If the interim slowdown is real, is the right move to be the one buying in 2026?

The dead zone worry that keeps coming up is that investors sit on their hands through 2026 because the enhanced benefits attach to the new zones starting January 2027. Advocates have described it as an inadvertently engineered gap of a year or more. I've been asked to quote work on two sites where the owners are stalling for exactly that reason, and it's made me wonder about the other side of it.

If capital genuinely pauses in existing tracts through 2026, then anybody transacting in 2026 is transacting in a market with fewer bidders. Sellers who need to move still need to move. Subs who normally have a queue have gaps. That's a buying window created by a policy transition rather than by anything wrong with the properties.

The argument against: an existing tract that comes off the 2027 map has a permanently smaller buyer pool for the tax-motivated portion of the market, and a lot of those tracts were only ever going to be bought by people chasing the incentive. Cheap in 2026 might just be correctly priced for what it becomes in 2027. You're not catching a dislocation, you're catching a repricing.

There's a middle version where you only do this in tracts that appear on the eligible list for the new designation round, so you get 2026 pricing and 2027 relevance. Treasury identified eligible tracts in early 2026, though eligibility and final designation aren't the same thing, and anyone relying on that should confirm the current status with their own professional.

I don't have a gain to place and I'm looking at this from the service side, so discount me accordingly. But somebody in this room is going to buy something in 2026 and I'd like to know how you're thinking about which of those three descriptions of the market you believe.