April 15, 2026
Categories:
Commercial Real Estate
Thomas Paulson
7 minute read

Q1 REIT Outlook: Industrial, Storage, Malls & Office

Advan Buysider on REITS to UBS' institutional clients

The topics / conclusions from the work are:

  • For industrial, Q1 activity has built on Q4’s; STAG and Terreno’s relative “share” have improved the most QoQ, whereas First Industrial has dropped the most. We expect that these directional moves to align with the trends in occupancy.
  • For Prologis, the pace of activity has risen to 4% above LY’s. California has picked up relative to Texas and Illinois. The better trend in California is also evident in Rexford Industrial’s observed activity.
  • In storage, Public Storage and Extra Space should report in-line revenue. CubeSmart should be a miss on revenue. Geographically for PSA and NSA, their observed activity nicely complement one another.
  • In cold storage, Lineage and Americold observed activity has largely been steady, with LINE slightly outperforming.
  • Malls overall experienced healthy traffic increases for the quarter. March’s retail sales (and traffic) were robust, especially at the high-end. SPG also saw a nice increase in activity during the quarter, despite the adverse weather.
  • In office, the activity rate at Alexandria Real Estate is still not good, but not worse. For BXP, the observed trends further strengthened.
  • Our larger worry is grocery-anchored real estate given the disruption happening to conventional grocery.

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Thomas Paulson

Thomas has been Head of Market Insights since January 2025. Previously, he served as Director of Research and Business Development at Placer.ai, where he was instrumental in providing actionable insights derived from location analytics and the path for expansion into new verticals. His extensive background also includes two decades as a buyside analyst and portfolio manager at Alliance Bernstein, Cornerstone, and others. Prior to that tenure he worked as an economist. Thomas also currently serves as the Co-Chair of the National Association for Business Economics Retail / Consumer Roundtable.