2025 Global Outlook – Niche Sectors

Niche sec­tors like stu­dent hous­ing, senior liv­ing, life sci­ences, self-stor­age, and cold storage—each deriv­a­tive of tra­di­tion­al core prop­er­ty sectors—present attrac­tive invest­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties due to their unique demand dri­vers and growth poten­tial. How­ev­er, these sec­tors are rel­a­tive­ly small com­pared to tra­di­tion­al, well-estab­lished sec­tors like indus­tri­al, retail, and office. In addi­tion, they are more opaque from a research per­spec­tive with lim­it­ed data and few­er, if any, cycles to ana­lyze his­tor­i­cal pat­terns.

One of the hottest niche sec­tors at the moment is data cen­ters. The explo­sion in AI over the last sev­er­al years has added juice to a demand curve that was already on an expo­nen­tial trend. With pow­er avail­abil­i­ty cur­rent­ly act­ing as a nat­ur­al near-term (23 years at least) sup­ply bar­ri­er, it’s easy to under­stand why heady com­pe­ti­tion for megawatts, par­tic­u­lar­ly among the hyper­scalers (cloud com­put­ing providers that oper­ate large-scale data cen­ters), has dri­ven sig­nif­i­cant rent growth with­in the data cen­ter space.

There are many ways to par­tic­i­pate in this wave, but Hines believes one of the high­est risk-adjust­ed oppor­tu­ni­ties is to source land, enti­tle it, work with local util­i­ties to receive pow­er com­mit­ments and then sell that land on to a hyper­scaler or data cen­ter developer.