What CRE’s Rising Leaders Are Getting Right

January 21, 2026

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They're here and thriving. Hear from five dynamic young investment executives.

The Millennial and Gen Z cohorts of CRE investment leaders are certainly a resilient bunch. The Great Recession, pandemic, economic and geopolitical headwinds, coupled with the omnipresence of artificial intelligence, have made the road to leadership a bumpy one, to say the least.

But with this also came a degree of creativity, boldness and a willingness to embrace the unconventional.

The proof is in their accomplishments. In interviews with Commercial Property Executive, some of the industry’s youngest, yet most accomplished investment leaders detailed their journeys and told us how their generation can push the industry forward.

The Innovator: Katharine Lau, Co-Founder & CEO of Stuf Storage

Self storage isn’t exactly the most glamorous sector, even as the assets themselves often bring compelling prospects. While the spaces are often boxy, industrial-looking facilities located in the suburbs or on highway offramps, they do benefit from demographic shifts taking place amid rising food, housing and energy costs.

Katharine Lau sought to capitalize on these trends when founding Stuf Storage, a startup developer of self storage assets built inside commercial and multifamily properties. The company, established in 2020, has built out self-contained self storage facilities inside underutilized spaces at Class A office and multifamily buildings, and now works with investors such as Vornado, Hines, RXR and Shorenstein on putting spaces into their properties.

“I was always interested in the weird funky spaces that no one paid attention to.” Lau told Commercial Property Executive. “(For) the basements, garages, mechanical floors and backup areas that to me felt wasteful, sitting around and collecting dust, it would be so nice to go downstairs and store that sort of stuff.”

Lau drew on her experience touring commercial buildings of all shapes and sizes while working as a fresh-out-of-college investment analyst at PGIM, a development manager at Equinox and later when heading up the real estate division of coworking giant Industrious.

Lau’s not only identified physical gaps in operationally expensive office buildings, but in the customer service experiences of self storage facilities themselves. In Lau’s mind, these are equally important components of a worthwhile investment.

“You have a lack of innovation in customer experience and operations, and there’s no compelling brand in the space either,” Lau pointed out. “It was funny to me because you would read customer reviews about self storage companies, and they were often not very good.”

Conversely, Stuf’s website is more akin to WeWork than Prime Storage, and the locations themselves resemble modern office amenity spaces rather than they do self storage facilities.

“It’s an amenity that actually makes money. The technology piece allows us to build a global network without having to hire a million people, and it allows us to increase security standards and customer experience,” Lau detailed.

Ultimately, it was a blend of branded hospitality, investment acumen and a willingness to experiment with technology that led to Stuf Storage’s expansion. These are traits that Lau believes the Millennial and Gen Z folk not only possess, but can bridge between each other. “We are in this sandwich, where we have one foot in each door,” Lau observed.

The Adapter: Ben Harris, Founder & CEO of Uncommon Capital Group

Ben Harris’ journey through the real estate investment world has been anything but smooth or predictable. Yet, navigating years of economic hardship has made his experiences with leading a business exciting, above all else.

Based in Chicago, Harris founded real estate equity investment firm Uncommon Capital Group in 2020 at the age of 29, gaining firsthand experience with starting a business during a once-in-a-century pandemic. “We were all adapting at the time, and growing a business was strange to say the least,” Harris said during an interview with CPE.

Since its founding, the Chicago-based firm has funded more than $2.5 billion worth of transactions in 28 markets across the industrial and multifamily sectors. His firm invests capital from high-net-worth individuals, wealth management firms and family offices who have been historically underallocating to CRE.

Even after emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, Harris had to contend with interest rate hikes, geopolitical uncertainty and acute macroeconomic headwinds.

“It’s humbling; when you work for a business and the world changes, you feel it, but it doesn’t change your life,” he quipped. “But when it is your business, it does, and the pace of change has been remarkable.”

When founding Uncommon, Harris strived for a degree of agency that he couldn’t get at his previous jobs.

“I just felt that that level of independence, flexibility and challenge was something that I strived for,” he said. “When you work at one investment shop, you are focusing one strategy and manager, but I wanted to be able to help them in more than one way.”

It’s this mix of grit and a desire to independently carve a path that Harris thinks sets his generation apart. “We were educated and graduated in a post-recession world, an environment where jobs were hard to come by,” he noted. “We inherently know that it’s hard, and things that are bad can get worse. At the same time, there is a real hunger to succeed.”

The Mentor: Anna Sporrong, Associate Director with Newmark’s Capital Markets group

It’s not just the high-profile titles, deals and accolades that give these younger leaders their renown; it’s also the mentorship and advocacy that they provide.

For Anna Sporrong, associate director working out of Newmark Capital Markets’ Century City office in Los Angeles, that’s another job, literally.

