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 (2−3 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.