Peter Linneman & Willy Walker | Real Estate Impact Conference 2026

Welcome to the 14th annual University of Miami Real Estate Impact Conference. Today, we bring together some of the most influential voices shaping the future of real estate, including Nadeem Meghji, Arnaud Karsenti, Peter Linneman, Willy Walker, Stuart Miller, Steve Witkoff, and Manny Kadre.

We are proud to recognize our presenting sponsors, Blackstone, Douglas Elliman, H&M Development, Kap Morrison Acre LLP, Kislak Family Foundation, Metropolitan Realty Group, and Witkoff. We also extend our sincere appreciation to our platinum sponsors, our prestige sponsors, our premier sponsors, and our partner sponsors.

Now, let's dive into what's shaping tomorrow's skyline, right here at the 2026 University of Miami Real Estate Impact Conference. Next up on stage is Peter Linneman and Willy Walker.

Peter Linneman is an acclaimed economist, author, and advisor. A former Albert Sussman Professor of Real Estate, Finance, and Public Policy at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and founding chairman of its Real Estate Department and Zell Lurie Real Estate Center. He is the recipient of Pria's Grass Camp Award, Wharton's Lifetime Achievement Award, and numerous national honors. He's also a founder of Linneman Associates, and a former chairman of Rockefeller Center Properties.

And Willy Walker, chairman and CEO of Walker and Dunlop, and host of the acclaimed Walker Webcast. A recipient of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and multiple time financier of the year, he serves on the boards of the US Olympic and Paralympic Foundation, and Harvard Business School's Board of Deans' Advisors. He is also a member of the Real Estate Roundtable. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Peter Linneman and Willy Walker.

The Manny and you are too young, but there used to be this thing called Hamburger Helper, which was just filler to make hamburger go farther. So, I figured between Nadeem and the Dean and Witkoff, we're just hamburger helper.

Just to remind people, we stopped having a lot of data. And just before we stopped, the pattern of data, not one piece, but the pattern of data, was consistent with a blip, temporary slowdown, and we're at the beginning of losing a million or two jobs. And I just didn't know it was like you were waiting for the next chapter, and they didn't release the next chapter. They then released the next chapter, and I don't mean just one piece of data, the collage, and you go, it looks blippy. And in which case, I became optimistic. There's always things happen, but I became optimistic because I got a little better pick of the pattern. So, I'm optimistic now. I think people are probably way too pessimistic right now, and I mean right now, as we speak. I think people are too pessimistic, but we'll get into that, I'm sure.

100,000 positive, just to be clear.

You lied and said you didn't hear the negative. I'm an honest guy.

I don't think the data's being manipulated in a political sense. I think they have a lot of trouble with their data right now. Response rates are not great. They're declining for a lot of reasons. I think the job data in particular is vulnerable to small businesses not reporting. There's no stick or carrot associated with reporting. It's 121,000 firms they survey. Few of you may do that, most of you don't. And then they have algorithms to figure out versus those answers. My intuition, but I can't prove this, is that a whole lot of firms, given the whole ICE episode that's been going on, if somebody showed up and asked you, 'Tell us about your employment. I'm from the government,' and I have many illegal workers, I'm just going to throw it in the bin. And that gets through their algorithms over interpreted as businesses went out of business. I don't know what else they can do. So, I told you that last year, officially, we had 181,000 jobs growth, even though, which is 10 basis points of job growth, no job growth, in other words. And in fact, you had 800,000 jobs added in health care. We only had 181,000 total, which means the rest of the economy didn't add jobs. I don't believe that. I just don't believe it. I lived through the year. GDP grew by 2.2%. Okay, maybe it was 2.4, maybe it was two. You don't get that kind of GDP growth with no labor increase. You don't have unemployment insurance claims stay low and flat, if that's the case. And I think that they're struggling with that. And I think this month, you say, 'Well, what about last month?' Last month may have been much better than it said. Yes, they revised down. So, I think right now, it paints a picture. The picture it paints is notably slow job growth versus two years ago. That I believe. But I believe we basically still have positive job growth. Can I prove it? No, but I can establish a lot of fact pattern to be supportive.

