BLOG #9: 2026 Real Estate: For Masochists Only — Or Am I Mentally Deranged?

One year in. Nearly two decades in this industry. And I am going to say something I have never said before: I have never seen a fundraising market like this one. Not after the GFC. Not during COVID. Not in any of the cycles I have navigated since I started doing this. What is happening right now is different in kind, not just degree.

Let's start with the only number that matters. Hit rates. A good GP or placement agent working a proper institutional LP list used to convert roughly 1 in 5 substantive conversations into a commitment. That was the working assumption. It shaped everything — pipeline sizing, team structures, the entire economics of how this business worked.

That number is now 1 in 30. I am not theorising. We are living it.

I was just at MIPIM. Cannes in March — the sun was out, the wind was brutal, the rosé was flowing and everybody was very pleased to see everybody else. Lots of "things are moving." Lots of "let's catch up properly." Lots of energy on the Croisette. And honestly? It was a relief. A whole week of talking to actual human beings in person — and I think we are all quietly delighted not to have spent it arguing with our AI or another Teams call staring at our own faces.

The market may be brutal but at least we were brutal together, outside, in the sunshine.

But here is what MIPIM has always been and always will be: a meet and greet. A temperature check. A place where relationships are maintained and occasionally born. It is not a closing room. Nobody wires money from the Carlton terrace. You leave with business cards and momentum and then you go home and do the actual work, which is where you find out very quickly what "let's catch up" actually meant.

Now. The market is (kind of) turning. I won’t say maybe, but I will say kind of. Clear right? No not really clear.

The conversations at MIPIM this year were different — not just warmer, structurally different. People are making decisions again.

And the most interesting thing?

Income is coming back. Quietly, then all at once — the way these things always happen. Core real estate, which felt almost embarrassing to pitch eighteen months ago, is slowly seeping back into LP conversations. Income-producing offices — good assets, tenanted, cash flowing — are being looked at again. Not the speculative stuff…

Income is always safe. It was always safe.

We have been operating through a period of sustained, compounding macro mental derangement. Wars. Political instability that makes your head spin. LPs are people. Their investment committees are people. People under that kind of background noise make fewer decisions. They wait.

But everyone is sick of it now. Genuinely, viscerally sick of the macro mental derangement. And I think we have collectively agreed — quietly, on terraces in Cannes and in investment committee rooms across Europe — that it is not fun anymore and we need to get things going again.

Maybe I am a masochist. But then again — aren't we all, to still be doing this? The whole industry has just survived something genuinely unpleasant together. And now, as always, the cycle will turn, capital will flow, assets will get expensive again, and everyone will start chasing the same things at the same prices and wondering why returns are compressing.

We have done it before. We will do it again. That is apparently what we are here for.

So why am I still here specifically? Why did I walk away from nearly twenty years of institutional real estate to launch Dry Capital almost a year ago, into the teeth of all of this?

Because I can see exactly where this ends. The maturity wall is no longer a forecast, it is a calendar. The 2026 and 2027 bond maturities across European real estate are arriving as live, distressed, real deal flow.

Preferred equity and recapitalisation, JV's, shared equity schemes — the thing Dry Capital was built to do — is precisely the strategy this moment was made for. You do not build for this moment by arriving when it is obvious. You build through the pain, before it is comfortable, when the hit rate is 1 in 50 and the Teams calls are endless and the market feels like it will never move again.

Real estate. Live and let die. It is still here. It always comes back.