Office-to-apartment conversions have reached a record level, with 90,300 units in different stages of development as of the start of the year. The biggest cities lead that effort, including New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Los Angeles, and have helped boost office-to-residential conversions by 28% at the beginning of 2026 compared to a year earlier.

Nearly 63% of workers are now fully on-site, up from just over half in late 2021. Many other workers have to commute for at least some of the workweeks.

At least $3.4 billion of investment for build-to-rent projects is frozen in place, according to an early survey of 14 build-to-rent firms. That translates to about 10,000 units of housing and it is likely just a sliver of the impact across the entire build-to-rent industry, which includes more than 1,700 firms.

Homes that went under contract in March sold in a median of 19 days, creating a 37-day gap from the 56-day typical listing time. The 37-day gap in days on the market for homes sold versus all homes listed was the widest for any March since 2020.

Vacancy for premium Midtown office space fell to 16.4% in the first quarter, from 22.3% two years earlier. The U.S. office vacancy rate, meanwhile, rose to 22.8% from 22.1% over the same period.

A New York City affordable-housing program offers tax breaks with easier rules for residential projects under 100 units. New York City apartment developers are splitting large projects into 99-unit segments to dodge harsher rules for new incentives.

More than 12 percent of American households, a record high, stash their overflow in rented storage spaces.

Japanese builders have announced or closed acquisitions of 23 U.S. single-family home builders since 2020, more than double the number from 2013 to 2019. That doesn’t include the multifamily developers and construction-supply companies they have also bought. By some estimates, Japanese builders are now set to own about 6% of the U.S. home-construction market.

The Kansas City metro area, with about 2.2 million residents, is the smallest of the 16 cities hosting the World Cup. Over the past 15 years, the region has poured $650 million into building world-class training facilities and stadiums in an effort to become America’s soccer capital. The city had a budget of $165 million for the World Cup tournament.

Investors purchased 204 distressed office buildings nationwide last year, up from 133 sales in 2024. Sales of these properties, which were auctioned out of bankruptcies or sold through foreclosures and lender seizure, came to $5.2 billion. In the first two months of this year, sales volume of distressed offices was $808 million, up 24.5% from the same period last year.