So, y'all should just commit suicide. Robots and AI are going to take everything. Look, all of history, and we don't have a lot else to go on other than history and intuition. All of history says, 'The more technology we have, the more employment we have.' And every time, and this is true for 125 years, and every time, everybody says, 'But this time's going to be different.' And it's not different, and it's not different for a fundamental reason. When you have something that increases productivity, it creates wealth. And when wealth gets created, people don't bury it. So, different people may have wealth, may have a different concentration, there may be particular people hurt, but there's more wealth. And the people who have that wealth are either going to invest it or spend it. I don't think they're going to burn it. I don't think they're going to create wealth and burn it. I don't think they're going to create wealth and bury it. All of history, wealth got created by productivity, and it gets either spent or invested. And if you believe AI is dramatically changing, the game you want to be in is the people who capture that wealth. Where are they going to invest it? And where are they going to spend it? And get in front of that. And all of history has said, yep, you know, those jobs disappeared. Walking behind a plow horse disappeared. Young people your age bending metal, which is what they did literally bending metal. Go back and look at old photographs. I grew up in a manufacturing city. Okay, those jobs are gone. But there's a whole bunch of new jobs that nobody ever dreamed of. That's what an economy is. And that's what I believe it will be. And I'll give one other thing and then I'll shut up, not for the rest of the session, but I'll shut up, which is over a long period of time, but I'm rounding, we get about 1 and 1/2% productivity growth a year. That's how we get wealth. Right? We get we're better, cheaper, faster, right? Not everything better, cheaper, faster. That's with electricity, that's with potable water, that's with modern sewage, that's with computers, that's with internal combustion, airplanes, cell phones, the whole thing. We get about 1 and 1/2%. Okay? The real question is not will AI increase productivity? It's is it why we're going to get 1 and 1/2% over the next 20 or 30 years? Or is it in addition to the 1 and 1/2% we'd normally get? Now, that's an important question when you think about 1 and 1/2% of GDP a year versus 3% of GDP a year from productivity. Okay? My own view is it's probably closer to how we get the 1 and 1/2%. Just like we got it from electricity, we got it from internal combustion, because these things take longer to integrate than people think. It would be like think of global warming. If the temperature projections came true that they'd talk about for the next century in the next 6 minutes, that would be tough to adjust to. But if they occur over a century, not such a big deal to adjust to. This is similar. If everything they said about AI happened suddenly, like tomorrow, it'll be a big challenge. It'll be a challenge anyway, but if it happens over 20 years or 30 years, things take time to absorb. That's my view.

Right. And they study that period of time and over the last 25 years, the average is 10 weeks. So, from 2000 to 2007, the average was 10 weeks if you lost your job and it would take you to find a new job. Then in the Great Financial Crisis, that spike came back down. From 2012 to 2020, stayed at 10 weeks. Pandemic hits, spikes up again, comes back down. 2022 to 2025, 10 weeks. So, I'm sitting there looking at this data. Thank you for the data. And I sat there and I said, 'But from 2000 to 2007, no one had an iPhone. No one had LinkedIn. No one had any ability to find a job electronically from 2000 to 2007. Yet the time period to find a job is exactly the same in 2025 as it was in 2000.' So, while I understand this technology is coming in, we sort of sit there and say, 'Wow, that period of time is going to be shrunk dramatically.' And it just hasn't.

It was supposed to be the most inefficient market on earth was the dating. You had to be at the right bar at the right time to meet the right person. And then all of a sudden we came out with these dating apps that were supposed to make the most inefficient market efficient. Okay? And many of you in this room have dating apps on. They might be a swipe right, swipe left, what have you. But you're supposed to be able to find your partner. Well, guess what? Between 2000 and 2025, the marriage rate in the United States is down by 26%. So, here's this great efficient market, yet less people are getting married today than they were previously. Now, by the way, I've been married basically 53 years. When I say basically, in a few months.

Let me restate that. Kathy and I have been married for almost 53 years. When I heard this, I said, 'Well, maybe the apps are working.' These people shouldn't be getting married, you know? That's a little cynical.

Since the pandemic.

You're starting to see I'll give you one obvious. You're seeing bigger deals. Right? Bigger deals. Deals have natural barriers like when you see the biggest deal that's ever occurred, it meant you've overcome hurdles, right? That are beyond normal. And that means people must have money. And when they have a lot of money, there's a risk they have more money than brains. Not to suggest they're stupid. That's a very different thing. You can be brilliant, but if you have more money than brains, what are you going to do with it, right? And so, that's a good example. You're starting to see mega deals. Right? Which means people have maybe a little too much confidence in trees growing to the sky. AI to me, I can believe in it, but I don't believe trees grow to the sky. I believe trees grow. But I don't believe they grow forever. And so, those are the kind of hints of you don't see many of them in real estate. The only one notably you see in real estate could relate to data centers.

