Real estate investors at the INREV Annual Conference 2026 were challenged to consider whether they are being reactive or proactive, with a clear call to prioritise rigorous stress testing over aggressive return targets.
José Pellicer, founding partner at Evonite, opened his session with a stark warning that the real estate industry may be “preparing for the last war” rather than the next. In his presentation, From geopolitics to ground level: translating Europe’s shifts into real estate value, Pellicer alluded to a century of military history, arguing that just as the French army relied on static defensive lines in 1940 only to be overwhelmed by mobile tanks, real estate investors are currently over-reliant on “first-level thinking”.
Pellicer identified “Globalisation 2.0” as a departing era of moderate political parties and predictable economics, arguing that this period of calm has been replaced by the emergence of “Realpolitik Reloaded.”
He described the period of “Globalisation 2.0” as an era characterised by international institutions and a monetary system based on the US dollar, which provided general economic and political stability. “That world, unfortunately, is changing,” he said.
In the new “Realpolitik Reloaded” environment, the industry is moving away from moderation toward political extremes and shifting from neoliberal freedom toward state capitalism.
The strategy for the “last war” relied on leveraging predictable mega-trends, such as e-commerce driving logistics or decarbonisation dictating office selection. However, “deep conviction” strategies and rigid forecasting are ill-suited for a world where the whims of a single president can invalidate a decade of underwriting.
“I would say bye-bye, for the moment, to deep conviction, because we just don’t know,” he said. “How can we forecast the world if it’s not just the macroeconomy? It’s just the whims of a president that decides that single-family housing in the US cannot be owned by institutional investors.”
Instead, Pellicer calls for a move toward defence rather than offence, urging investors to prioritise a “margin of safety” in the price to compensate for whatever might go wrong. He argued that the answer to today’s volatility is not simply going “risk-off,” as he noted that prime assets often saw the sharpest valuation falls, but rather practising humility.
“How can we underwrite so that we are protected for what can go wrong?” he asked. For Pellicer, the strategy for the “next war” requires a focus on stress testing to ensure investors are protected.
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