From all-electric skyscrapers to floating offices and carbon-neutral urban development, these firms are redefining the future of the built world
Innovation in real estate is a broad concept, one that resists easy definition. It's often used these days as shorthand for technological ingenuity and novelty, but true innovation can take many other forms. It can mean addressing an underserved market; it can be about sustainable practices; it can reflect a new philosophy of what an asset type is, or how it can be repurposed. It can be about the fundamental ideas that change how buildings, neighborhoods, or entire categories of real estate function.
Or it can be about a cool building that floats on a river in the middle of Rotterdam—that works too.
So we set out to develop a list of the world’s most innovative developers in collaboration with Bloxspring, the communications agency focused on the built world. It was no easy task. We started with a couple of assumptions: first, such a list is completely subjective, so if your favorite developer, employer, or company you founded has been left off this list, our apologies in advance. Second, we chose to present the list in alphabetical, as opposed to ranked, order. Some headaches and arguments just aren’t worth having.
Let us know who you think is missing—and why. This isn’t a one-and-done exercise: our plan is to revisit this list with Bloxspring on an annual basis, so consider this the first edition, and start nominating the developers you think deserve to appear here in 2027.
Wildflower
Few boutique developers have been as diverse and innovative in their focus as NYC’s Wildflower, which has built everything from ultra-luxury residential to e-commerce warehouses to NYC’s largest sound stage development, Wildflower Studios, which was co-developed with legendary actor Robert De Niro.
Today, Wildflower is embarking on their latest quest: to solve NYC’s EV charging problem. As a city of renters and apartments, New York presents a unique challenge for EV charging—and adoption. So Wildflower has taken the lead on installing stations throughout the five boroughs, another asset class in the company’s menagerie of projects.