A veteran broker's read on where the opportunity is in the second half of 2026
The commercial real estate market has been grinding through a prolonged correction, and most brokers know where the pain is. Despite the headwinds in the space, there are opportunities available for brokers looking to make deals.
While commercial lending is less sensitive to rate changes, elevated rates have had some impact on deals in the CRE space. However, with liquidity still available in the space, deals are pushing through regardless of where mortgage rates settle for the day.
One veteran broker has been through several interesting cycles in the commercial space, and as he returns to the brokering side of the transaction, he is looking ahead to areas where deals are available throughout the rest of the year.
Elliott Kunstlinger (pictured top) brings a unique perspective to the market. As a senior mortgage broker at Eastern Union who has worked the ownership side, the brokerage side, and back again, he has closed nine-figure deals across multiple cycles and knows which sectors are moving right now. The ones that are moving are being boosted by strong market liquidity.
"It’s very different than 2008, and very different than COVID," Kunstlinger told Mortgage Professional America. "There's a lot of powder on the street."
Where there are opportunities
Two strong commercial sectors are industrial and data centers, both of which have been booming, with billion-plus-dollar transactions becoming routine.
For brokers working in a broader range of deal sizes, Kunstlinger said retail is worth a second look. He watched it recover from what felt like a structural collapse before COVID and said it has continued to hold up well.
"When I first got into the brokerage business, right before COVID, retail was like, oh, we're not touching retail," he said. "And now retail, a lot of people like it. Post-COVID, those did really well. People want to get back out and go to brick-and-mortar stores as opposed to necessarily online shopping."
Kunstlinger said hospitality is another sector worth watching, with corporate travel returning and office utilization climbing.
"With business back open and the push to get back into the office, I think globally you're going to see a lot of corporate travel back up, which I think will do pretty well for the hospitality industry," he said.
On the residential conversion side, he said New York City's political environment has pushed some multifamily operators toward free-market units as rent-stabilized assets become increasingly difficult to manage profitably.
"What's going to happen now to free-market units is they're going to trade for just better numbers," he said. "Because you have these guys that are owner-operators on the management side in New York multi that now say, ‘Well, what am I doing with these stabilized, controlled buildings? So maybe let me go ahead and start buying free market units because I know what to do.’"
How to thrive in the market
Kunstlinger has co-brokered with most of the major shops in the business. He said while there is liquidity to support deals right now, it doesn’t mean getting those deals closed is suddenly very easy.
"Nothing's easy right now," he said. "Can't just sit back on cruise control. You’ve got to be creative. It's very important to constantly understand where the market is."
He said one of the most useful things a broker can do when they lose a deal is treat it as research rather than a rejection.
"As a broker, you can't ever be too proud," he said. "If you lost a deal, somebody else placed it — besides the congratulations, become smarter, become a better broker, find out where they placed it, how they placed it. Not necessarily how they won the business, but how they placed the deal. Because it's really hard to place business right now."
The point came through in a deal he described from his own experience. A $92 million transaction on a Coney Island office development project had been circulating in the market for 15 years without closing.
"It was a $92 million deal," he said. "And I thought of the lender because I was listening to a podcast of someone where they mentioned a lender, and I said, ‘Hey, who's that lender you're talking to?’ And I made a call and paired it up."
The broker community itself, he said, has consolidated around the people willing to operate that way, and shed those who were not.
"Be collaborative, be respectful, be appreciative that there are some really smart people out there," he said. "The commercial mortgage brokerage world has definitely thinned out. And you have either really, really good brokers or really, really bad brokers. The in-between guys kind of went to do something else. But there are some really, really good brokers out there."
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