Uncertain markets don’t slow transactions. Instead, they create them. The owners who have to make a decision will. The question is which broker they call. That’s the through line of the eXp Commercial 2026 Commercial Real Estate Virtual Summit, where John LeTourneau, Director of Commercial Operations, and Tim Rios, California designated managing broker, spent 90 minutes breaking down what the current cycle actually means for working brokers and what to do about it.

The session covered four interconnected themes, including capital markets and debt maturity opportunity, Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) compliance in the new prospecting environment, the hybrid broker and AI toolkit, and property sector outlook. What follows is a practitioner-level recap of the key insights.

Capital Markets in 2026: The Debt Wall Is a Lead List

The “debt wall” narrative has been circulating long enough to have lost its urgency for most brokers. That may be a mistake, but not for the reason the pessimists think.

“You never get punished for being negative,” Rios observed. “If you’re negative and something good happens, everybody breathes a sigh of relief. But if you say something positive and it doesn’t happen, you’re a villain forever.” The result is a market where the dominant media posture is almost structurally bearish, regardless of underlying conditions.

The underlying conditions in 2026 are mixed, but overwhelmingly opportunity-oriented for brokers who are paying attention. Yes, there is significant CMBS debt maturing. Yes, there are assets that were bought at peak pricing with minimal rent growth and negligible debt coverage. But lenders today are fundamentally different actors than they were in 2008.

“Banks do not want troubled assets on their books,” LeTourneau said. “Banks are much more willing to work with borrowers.” This results in a wave of capital decision-making. Owners who bought on floating-rate debt, or whose five- and seven-year commercial notes are coming due, have to do something. Refinance, sell or recapitalize. They can no longer defer.

That decision-forcing dynamic is the opportunity. “You can be a great prospector and get on the phone and the person on the other end can love you like a son or a daughter, but if they’re not facing any kind of decision or any transaction needs, it doesn’t matter,” said Rios. Now, market forces are creating those needs at scale.

The single most important positioning move a broker can make is to be in a client’s ear a year before they need to transact — not 30 days before the note matures. “A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part” is the right framing to avoid, but it’s also a reminder that the broker who shows up early is the broker who gets the assignment.

Finding the Debt: Two CoStar Techniques Most Brokers Ignore

The summit offered two specific, actionable methods for identifying owners facing imminent debt decisions using CoStar’s Loan tab, which was described as “the most underused tab in CoStar.”

Method 1 — Loan Maturity Search: Go into CoStar, select your property type (multifamily as the example used, filtered to five or more units to target commercial debt rather than 30-year fixed residential instruments), navigate to the Loan tab, filter to properties that have a loan, and click the maturity expiring within the next year filter. The result in a single metro was 326 properties with imminent debt decisions to make.

Method 2 — Loan Origination Search: Because CoStar doesn’t always capture maturity dates, repeat the search using origination date instead, dating it three to five years back to capture five- and seven-year term debt. Same metro, same parameters gave 2,397 properties. Combined with the first search, that’s approaching 3,000 owners in a single market with a documented reason to have a conversation.

“We always talk about a sustainable database being about 500 owners,” LeTourneau noted. “Well, I’ve got 2,400 people here just with debt concerns.”

The Equity Statement: A Twice-Annual Touch That Generates Listings

One of the most concrete takeaways from the summit is the equity statement — a personalized outreach piece sent to every closed client, on both sides of the transaction, every June and December.

The format is simple: pull the property’s original purchase price, original NOI, debt structure, and current estimated market value. Calculate appreciation and principal paydown. Surface the equity position, which is often dramatically higher than the owner realizes.

“People don’t care what their property is worth nearly as much as knowing, ‘But how much do I have sitting there, and what’s it doing for me?’” explained LeTourneau. 

The equity statement serves multiple purposes at once. It reinforces the broker-advisor relationship with owners who have gone quiet. It raises the return-on-equity conversation and reframes a held asset from “stable investment” to “underdeployed capital.” And, it creates conditions for the listing conversation before the owner has decided to sell, which is the exact positioning that allows for a proactive rather than reactive assignment.

The broader point is a direct challenge to how most commercial brokers manage client relationships. A 401(k) investor gets monthly statements and twice-annual advisor calls. The most valuable asset most of your clients own is a commercial property, and it typically gets silence until the owner reaches out. Equity statements close that gap.

