Gower Crowd

Over the past few days an interesting signal has started appearing in the credit markets.
It has very little to do with productivity.
It has to do with risk.

Mahesh Saireddy, co-head of Goldman Sachs’ Capital Solutions Group, said last week that AI disruption is likely to make lending decisions more difficult over the next several years because lenders cannot yet tell which business models will remain durable.

The concern is straightforward: when technology can rapidly change the economics of an industry, it becomes harder to evaluate long-term creditworthiness.

That anxiety is beginning to spread through parts of the private credit market.

Software companies, digital services businesses, and other technology-dependent models suddenly look harder to underwrite when the pace of change accelerates.

In that environment, something interesting happens.

Assets backed by physical collateral start to look comparatively easier to understand.

Buildings still generate rent.
Leases still produce cash flow.
Collateral still exists in the real world.

None of that removes risk from commercial real estate. The sector has plenty of its own cyclical challenges.

But it highlights a broader shift that is easy to miss.

Most of the conversation around AI in real estate still focuses on productivity - faster underwriting, faster research, faster document analysis.

The larger macro effect may be different.

AI is beginning to influence how lenders think about risk itself.

When uncertainty rises around intangible business models, capital often gravitate toward assets where the underlying economics remain visible.

That does not mean real estate suddenly becomes risk-free.

It does mean that in a world where technological disruption can quickly rewrite entire industries, collateral that can be inspected, valued, and financed may regain a certain strategic clarity.

AI is changing workflows.

But it may also begin to reshape how capital decides what it trusts.

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If you’re interested in the practical side of applying AI inside real estate firms, I’m running a small executive program on this starting March 16.

https://learn.gowercrowd.com/ai-accelerator-program

Sell high, buy low.

I've been saying this for months.

If you are raising equity capital for real estate, now is the perfect time to be building your systems to attract, nurture, and convert investors.

Four reasons:

1. Interest rates coming down
2. Extended tax breaks made permanent.
3. More liquidity in the market (debt) from banking deregulation.

and...

4. The stock market is at historic highs (sell high) - while real estate is at cyclical lows.

Want to know how to rise above the noise in a tough market for capital formation from retail investors?

Positioning.

***

Our clients manage over $45bn in assets and have raised over $1bn in equity using our systems with minimum investments as low as $25,000.

DM me if you'd like to discuss how we can help you too.

CRE Valuations Fall Below Equities for the First Time in Two Decades CRE now screens as "cheap" relative to stocks, with private-market pricing stabilizing.

Most of us will spend a disproportionate amount of our lives at work, which makes learning how to think, decide, and operate effectively feel less like a hobby and more like basic risk management.

When the goal is better judgment, sharper strategy, or simply understanding why organizations behave the way they do, we tend to reach for business books written by people who claim to have figured it out.

Below is a short business reading list that skips the usual bestsellers and focuses instead on material that quietly improves how you think, negotiate, and lead in the real world.

-> Calvin and Hobbes for philosophy
Teaches first-principles thinking, incentive misalignment, and why most strategic errors begin with flawed assumptions.

-> Asterix the Gaul for cultural anthropology
Required for understanding why global strategies fail locally, and why culture eats centralized planning every time.

-> The Piranha Club for business strategy and tactics
A realistic treatment of competitive dynamics, informal power, and how outcomes are actually won.

-> Bertie Wooster & Jeeves for executive decision-making
A case study in solving complex problems when authority and intelligence are not aligned, which is most organizations.

-> Rumpole of the Bailey for negotiation tactics
Demonstrates how framing, timing, and narrative routinely matter more than formal leverage.

-> James Herriot collection for leadership and professional judgment
Covers accountability, resilience, and operating under real-world constraints without excuses.

If nothing else, these books will leave you with a smile which suggests you may have learned the most important lesson of all: perspective.

Have a good weekend.