I have spent the last decade at MetaProp watching capital flow into and out of every corner of the built world. Retail is the corner that gets written off most often and reinvents itself most aggressively. Right now it is doing both at once.

A few weeks ago I was at NRF in New York and the floor felt different than it has in years. Less performative AI demo, more actual deployment. Less "the death of brick and mortar," more landlords and tenants quietly rebuilding what a store is for. The smartest operators in the room were treating 2026 as the year retail technology stops being a panel topic and starts showing up in the rent roll.

Here are the three trends I think every PropTech investor, retail landlord, and venture investor should be paying attention to right now. For each one I will name the technology companies pushing the frontier, the real estate owners with skin in the game, and the venture capital firms underwriting it all.

1. Agentic Commerce: Your Next Customer Is Not a Human

If you are an e-commerce brand, the most consequential shift of 2026 is that your "visitor" might not be a person. It is an AI agent shopping on behalf of a person, and it has very different requirements than a human shopper.

This is no longer theoretical. ChatGPT's Instant Checkout went live in late 2025 with Etsy, Shopify, Walmart, Target, Sephora, and Best Buy. Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol at NRF 2026 with a coalition that includes Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Walmart, Wayfair, and Macy's. Perplexity went free for all US shoppers via PayPal and connected over 5,000 merchants. Amazon sued Perplexity in November 2025 to keep agents off its site. McKinsey projects agentic commerce will orchestrate $3 to $5 trillion in global retail spend by 2030.

Why does this matter for real estate? Because agentic commerce reshuffles which physical store formats actually win. If an AI agent is doing the discovery, the search bar, the comparison, and the checkout, then the physical store stops competing on convenience and starts competing on something agents cannot replicate: brand experience, immediate fulfillment, returns, and human curation. Boring middle-market retail gets disintermediated. Premium experience retail and ultra-fast fulfillment retail get more valuable.

Technology companies to watch:

Venture capital trends: Madrona led Nekuda's seed with Amex Ventures and Visa Ventures participating. Stripe's protocol partners read like a who's who of the payments venture stack. The interesting white space, in my view, is in trust and verification infrastructure: the systems that prevent fraud and prove identity when no human is in the loop. That layer is underfunded relative to its importance, and I expect to see meaningful seed and Series A activity there in the back half of 2026.

2. The Mall Is Not Dead. The Old Mall Is.

Walk through Smith Haven Mall on Long Island today and you will find Golf Lounge 18, an indoor golf simulator with 200 courses. Walk through Roosevelt Field and you will see Simon's multi-brand platform for emerging labels. Simon announced in early 2026 that it will invest $250 million into modernizing properties in Nashville, Denver, and Tampa. Brookfield is doing similar work across its 170-plus US shopping centers.

What is happening here is a fundamental rewrite of what a regional mall is. The luxury anchor and the experiential anchor are replacing the department store. The food hall is replacing the food court. The pickleball facility, the indoor go-kart track, the boutique fitness studio, the wellness spa, the medical clinic, and yes, the residential tower attached to the mall, are all becoming part of the merchandising mix. Even the vacant Anchor Box stores, which used to be balance-sheet liabilities, are turning into community assets like libraries, pickleball clubs, and last-mile distribution.

The retail real estate executives I respect most have stopped underwriting these properties as "shopping centers" entirely. They are underwriting them as town squares with lease income.

Technology companies enabling this shift:

Real estate investor trends: Simon Property Group and Brookfield Properties are not just landlords here. They are tenants of their own properties, which is a fascinating structural play. Both have used balance-sheet capital to acquire bankrupt brands like Forever 21, Express, and Bonobos through partnerships with Authentic Brands Group and WHP Global, then placed those tenants back into their own centers. Tanger, Macerich, Kimco, Edens, Jamestown, and Westfield are running variations of the same playbook.

The brokerage layer is where this gets interesting. None of this experiential reinvention works if the leasing process is still being run on relationships and gut instinct. The retailers Simon and Brookfield want in their centers are franchise systems, digital-native brands, boutique fitness, premium F&B, and wellness operators, and almost none of them have a traditional national real estate department. They need a brokerage layer built on data.

