to share with you, if I had the money globally, I want to allocate the real estate money globally, I have to say U.S., I will overweight. The U.S., for the economic point of view, for the real estate political point of view, from a structural tailwind point of view, U.S. is ahead. So definitely, I will overweight the U.S. commercial real estate market.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah, well, certainly an important part of any portfolio that serves as a diversifier. Dr. Chin, we’re going to have to leave it there. It’s always great to see you.
We thank you so much for joining us and we look forward to having you back again very soon, sir.
Henry Chin, Phd., CBRE
Thank you, Jeffrey.
