2025 Reflection

Greetings Friends,

As many of you know, the period around the Christmas holidays has become a meaningful time for me to pause, slow down, and reflect. While spending time with my family, I naturally look back on the year that has passed, what it taught me, what it challenged in me, and how it reshaped my priorities - while also sharing a few thoughts about the road ahead.

Personal & Professional Milestones:

One of my most intentional commitments this year has been to my personal well-being. Amid a demanding professional life, I made a conscious decision to dedicate at least 15–20 minutes each day for breathing, stretching, and light exercise - no matter how busy the day might be. Whether early in the morning or late in the evening before sleep, this small but consistent discipline has had an outsized impact on my clarity, energy, and resilience. I genuinely encourage anyone operating at a high level to treat personal wellness not as a luxury, but as a foundation for sustainable performance.

At the same time, I find myself increasingly concerned about broader societal shifts. Modern societies seem to be losing consensus on fundamental notions of right and wrong, replacing shared moral principles with extreme self-interest, money, power, and status, while media, politics, and culture often glorify destructive behavior. This erosion of moral clarity leaves younger generations without strong role models and risks normalizing selfishness, division, and cynicism. These observations have further reinforced my belief that values, character, and responsibility matter more than ever, both in life and in leadership.

On a far more personal and joyful note, I remain deeply grateful for my life partner – my lovely, amazing wife – whose passion, dedication, and love shape every minute of mine and our daughter’s life. She is tirelessly involved in our daughter’s growth, ensuring she reaches milestones both physically and mentally. Between gymnastics, swimming, music in Greenwich and language classes and Rudolf Steiner School, in Upper East side NYC. Their daily schedules are full, energetic, and inspiring to witness. Our daughter is growing faster than we can believe. She is intelligent, determined, curious, and she fills our lives with laughter, purpose, and perspective. I feel incredibly blessed and, without question, the luckiest father in the world.

Professionally, this year brought both progress and powerful lessons. The data center development business I founded presented significant challenges in 2025, offering valuable insights that deserve reflection. Among the most important lessons learned were the critical importance of securing power early, deeply understanding all stakeholders involved, federal & state regulations and perhaps most importantly, choosing the right partners. Trust is essential in any venture, but trust must be supported by alignment, diligence, and clarity. These lessons, while hard-earned, have meaningfully strengthened my judgment as a founder, entrepreneur and operator.

PAN Partners continued its positive growth trajectory this year. We secured several strong assignments locally across New York and New Jersey, as well as internationally in the Middle East, primarily providing consulting management, PM-oversight and owner’s representation services. In parallel, our construction law and dispute advisory platform, PConstLaw, expanded its footprint, supporting clients with construction law matters, arbitration, claims consulting, and cost management services. The growing trust from our clients reinforces the value of precision, experience, and credibility.

I am excited to share the launch of a new and very personal venture this year: a private equity and investment platform - It’s called “Sekeeh Capital” - investment management and advisory firm. Currently self-funded, it focuses on three core areas, real estate, public markets, and investment management. In its initial phase, the emphasis has been solely on market investments, including S&P500, REITs, Index and ETFs. The Fund will have a strong bias toward equities but may in future take positions in fixed income securities as well. Investments of the Fund will be primarily publicly traded stocks, options, and ETFs. This initiative reflects my long-standing passion for finance and investing, shaped by both experience and education. Looking ahead, I plan to grow this platform thoughtfully and, in time, open select opportunities to friends and family as we expand its scope and reach. 

Tariffs and Their Impact on Construction & Development: 

Tariffs and trade restrictions are increasingly reshaping the global construction landscape. Rising material costs, extended lead times, and heightened policy uncertainty are placing additional pressure on developers, investors, contractors, and end users alike. Even the most carefully underwritten projects are now more vulnerable to disruption from forces outside traditional market fundamentals.

The key question is no longer whether tariffs are impacting construction activity, but to what extent. The evidence is clear: tariffs are already affecting development pipelines. Construction activity was softening even before the latest trade pressures, largely due to supply–demand imbalances, elevated interest rates, and tighter credit conditions. By the second quarter of 2025, these trends have intensified. Office construction pipelines have declined approximately 60% relative to the five-year average. Multifamily groundbreakings are at their weakest point since 2012, while retail construction, already subdued for years, remains constrained. Additional cost pressures from tariffs risk further dampening new starts unless trade policy shifts meaningfully under the current administration, particularly for key construction materials and trading partners.

Equally important is the role of uncertainty itself. Trade policy volatility often proves just as disruptive as tariffs in practice. When policy direction remains unclear, pricing becomes more volatile, cost forecasting becomes less reliable, and underwriting assumptions weaken. This uncertainty alone can delay investment decisions, slow capital deployment, and stall projects, even before actual cost increases are fully realized. Greater clarity and predictability will be essential for market participants to confidently move forward.