This is exactly the gap our MetaProp portfolio company Locate AI was built to fill. Locate is the first tech-enabled retail brokerage in the industry. The platform combines AI-driven site selection with broker expertise, then offers the data and analytics to retailers at no cost because Locate captures the brokerage commission on the transaction itself. Clients like Parachute, Allbirds, Barry's Bootcamp, and MassageLuXe use Locate to find sites and sign leases.

The thesis behind backing Locate was simple. Site selection is one of the most consequential decisions a retailer makes, and it has historically been done with the worst data of any decision in the company. AI changes that calculus, but only if it is paired with a real-world brokerage workflow that can actually get a deal closed. Locate is one of the cleanest examples I have seen of a software-plus-services model in PropTech, and it is exactly the kind of brokerage layer the experiential retail revolution needs underneath it.

Venture capital trends: Fifth Wall, Camber Creek, Moderne Ventures, Brick & Mortar Ventures, JLL Spark, RET Ventures, Tishman Speyer Ventures, Zigg Capital, and Second Century Ventures are the names you see most often on the cap tables of the technology companies serving these landlords. CRETI reported $16.7 billion in proptech funding in 2025, a 67.9% jump over 2024, and retail-adjacent technology has been a meaningful share of that.

3. The Back of the Store Is the New Front of the Store

The third trend is the one most landlords still underestimate. It is not happening on the showroom floor. It is happening in the storeroom, the loading dock, the basement, and the abandoned anchor box.

Micro-fulfillment centers, dark stores, and ghost kitchens have been quietly absorbing retail real estate at the rate of millions of square feet a year. Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons, H-E-B, Carrefour, and Ahold Delhaize have all built MFCs into their store footprints. The micro-fulfillment market is projected to reach roughly $36 billion by 2030, with most of the growth coming from grocery. Quick commerce is expanding at a 70 to 80 percent CAGR in markets like India and accelerating in dense US metros.

The implication for retail real estate is enormous. A 100,000 square foot store can now do double duty as a 70,000 square foot retail floor and a 30,000 square foot automated fulfillment hub. A vacant mall anchor that nobody wanted at $20 a foot triple-net suddenly has a tenant willing to pay above-market rent for last-mile logistics use. A failing power center in a dense urban submarket becomes a strategic asset for any retailer trying to compete on same-day delivery.

This is also where retail real estate intersects with industrial real estate in ways that did not exist five years ago. The cap rate compression we have seen in industrial is starting to bleed into retail submarkets that have logistics optionality.

Technology companies to watch:

Real estate investor trends: Prologis is the obvious giant here, but the more interesting story is the secondary developers. Rockefeller Group, Link Logistics, Realterm, and EQT Exeter are aggressively underwriting last-mile logistics conversions. Brookfield has been particularly active using its retail portfolio as a pipeline of logistics conversion opportunities, which I think is an underappreciated value driver in their real estate book.

Venture capital trends: Construct Capital, Eclipse Ventures, 8VC, Forerunner, Tiger Global (in its more measured 2026 form), Khosla Ventures, and the strategic logistics funds at FedEx and DHL have all been active. On the proptech-specific side, Fifth Wall, Camber Creek, MetaProp, RET Ventures, Brick & Mortar Ventures, and Building Ventures have all touched this category. The clearest signal that this is no longer a fringe thesis is that traditional industrial real estate REITs are now writing venture checks directly into the technology companies serving them.

Putting It Together

Read those three trends back to back and a pattern emerges. Retail in 2026 is bifurcating along a clean line. On one side is everything that benefits from being agentic, automated, and invisible to the consumer. On the other is everything that benefits from being human, sensory, and irreplaceable in person.

The middle is dying, again. Standard mid-market apparel, generic food court chains, and undifferentiated category-killer big-boxes are all under pressure. The winners are at both ends: the agentic infrastructure that makes shopping happen without a human, and the experiential physical real estate that makes humans want to show up in person anyway.

If you are a retail landlord, your job in 2026 is to figure out which side of that line your assets sit on, and to invest accordingly. If you are a venture investor, the opportunity set has never been broader, but it has also never demanded more discipline about which layer of the stack you are actually backing. If you are a founder building in any of these three areas, my DMs are open.