And my rationale is simply three things. Come on. I'm almost 75, so you don't ask for a 75-year-old to have great insights on technology, right? But the margins I heard Nadeem. Nadeem said what? The yield on cost is something like just under 8%. Where else can you get an 8% yield on cost developing? No, right? So, it means a lot of money going there. Means the margin is very big. You show me a sector in any industry over my lifetime, including this one, where margins are double or 50% to 100% higher than normal, guess what you have in two or three or four years? Over supply. Even if demand's good, you will end up markets adjust. So, my concern is on the supply side. And then the other concern is, and I think Nadeem mentioned it, who takes out who's the takeout? And that's a challenge. We don't know who the takeout is. Well, if I don't know who the takeout is, I own an apartment complex in Dover/New Philadelphia, Ohio. Nobody knows it. I assume I don't have a takeout equity. I will, but I assume I don't. Why? Because nobody knows. So, as I evaluate it, I assume nobody knows. There is a pricing of these deals where everybody seems to act like they know what the takeout is. They seem to know that just because a tenant is credit worthy today, they'll be tenant credit worthy in three years. I'm old enough to remember when strip centers begged to get Kmart as their anchor tenant, and by the time the center opened, you're selling your strip center, they were an anchor, not an anchor tenant. Okay? Got it? And by the way, at the moment Kmart was really doing well. So, it's not like I have some insight beyond I just have seen too many companies. What makes Microsoft, what makes Walmart, and a few other companies amazing is they have successfully reinvented themselves repeatedly over 40 years. Not easy to do. If you went to the record of most companies, if you can reinvent yourself twice over a 30-40 year period, you're doing great. And everybody assumes that the hyperscalers will be forever gold. Do you ever hear of a company called Ford Motor? Did you ever hear of a company When I was a kid, they truly meant that whatever was good for GM, General Motors, was good for America.

No. GE was the most valuable company on Earth in 2000 at a market cap of half a trillion dollars.

Almost died. So, I'm not trying to pick on anybody. I'm just

So, Peter, in the canaries in the coal mine, one of the ones that you've had for quite a while is the misguided Fed. And I think in the last one you had four canaries dead on a misguided Fed.

Only because I'm nice, they're not all five dead.

All right. So, I have a very simple approach to this. And obviously, there's more complicated equations and data behind it. I'm going to make this real simple. To take a short-term highly liquid risk, I don't think I need a big return premium over inflation. All right? That's step one. Step two, where's inflation? If you look at the roughly 80,000 items that people truly consume, inflation is running about 2.1 to 2.2% for the last 2 years. Not for the last 2 months, for the last 2 years, it's been running at 2.1 to 2.2 a year. The only reason it registers higher is mainly because of an item called owner equivalent rent. And any of you who own homes, I want you to tell me immediately how much rent do you pay yourself for your home? And your answer is, nothing. No one ever bought it. And that's a quarter of what drives the consumer price index. And it's been high, and it's what causes it to be up. Just as an aside, he helped create it with Milton Friedman.

He helped create that owner equivalent rent. So, he knows it all too well because he actually created the measure.

of what you were trying to do. You were trying to compare For example, it was a useful I'm not saying perfect, but it was a useful effort to basically ask, what's the cap rate you apply to your home, and is there an arbitrage between rental and owner of a home. Got it? That was what motivated me. You could say, well, that was stupid. I was young and stupid. All right? That's what I did. But 2.1, 2.2% for 2 years. By the way, the 30-year average of the inflation, not including that owner equivalent, for the 30 years prior to the onset of the pandemic was 2.2.

So, for 2 years we've been back to basically where we were, with noise, for 30 years prior to the pandemic, which kind of disrupted everything. All right? We've been back. If it's 2.2%, what how much return do you need? I would say 50 basis points, maybe 75 basis points. That's as 2.75 to 3. There are some people would say you only need 25 basis points. That would say 2.5. So, somewhere between 2.5 and 3. I would say closer to 2.75. It is currently 3.5. I'm being kind. It's currently 3. Well, that's 75 basis points too high. And the way I've won my bets What's that?

With the new appointments By the way, if you were the president, and you think rates are too high, and you're choosing people, are you going to pick somebody who believes it should be 100 basis points over inflation, or 25 basis points over inflation? Doesn't mean you're going to force an answer on them. They went to the same universities. They worked at the same jobs. They all have integrity. Right? But you're going to pick people, right? So, it's very possible you're going to get a majority in there in the course of the next year or so that believe it should be 25 to 50. And you're on for this year then for 75 basis points cut, I think is absolutely in. They'll backload it again, like they've done the last 2 years. I think they'll do one probably before the middle of the year, and again, probably two at the end of the year. And depending on resignations, like I think Powell will go off. I don't know that, but I think he'll go off. He has more term. That's another appointment. That's going to be another person who believes 25 over inflation, and so forth. So, it could easily be 100.

Three. Three and four. Well, four and five.