Net lease investors could be forgiven for feeling whipsawed by the past two years, but the agenda at GlobeSt.com's Net Lease Spring conference in New York today suggests something important: this corner of commercial real estate is no longer just managing through volatility, it is trying to define what the next phase of the cycle will look like.
Event structure and focus
The two-day event at the New York Marriott Marquis opened Monday evening with a welcome reception and will be followed by a full slate of programming on Tuesday, built around a single ballroom track and frequent networking breaks. The structure keeps all delegates in the same room for the core content while pushing most informal conversations into the terrace, foyer and evening reception, a format that tends to concentrate discussion around the themes introduced on stage.
Macroeconomy and market outlook
Tuesday begins with a keynote, "Net Lease Market Forecasting for 2026," led by Spencer Levy, Global Chief Client Officer and Senior Economic Advisor at CBRE, who will unpack the impact of 2025 and the macro and micro trends shaping the next year. That framing reflects where the sector is today: transaction volume has started to rebound as interest-rate cuts and narrowing bid-ask spreads restore some price discovery, yet cap rates and capital costs are still resetting after the 2022–2024 shock.
The keynote is followed by "Net Lease State of the Industry," a panel of senior figures from W. P. Carey, TPG, ARCTRUST, CBRE, JLL Capital Markets and Marcus & Millichap, who are positioned to speak across retail, industrial, office and specialty assets. The talk will focus on which behaviors adopted during the tighter-money phase—such as more conservative leverage, longer diligence, or sharper tenant underwriting—are likely to persist even as conditions improve.
Capital, deals and development
A late-morning session, "A View From the Top: Investment Opportunities for Net Lease Owners," brings in owners and capital providers from Kroll, The Boulder Group, New Lake Capital Partners, Essential Properties Realty Trust and J.P. Morgan.
Their remit is to discuss staying "nimble and resilient" through volatility, finding opportunity in new sectors, and diversifying portfolios, which aligns with broader trends toward allocations to data centers and other operationally essential assets as investors seek durable income streams.
That theme continues into "Developers Spotlight," which looks at how developers are handling inflation, higher financing costs and lingering supply chain issues, as well as the role of redevelopment across sectors.
Given that national net lease cap rates showed only marginal upward movement in 2025—overall moving from roughly the high-6% to just a basis point higher in the second quarter—developers are likely to focus on where construction pencil-outs still work and how they are reshaping pipeline strategy.
After a networking luncheon, "An Examination of Capital Markets" turns directly to inflation, the ongoing recession, and rising interest and cap rates, with speakers from Arch Street Capital Advisors, Carlyle, Surmount and Dansker Capital Group.
The panel will take a holistic look at the net lease deal from sale to acquisition to financing, which tracks with investor concerns about how quickly debt markets will normalize and what that implies for volume and pricing through 2026.
Tenant, sale-leaseback, and structural themes
One of the more distinctive sessions on the agenda is "The Corporate Tenants Speak Out," featuring real estate leaders from Union Square Hospitality Group and Levain Bakery. The goal is to give owners and investors direct insight into what motivates tenants to transact on net leases, what pressures they face at the unit level, and how to build more genuinely collaborative relationships—an increasingly important topic as both sides try to balance occupancy cost, flexibility and long-term commitments in a still-uncertain economy.
The program closes with "Deconstructing the Sale-Leaseback Transaction," which focuses on a structure that the agenda describes as "perhaps the most resilient transaction across the CRE landscape."
Panelists from Reed Smith, TPG, Woods Oviatt Gilman, Net Lease Capital, U.S. Realty Advisors and Sands Investment Group are set to walk through structures, fundamentals and the roles of various players, an area where activity has often held up even when broader investment sales have slowed as operators monetize real estate to shore up balance sheets.
What this says about the market
Taken together, the agenda reads less like a celebration of a booming sector and more like a working session on how to operate in a still-recovering, selectively liquid market.
Heavy emphasis on capital markets, macro forecasting and sale-leasebacks acknowledges that while net lease is viewed as comparatively resilient—and did see a notable rebound in volume in 2025—it is still adapting to a new cost-of-capital regime rather than returning to the pre-2022 playbook.
The mix of owners, capital providers, developers and tenants on stage, plus concentrated networking windows, also underscores a shift toward more integrated decision-making, where financing terms, store-level performance and long-term asset strategy are negotiated in tandem rather than in silos.
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