Q&A: Cohen & Steers’ Zi Zhang on Leveraging Uncertainty

September 2, 2026

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How the senior vice president & portfolio manager for global real estate identifies genuine inflection points and knows when to rethink an investment thesis.

In real estate investment, signals don’t always line up. Property fundamentals may point in one direction while public-market pricing moves in another. Economic shifts or changing demand patterns can quickly complicate the picture. The challenge is figuring out what’s temporary—and what could genuinely change an investment’s outlook.

Ji Zhang has spent nearly two decades making those distinctions. A senior vice president & portfolio manager for global real estate at Cohen & Steers, she has experience spanning both equity research and portfolio management. Zhang joined the firm in 2018 after working on Neuberger Berman’s real estate securities team, with earlier roles at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Macquarie Capital.

Commercial Property Executive spoke with Zhang about what catches her attention when evaluating an investment, how she separates market noise from meaningful change and, perhaps most importantly, what makes her change her mind.

In what ways has your research experience shaped the way you evaluate real estate investment opportunities?

Zhang: Equity research gave me a strong analytical foundation required for evaluating real estate investments. Ultimately, we are underwriting future cash flows and determining what those cash flows are worth. The discipline of understanding the fundamental drivers of a business, translating them into cash flows and intrinsic value and then comparing that value against what the market is pricing continues to anchor how I evaluate investments today.

At the property level, which indicators help you determine whether an emerging demand trend is durable enough to support an investment thesis?

Zhang: Some of the most attractive investment opportunities emerge around inflection points. The key is determining what is actually changing and whether the underlying driver is cyclical, secular or some combination of the two.

Multifamily over the past decade is a good example. The sector benefited from steady job growth, which is cyclical, but also from a secular demographic tailwind as a large cohort of younger Millennials chose to live, work and play in urban areas and rent apartments. As that cohort ages, forms families and increasingly moves toward homeownership and the suburbs, what had been a secular tailwind can become less supportive, and that is also why demographically we are more constructive on single-family homes.

Understanding where you are in both the cyclical and secular trend, and recognizing when one is beginning to overwhelm the other, is critical to identifying an inflection before it is fully reflected in expectations.

How do you identify the most attractive opportunities across listed real estate?

Zhang: The most attractive setup is often a company or sector where valuation is inexpensive and fundamentals are approaching a positive inflection. As such, valuation and the trajectory of fundamentals tend to be our starting points.

Positioning provides another useful layer of information. A compelling narrative is often already well understood and well owned. In those cases, the opportunity has to come from fundamentals exceeding what is already embedded in expectations. Some of the best investments, however, we believe, are under-owned because the prevailing narrative is still negative or investors have not yet recognized that the fundamentals are changing.

That is where deep fundamental research can be particularly valuable: identifying the inflection early enough that you are investing before the new reality is fully reflected in expectations and valuation.

Investors can agree on the strength of a long-term trend but disagree on whether the opportunity is already reflected in valuations. How do you distinguish a compelling real estate story from a compelling investment?

Zhang: A compelling story only becomes a compelling investment when there is a disconnect between what we believe a business is worth and what is reflected in its valuation.

At Cohen & Steers, we have a disciplined investment process designed to translate our fundamental views, positive or negative, into cash flows and ultimately into value. We then compare that value across the investment universe.

Public markets can overshoot in both directions, which creates opportunities but can also tempt investors to rationalize valuations around a strong narrative. As fundamental investors, we continually test the upside and downside to our assumptions, but ultimately we have to respect the process.

How do you differentiate among companies with similar property exposure and demand drivers? Which operating or financial characteristics tend to matter most?

Zhang: Companies can look very similar from the outside and produce very different investment outcomes. Even within the same property type and geography, differences in portfolio quality, tenant exposure, management execution, balance sheet strength, capital allocation and governance can materially affect long-term value creation.

That is one of the advantages of having a large, experienced investment team focused specifically on listed real estate. Understanding those nuances allows us to identify the property sectors with the most attractive fundamental backdrop and valuation, and then invest in the companies within those sectors that are best positioned to translate those conditions into shareholder returns.

As more private real estate platforms consider accessing listed markets, what characteristics make a business attractive to public-market investors?

Zhang: The public market can provide real strategic advantages to high-quality real estate businesses. As perpetual-life vehicles, listed companies have the ability to aggregate high-quality assets and portfolios over time. Strong governance, a durable balance sheet and access to deep pools of capital can create a meaningful competitive advantage, particularly when an attractive cost of capital allows a company to fund acquisitions and development accretively.

But access to public capital also imposes discipline. Share prices and costs of capital change, sometimes significantly, over the course of a cycle. Management teams need to make capital allocation decisions that reflect that reality rather than pursuing growth for its own sake.

The strongest public companies maintain multiple sources of capital and a broad toolkit. That flexibility allows them to shift between acquisitions, development, dispositions, joint ventures, debt and equity depending on where the best risk-adjusted opportunity exists at a particular point in the cycle.

Listed markets can react quickly to economic data, earnings and changes in sentiment, while underlying property fundamentals move more slowly. How do you separate market noise from information that genuinely changes your investment view?

Zhang: The starting point is knowing which operating metrics actually matter to the investment thesis.

Earnings provide an important checkpoint on how a business is performing and whether our expectations are playing out. Economic data help us assess the demand drivers affecting individual markets and property types. But not every data point carries equal weight, and market prices can react much more quickly, and sometimes much more dramatically, than underlying real estate fundamentals.

Experience through multiple cycles helps us distinguish signal from noise, but we also complement that experience with rigorous quantitative analysis. The combination helps us identify the relatively small number of operating metrics that ultimately drive cash flows and value, and focus our attention on whether those metrics are changing.

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What kinds of developments are most likely to cause you to reconsider an investment thesis, and how do you determine whether the disruption is temporary or has fundamentally changed the investment?

Zhang: We are constantly re-evaluating our investment theses as new information emerges. When the facts change in a way that materially changes our underwriting and the prospective return is no longer attractive, we sell.

Longer-term structural questions are more complex. When evaluating the impact of flexible work on office demand or AI across real estate, there are technological, economic and behavioral variables evolving simultaneously. In those situations, we continually incorporate new evidence, test different scenarios and refine our assumptions as the range of potential outcomes becomes clearer.

Some of the most abrupt thesis changes occur around regulation or geopolitics because the impact on value can be both immediate and structural. If a regulatory change materially limits a company’s ability to increase rents, for example, that changes our expectations for future cash flow growth. Similarly, geopolitical developments that constrain a company’s ability to transact or deploy capital can impair its growth opportunity and increase the appropriate discount rate for the business.

The important discipline is separating a temporary disruption from something that has fundamentally changed the economics of the investment. If the latter has occurred, prior conviction shouldn’t prevent us from changing our view.

After nearly two decades in real estate investing, which parts of the decision-making process have become easier with experience and which remain just as difficult?

Zhang: Experience has made it easier to distinguish signal from noise and to recognize patterns across cycles. That perspective can be particularly valuable during periods of dislocation, when volatility and uncertainty can create some of the best long-term investment opportunities.

What remains challenging is the increasingly uncertain macroeconomic, geopolitical and technological environment, which is more unpredictable today than ever. Over time, we have found it more useful to rely less on any single forecast and instead focus on understanding a range of possible outcomes and how they might impact value.

Good investing isn’t about certainty. It’s about understanding what is reflected in the price, identifying the variables that matter most, thinking probabilistically about what could change, and making sure that as an investor, you are being appropriately compensated for the risks you are taking.