FIRST DRAFT LIVE: The Political Noise Is Loud. Here's Why 2026 Isn't A Panic Year For CRE — It's An IC Year

Bisnow’s First Draft Live is a regular series featuring live conversations about the critical stories impacting CRE right now. It is a companion to The First Draft, Bisnow’s daily, flagship CRE newsletter. Register here to get The First Draft in your inbox. Subscribe to First Draft Live on Apple and Spotify, or scroll down to view in your browser. 

If uncertainty was the defining word for the commercial real estate industry in 2025, the word that best describes 2026 so far might be "noise." 

Political noise, economic noise, alarm bells sounding around tariffs — it’s a loud time for the industry, and it can be tough to know what to focus on. Investment committees have a difficult task today to tune that out and make important calls about what the fundamentals are whispering beneath it all.

Abbe Franchot Borok, managing director and head of U.S. debt for BGO, sat down with Bisnow Editor-In-Chief Mark Bonner for the inaugural First Draft Live of 2026 to share how she is making decisions in this environment. She spoke about how she’s ranking the markets, the state of U.S. investment, and why she’s optimistic for the year ahead. 

While foreign investors have been put off by the volatility of U.S. policy, Borok said she doesn't expect any sustained downturn in investment here. America remains the most liquid and active property market.

She said BGO has been using new types of data and analytics to force rank the more than 300 U.S. markets where the firm is active. 

"We're bringing in a lot of different data sources surrounding supply, a lot of which comes from these macros, whether it's the supply chain or tariff policies," Borok said. 

She added that the supply-demand dynamic has shifted. While 10, 20 years ago, when there was too much supply, there was softness in the market, today, there are a lot of changes in demand and consumer uses of real estate. Those changes necessitate different data sources to determine what is truly driving demand. 

View the full conversation below.