“When you naturally get promoted in this industry and gain seniority, you are (also) under increased pressure” Sporrong said. “I think that there is also a huge responsibility to pay things like mentorship forward and be someone for interns and analysts, whether it’s deal-related or not.”

In 2020, her first year after graduating from the University of Southern California’s real estate development program, Sporrong was a co-founder of the Arche Women’s Network. It’s a networking organization that connects women in the first decade of their real estate careers with networking, job and mentorship opportunities, hosting events with groups such as Blackstone, CBRE and TPG Angelo Gordon.

Now, the group now has north of 700 members, and Sporrong was able to use her experiences leading Arche to implement more female-focused resources at Cantor Fitzgerald, Newmark’s parent company. “I am super passionate about growing and improving the organization since it was founded in 2020, and I make that very known here at Newmark.”

Sporrong certainly has the experience to back this view. Now in her third year working at one of the nation’s largest brokerage firms, Sporrong executed more than $1.5 billion of deal volume in 2025 alone, and was one of the key players in a $61.5 million recapitalization of a planned 42-acre waterfront mixed-use project taking shape in Los Angeles’ San Pedro neighborhood. Prior to this role, she spent three years in middle-market brokerage at James Capital Advisors, then another year as an associate at JLL Capital Markets. Sporrong won James Capital Advisors’ 2020 Rookie of the Year Award, and Multi-Housing News’ Rising Star Silver prize a year later.

While Arche is a unique organization for the industry, Sporrong sees its creation as emblematic of many of the Millennial and Gen Z cohort’s character traits and work habits. “We sometimes get a bad rep for having too many boundaries, but there is also a shamelessness that we have,” Sporrong opined. “We push the envelope in novel ways, and I see this trend of ours as something that can shape up the industry, especially in dealmaking.”

Sporrong believes that the biggest avenues of innovation for the industry lie in this sort of outside-the-box thinking, especially when it comes to building alternate liquidity solutions in 2026. “The investors who can engineer those structures thoughtfully are going to capture some of the best opportunities in this cycle,” she predicted.

The Builder: Jonathan Hong, Vice President of Development & Acquisitions at Silverstein Properties

If you told Jonathan Hong that he’d have the ear of Larry Silverstein almost immediately after finishing graduate school, he likely wouldn’t have believed you. As he put it, “I certainly had a pretty non-traditional, non-linear path (going) into my role.”

At 31, Hong leads Silverstein Properties’ balance sheet general partner equity investments, which include an office-to-residential conversion of 55 Broad Street in Manhattan’s Financial District.

These accomplishments were born out of a desire to build, above all else.

Hong’s full pivot to CRE investment and development came when attending Columbia University’s Master of Science in Real Estate Development Program, having learned of an internship at Silverstein through a mentor that worked at Nuveen.

As an intern, Hong worked on the firm’s acquisition of U.S. Bank Tower, a 72-story trophy office high-rise in Los Angeles. During this time, Hong had a change of heart about his approach to development.

“The conclusion I came to was that setting policy is something that’s very difficult to do well,” he said. “There’s a lot of red tape, and you can have the best intentions. But if tariffs, construction wages and the world change, your analysis of what made a project feasible might no longer work.”

Conversely, leading the investment end of development projects gives Hong the feeling that his work is having a more-on-the-ground, higher-stakes impact. This is both a personal and professional priority for him and many of his peers.

“That is something that was interesting to me, in that you have a full visibility into what makes a project go or not,” Hong concluded. “It’s very emotional. (Developers) have the final say if a project goes through or not.”

The Educator: Jade Miller, CEO of ADISA

Being someone that investors from firms of all shapes and sizes turn to for advice and advocacy can sometimes be more meaningful than any dollar amount or deal. In fact, some consider education and advocacy in the CRE investment space as a standalone calling and responsibility.

Despite more than a decade of private equity real estate investment experience under her belt, Jade Miller sees herself as an educator and advocate for the industry above all else.

Miller is the first CEO of the Alternative & Direct Investment Securities Association, a CRE trade organization that hosts events, provides educational resources and lobbies for a 4,500-plus-member investor base. “It’s easier to understand if you can educate and conceptualize, and that has shaped my leadership style as well as my professional journey,” Miller told CPE.

Miller considered the role after working across the investment advisory, asset management and underwriting gamut, developing a degree of empathy and intellectual curiosity for the industry.

“I’m a big proponent of going to see the investment, going to underwrite it and seeing who the renters are. One of the unique things (about real estate) is that it is tangible, and having that experience with leaders who did that as well has been instrumental with me and my journey.”

As for how this approach has shaped the firm’s operations, Miller describes the organization as going from a traditional association model to more of a “partnership model.”

“It’s more of a fundamental shift from proactive vs. reactive, and listening is half the battle,” Miller said. “It’s about seeing where the trends are going, what the members need, how can they be at the forefront and how we can help them.”