2026 Fall Preview: Kayla Nassar, AMCON

What trends or changes are having the greatest impact on your sector of commercial real estate this fall, and how are they shaping your business?

What would your team do with the hours spent chasing leads, answering email, updating systems, creating content, and keeping up with what’s next? At AMCON, we’re finding out. We are investing in an AI business brain that connects every department, led by a pilot team testing what’s possible. Less redundancy. Less busy work. More capacity for what our partners value most: responsiveness, strategic thinking, and innovation. We love talking about it. Ask us what we’re discovering.

Where do you see the greatest opportunities in your market or area of expertise as we approach the end of 2026 and look ahead to 2027?

Where is New England’s next wave of building coming from? Look at the planning board agendas. Massachusetts’ new multifamily zoning has pushed more than 100 projects and nearly 7,000 homes into the permitting pipeline, most of them beyond walking distance of a station. Owners are pairing housing with ground floor retail and reusing buildings they already have. These projects are cost sensitive and fast moving, which is exactly the work AMCON is built for.

What are the biggest challenges your clients are facing in today’s market, and how is your firm helping them navigate those challenges?

High interest rates are squeezing every pro forma, and that pressure lands on construction cost. Design bid build can’t solve that. By the time a contractor sees the drawings, the best savings are gone. The answer is to bring the builder in early to work alongside design and engineering, testing every option: specifications, constructability, value engineering. When the right partners lock arms from day one, projects that didn’t pencil can get built.

What advice would you offer clients, colleagues or fellow industry professionals as they plan for the coming months?

Start. AI feels intimidating until you use it, and then it becomes a tool like any other. The change is coming to construction whether we’re ready or not. The only question is when. The firms that start learning now will set the pace. Pick one process, one team, one problem, and begin. The hardest part is the first step. Everything after that gets easier.