The return-on-equity argument embedded in that statement is worth spelling out explicitly to clients: an eight-cap purchased 20 years ago, after appreciation and cap rate compression, may represent a 2% actual return on current equity. Reinvesting that equity into a larger asset at today’s market cap rates with leverage often produces dramatically better outcomes, even if the nominal cap rate looks lower than what the client believes they “only” buy.

TCPA 2.0: The Prospecting Compliance Shift Every Broker Must Understand

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act has been tightened significantly, and the 2026 enforcement environment has real teeth. Fines run $500 to $1,500 per violation, with escalation for egregious patterns. A large national brokerage recently settled for over $40 million.

“Is it the end of cold calling as we know it? Well, kind of,” Rios acknowledged. “But that doesn’t mean that prospecting is going away.”

What has changed in 2026:

• Auto-dialers and parallel dialers are now classified as robocalls under the revised TCPA framework, regardless of whether a human is eventually connected.
• AI voicemail clones and automated voice drops, a technology that was being actively promoted as recently as six months ago, have been shut down by legislators as “no human in the loop” robocalls.
• Pre-purchased “scrubbed” lists provide no liability protection. The fines fall on the calling broker, not the list vendor.
• Documentation of consent is now the only safe harbor. If a contact opts in with a “Yes, send me market reports, you can call me,” that consent must be timestamped and stored in a CRM with a defensible record.

eXp Commercial advisors have access to DialSafe, which allows import of a full contact list and scrubs it against Do Not Call registrations in seconds, producing a clean output file. That’s the mandatory first step before any outbound prospecting call.

The constructive framing from the summit: TCPA 2.0 is an enforced database hygiene mandate. Brokers who have been building and maintaining a clean, consent-based database of engaged contacts will have a durable, defensible prospecting engine. Brokers who have been operating on bulk lists and hope will be facing increasing legal exposure. The constraint creates a structural advantage for disciplined operators.

“Human in the loop” is now the TCPA buzzphrase, and that’s a good thing for experienced brokers. The work cannot be automated away. What replaces volume dialing is consistent, relationship-based outreach built on a quality database, in-person site visits, and opt-in marketing channels.

In-Person Prospecting Is Undervalued (And Getting More So)

In a market being pushed toward compliance-limited phone outreach, physical presence in the market is a growing competitive differentiator.

Door-knocking and tenant conversations remain highly effective in industrial, retail, and multifamily. The exception is true Class A office, where building security generally restricts access. Everywhere else, walking a market, visiting tenants, and talking to business owners in strip centers produces information that no data provider can replicate, such as lease status, owner intent, property conditions and local business health.

The summit offered a pointed anecdote: a broker visiting a multifamily property was told by a tenant that the property flooded every year due to a neighborhood drainage issue that was structural and unsolvable. That information wasn’t in the marketing package. It wasn’t on CoStar. It was available exclusively to the broker who showed up.

“Being open and notorious — not pretending you were just walking your dog by the property” according to Rios — is the posture. Let people know who you are and what you’re doing. Some conversations won’t go anywhere. Others produce information, relationships, and eventually transactions.

AI and the Hybrid Broker: What Actually Makes You Money

The summit addressed AI without the hype.

The core reframe was that AI will not replace commercial brokers. But brokers who effectively leverage AI will replace those who don’t. That distinction reorients the question from “should I use AI?” to “what am I currently spending time on that AI can handle, so I can do more of what actually generates revenue?”

The five things that actually make a commercial broker money, according to the session, are: prospecting, face-to-face (or virtual) client meetings, reviewing and approving all outgoing materials, solving problems when deals encounter obstacles, and maintaining client relationships for life. Everything else is a candidate for leverage — team members, systems, or AI.

