Good morning — Jordan here from CRE Daily. If you’re reading this, you made it through eleven consecutive interest rate hikes and one of the most challenging years the commercial real estate industry has faced.

As we close out 2025, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what’s been a defining year for CRE Daily and share a few thoughts heading into the year ahead.

This past year challenged nearly everyone in our industry. Capital markets remained selective, deal velocity varied widely by asset class, and uncertainty continued to shape decision-making across the board.

At the same time, the demand for clear, credible, and timely information has never been higher. That reality has reinforced why we built CRE Daily in the first place — to cut through noise, provide context, and help professionals and investors make better decisions to do more business.

A year of building

2025 was a year of intentional progress.

Our newsletter community grew to more than 80,000 readers, entirely through organic referrals and word of mouth. Engagement reached an all-time high, with open rates approaching 70%, reinforcing what we’ve long believed — when content is relevant, timely, and trustworthy, people show up.

We also made a deliberate shift in how we approach access. Over the past year, we reduced gated content by more than 20%, making more of our daily coverage freely available on credaily.com. Today, readers can expect up to 10 news stories per day, with plans to expand that to 50% of total coverage in 2026 as we continue investing in our newsroom and editorial infrastructure.

Beyond daily news, we expanded our product reviews and buyer’s guides to cover dozens of leading tools and platforms across commercial real estate. These guides are designed to help professionals discover and evaluate modern technology solutions as alternatives to legacy systems.

We also launched several major platform initiatives:

• The CRE Events Calendar — now the largest and highest-ranking searchable calendar for commercial real estate events on the internet.

• Market Reports, a centralized hub for brokerage research and market intelligence, bringing previously fragmented reports into a single, accessible destination.

• And most recently, a fully interactive version of our Fear & Greed Index, developed in partnership with John Burns Research & Consulting.

On the podcast side, No Cap continues to grow, surpassing 60,000 downloads across four seasons. Huge credit goes to Jack Stone and Alex Gornik, who have helped shape the show into what it is today — thoughtful, honest conversations with some of the most interesting voices in commercial real estate, from Tom Kennedy and MaryAnne Gilmartin to Rich Hill, Tommy Lee, and many others.

We even took No Cap on the road this year, hosting live interviews at Strip Mall Guy gala in New York. In case you missed it, you can catch the recap here.

This year also marked the launch of our first in-person event, Night Cap Dallas, bringing more than 300 members of the CRE Daily community together for an evening of thoughtful conversation and connection.

The evening featured a live panel co-hosted by Jack and Alex from No Cap with Lucy Billingsley, carrying forward the Crow family legacy through transformative, community-shaping developments, and Mike Ablon, an urbanist and developer helping define the next era of growth in Dallas.

And yes — we also had a llama named Whiskey, which somehow felt perfectly on brand for the night.

Behind the scenes, 2025 was also a meaningful year for the business itself. We crossed the seven-figure revenue mark for the first time, expanded our full-time team, and continued to diversify how CRE Daily operates.

In addition to newsletter advertising, we expanded our product offerings to include custom content, whitepapers, webinars, and brand studio partnerships, allowing us to build stronger long-term relationships with companies across the industry.

That growth has given us the ability to invest more deeply in our newsletters, our digital products, and the event community we’re building.

What’s next for CRE Daily

Looking ahead, 2026 is shaping up to be our biggest year yet.

After several years focused on building our national newsletter, we’re expanding our coverage with the launch of CRE Daily Texas and CRE Daily New York.

These new editions will deliver market-specific reporting, deal coverage, and local insight from two of the most active commercial real estate markets in the country. Each will begin as a weekly send, with plans to grow in frequency over time, while maintaining the same editorial format readers expect from CRE Daily.

Readers based in Texas and New York will automatically begin receiving the new newsletters starting in January. If you’d like to subscribe or add yourself to either list, you can sign up here for CRE Daily Texas and CRE Daily New York.

Throughout the year, we plan to continue expanding our regional coverage, adding new market-specific newsletters to deepen our reporting and better serve local CRE communities across the country.

That same focus on community and connection extends beyond the inbox.

Following the success of Night Cap, we’re expanding our live events footprint — returning to Dallas for a larger, full-day experience and hosting smaller, more intimate gatherings in cities like Miami, Charlotte, and New York. Together, these events will create more opportunities for meaningful conversations, in-person connection, and shared perspective across the CRE community.

As we continue to build out the platform, we’re also expanding the ways we support professionals beyond content and events.

We’re also preparing to launch two new initiatives in the months ahead: a high-touch executive search offering focused on senior real estate talent, and a new AI collective designed to help teams streamline workflows, improve decision-making, and operate more efficiently.

More details to come, but both efforts reflect where we see the industry heading and how we plan to support it.

Thank you for reading

As always, none of this would be possible without the support of our readers, partners, and broader CRE community. Your engagement, feedback, and trust continue to shape what we build and how we grow.

If you have ideas, suggestions, or thoughts on how we can continue to improve, I’d genuinely love to hear from you.

And if you’re looking to do more with your marketing, content, or brand presence in the year ahead, we’re always happy to explore ways to work together. Referrals are equally appreciated — they go a long way and never go unnoticed.

Thank you for being part of the CRE Daily community. We’re excited for what’s ahead. Let’s keep building!

—Jordan
Co-founder / CEO of CRE Daily