Another critical consideration is how tariff-related cost increases are absorbed across the construction supply chain. While the limited historical use of broad tariffs makes precise attribution difficult, economic research suggests that approximately 75% of tariff-related costs are ultimately passed through to downstream users.

Tariffs are paid by importers at the point of entry into the United States, but their impact cascades through the entire construction ecosystem. Importers may attempt to renegotiate pricing with overseas suppliers, source alternative domestic or foreign materials, or absorb a portion of the costs internally, reducing margins in the process. However, as demand shifts toward alternative suppliers, price pressures often follow, eroding any initial cost advantage. In practice, the burden is typically shared across suppliers, importers, contractors, developers, and ultimately tenants or end users.

Taken together, tariffs represent not just a cost issue, but a structural risk factor, one that complicates planning, raises execution risk, and reinforces the need for disciplined underwriting, contingency planning, and adaptive sourcing strategies in today’s construction and real estate markets.

Economics, Investment, and Long-Term Perspective:

Traditional economic indicators, including money supply, are no longer reliable guides for investors or policymakers. Understanding today’s economy requires deeper, more nuanced analysis rather than oversimplified narratives. 

As Einstein wisely noted: “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

Complicating the inflation outlook, most economists now anticipate another year of relatively healthy global GDP growth, potentially exceeding that of the past two years. Inflation remains persistent across much of the developed world, yet the prevailing expectation is for a gradual easing of interest rates over time. Any such shift would be particularly meaningful for real estate markets. Elevated borrowing costs and sharply higher fixed-income yields have contributed to nearly a 60% decline in global property investment volumes since the 2021 peak. Encouragingly, recent data suggests the pace of decline is slowing, with investment volumes in the second half of last year increasing year over year. Private capital, in particular, remains highly engaged, with approximately 45% of global family offices indicating plans to increase their real estate allocations.

While much of the global investment narrative remains focused on North America and Asia, I believe Africa is positioned to outperform in future wealth creation, if not in absolute size, then certainly in growth. A rapidly expanding young population, abundant natural resources, improving infrastructure, and increasing foreign investment provide strong foundations. The rise of an emerging middle class is also unlocking meaningful opportunities across manufacturing, services, and entrepreneurship.

History offers important lessons. China and South Korea surged ahead while Japan stalled not because of superior technology alone, but due to a greater willingness to invest in people, embrace global learning, and reform internal systems to support innovation. Japan remains a world-class technology nation, but future leadership will require treating innovation not merely as R&D, but as a cultural and structural commitment, one that empowers younger generations and modernizes governance.

Over the past 25 years, the information technology sector’s share of GDP has more than tripled, yet it still represents only about 8% of total output, suggesting we remain in the early stages of this transformation.

AI adoption, in particular, is still in its infancy. While early adopters have demonstrated its potential, over 25% of new code at Google is now generated by AI, with measurable productivity gains, broader integration across industries has only just begun. Today, an estimated 1–5% of work hours are assisted by AI, a figure that is poised to rise rapidly as models become more capable, reliable, and embedded into everyday processes.

The implications are significant. AI-driven growth across enterprise systems, scientific research, healthcare, manufacturing, and robotics will require orders of magnitude more computing power than we use today. As we are seeing firsthand in our business, delivering this capacity is becoming increasingly challenging. Power availability has emerged as a critical bottleneck. After decades of flat electricity demand, the United States is now experiencing a surge driven by data centers, electric vehicles, electrification of buildings, and reshoring of manufacturing. Grid infrastructure has struggled to keep pace, with connection wait times extending to 7–10 years in key data center markets. Beyond power, developers face ongoing supply-chain constraints, labor shortages, regulatory hurdles, and rising capital requirements, often reaching into the billions for large-scale campuses.

For investors, the priority must be to look beyond short-term volatility and focus on long-term fundamentals. At the same time, it is essential to ask whether today’s valuations are implicitly pricing in a future of uninterrupted, near-perfect execution in an industry that is still evolving.

Finally, it is worth recognizing that many of today’s global challenges: polarization, violence, and institutional distrust, are not purely economic in nature. They reflect deeper moral fragmentation. Across regions, ethical frameworks have struggled to keep pace with rapid change: Power often presents itself as morality, modernization outpaces cultural adaptation, shared values weaken, and extreme individualism erodes collective responsibility.

Ultimately, humanity’s long-term prosperity will depend not only on innovation or capital, but on how we treat one another, and the values we choose to uphold as we shape the future.

As we step into the new year, I hope it unfolds with endless possibilities, growth, and fulfillment for all. Here's to the journey ahead, full of promise and purpose - Happy New Year!

With gratitude and best wishes, Peyman Askari N.

This letter of reflection expresses the views of the author as of the date indicated and such views are subject to change without notice. PAN Partners has no duty or obligation to update the information contained herein. This letter is being made available for informational purposes only and should not be used for any other purpose.

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© 2025 PAN Partners,