Practical AI applications highlighted:

• Interest generator scripting: Describe your target property type, geography, and prospect profile to an AI platform, and ask it to generate conversation starters for outreach. This directly addresses call reluctance because the most common bottleneck in prospecting isn’t skill, it’s not knowing what to say.
• Voice-to-CRM tools: Tools like Whisperflow allow brokers to dictate notes into any text field on their computer using voice, removing the friction of manual CRM entry after calls and site visits.
• Workflow automation: Tools like Zapier can connect existing systems, like CRMs, team dashboards and calendars to automate data flows that currently require manual weekly inputs.
• Predictive prospecting tools: Platforms including Reonomy and Prospect integrate AI-based signals for ownership behavior. The session was clear-eyed about their limitations (“imperfect, just like data in CoStar”) while affirming their value as conversation-starting tools for brokers who struggle to identify a relevant reason to call.

On AI model selection, the session’s view was that the differences between leading models are less important than the act of actually using one. “Pick a premium version and commit to teaching it your voice, your market, and your style.” The returns come from sustained use, not platform shopping.

Sector Outlook: Where to Focus in 2026

Industrial: Still strong, with important internal bifurcation. Data centers have emerged as their own segment, requiring floor loads, power, water, and air specifications that are categorically different from standard warehouse products. Brokers without the balance sheet to play in data centers directly should understand the market and focus on the ancillary spillover activity those developments generate. Traditional industrial remains solid, with some space overhang in markets where tenants signed longer-than-needed leases post-pandemic.

Multifamily: The session was bullish. Multiple drivers converge: younger workforce cohorts who saw parents lose homes in 2008, gig-economy mobility preferences that make 30-year mortgage commitments misaligned with career patterns, a housing affordability crisis that keeps renters renting longer, and recent legislation affecting institutional build-to-rent operators that may redirect large capital toward apartment construction rather than single-family rentals. B and C vintage assets were called out specifically as having a structural protective moat — you can’t build them at current land and entitlement costs, which means existing stock faces limited competitive pressure from new supply. Rust Belt and traditional markets were highlighted for climate resilience and water availability, factors increasingly constraining development in Sun Belt markets.

Office: Bifurcated, with significant market divergence. Class A office in strong growth markets, like Raleigh and parts of Texas and Florida, continues to lease. Downtown towers in major legacy markets face a different reality with some ultimately headed for demolition. Suburban Class C scattered product has minimal conversion potential to residential given floor plate constraints. The “flight to quality” trend is real. Tenants are not necessarily cutting real estate spend, but are right-sizing to exceptional space for a smaller daily occupancy footprint rather than holding excess square footage. One near-term counter-narrative is emerging research that suggests employees and employers are increasingly recognizing the costs of remote-only work, which may slow the contraction.

Retail: Neighborhood strip retail — specifically the 10,000-square-foot, multi-tenant center with hair, nails, food, insurance, and service tenants — is described as “on fire.” These assets deliver the diversified income stream of multifamily without property management intensity, and they’re resistant to e-commerce because their tenants serve fundamentally in-person needs. Larger format and regional retail is more nuanced. Power centers and grocery-anchored product remain stable; enclosed malls continue to face structural challenges.

The 2026 Action Plan: Where to Start

With four major strategic levers on the table, the session was explicit about sequencing.

First: TCPA compliance. Protect what you’ve built. Audit your database. Implement DialSafe. Document your opt-ins. This is not optional. It’s an immediate operational requirement.

Second: Pick one AI or workflow tool and habituate it. “If you come up with 12 strategic directions right now, you will not do any of them.” Identify the single biggest bottleneck in your business and solve it with one tool.

Third: Activate the equity statement for your existing database. This is the lowest-friction prospecting move available to any broker with a list of past clients, and it generates conversations, referrals, and listings from relationships you’ve already earned.

Fourth: Reframe the market for your clients. The debt maturity cycle is creating decision-makers who need to hear from a trusted advisor. The broker who shows up with an equity analysis, a debt scenario model, and a prospecting posture of “I can help everyone I talk to one way or another” is the one who captures that opportunity.

The next session will pick up right where this one left off. LeTourneau and Rios are taking it live to eXpCOMMCON, only at eXpcon Salt Lake City, on October 7. Join us there.

This article is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute investment, legal, tax, or financial advice, nor a solicitation to buy or sell any security or real estate interest. Readers should consult their own professional advisors before making any investment or business decisions. The views expressed reflect individual market perspectives and do not represent investment recommendations or company forecasts. Certain statements may be forward-looking in nature and are based on current expectations, which are subject to change due to economic and market conditions.