Fortress: private capital can outlast real estate's institutional clock

Commercial real estate spent the last few years in a quiet recession while the broad economy ran hot. David Hammerman, the COO of real estate equity at Fortress Investment Group, thinks that gap is closing. In an interview with IREI published Aug. 17, he said values have reset, deals are coming back, and real estate is turning in investors' favor. That is what private capital is built to wait for.

Fortress released its 2026 Mid-Year Outlook in the same stretch. Read together with the interview, the two amount to a claim about who should own the next stretch of the real estate cycle, and the claim is coming from the top rather than from a deal team celebrating one acquisition.

Hammerman starts with patience. Institutional funds have finite lives and fixed return expectations, so an asset can be cheap and still break a fund's math when the hold period or business plan outlasts the mandate. Private investors, he told IREI, can take the long view on basis that institutional money has to pass on. Office transactions and select multifamily deals are the clearest cases, he said.

The interview also touched on Delaware statutory trusts and their growing place in private wealth. A manager with Fortress's institutional roots raising the structure in public suggests where the demand for it has gone.

An institutional fund has a clock; a private investor has a horizon. In this cycle, that split should matter more than leverage or location. Sponsors who can package an asset for an owner with time on their side are selling something a fund cannot offer its own capital: the option not to sell.

The bet is that the reset is real. Hammerman says it is. If he is right, the next wave of institutional-quality commercial real estate will go to investors who were willing to move while funds stood still.