Hines names David Steinbach first president and Alfonso Munk global CIO

Hines has filled in the layer beneath its incoming co-CEOs; IREI reported that David Steinbach will become the firm's first president, Alfonso Munk global CIO, and Jeff Hines chairman, all effective Jan. 1, 2027, beneath the co-CEO pairing of Adam Hines and Laura Hines-Pierce, which PWD reported on Oct. 2.

The announcement assigns the work explicitly: the co-CEOs lead the firm and set strategic direction and priorities, Steinbach oversees execution of that strategy across the business, and Munk takes responsibility for investment strategy and performance across Hines' real assets platform. That the president's post is new — the firm's first, per the announcement — indicates the execution load has outgrown what two chief executives can carry between them, and that a manager of this size now wants one name attached to delivery.

The other structural addition is softer: Hines plans an independent external advisory board to provide outside perspectives and counsel, and the announcement is specific about its limits — the board will not have governance authority, and the investment committee's authority remains unchanged. Read plainly, the two lines do different jobs: the first adds outside experience, the second closes off any reading in which the new body changes who decides.

The trust layer moves with the leadership: Laura Hines-Pierce replaces Jeff Hines as CEO and chair of the board of Hines Global Income Trust, and Adam Hines joins that board as a director, putting both co-CEOs on the trust's board. IREI's report does not describe the trust's governance beyond those seats or say who else sits on it.

The firm chose to publish two numbers alongside the titles: the discretionary business has compounded at roughly 20 percent a year since 2018, and the private wealth business has doubled in size. Neither figure arrives with a base, a dollar amount or a date range beyond the 2018 starting point, so both describe a trajectory without defining the book. The private wealth line reads as Hines' channel to individual investors, which makes it the one figure in the announcement that speaks to the business our readers sit closest to.

Taken with the Oct. 2 co-CEO announcement, the changes leave Hines entering 2027 with a chairman, two co-CEOs, a president and a global CIO, plus an advisory board whose members the report does not name.

The new structure now has to execute on a platform that was already moving toward development. The wager behind Hines' pivot from buying to building, described in August, is that a global construction freeze has handed developers a scarcity advantage acquisitions cannot match. In early September, Hines' US industrial portfolio was leasing to the supply chain for the data center buildout, a tenant class accounting for 10 to 30 percent of recent leasing in that portfolio. Delivering into a supply vacuum is an operating problem before it is an investment one — entitlement, cost, schedule — and execution across the business is the remit now written on the president's door.

That pivot is broadening beyond ground-up development into large land assemblies, where capital pays for permission to build before a shovel moves, and development is an operating business rather than a pricing one. Hines has been one of the clearest examples. If that is where the firm intends to compete, the president's seat is the one that has to work, because a construction program converts on schedule and budget well before it converts on price; the growth disclosed on the discretionary book is the size of the platform that seat will run.

IREI's report does not establish why the president's role exists; it does not say why the seat is new, whether Steinbach or Munk is arriving from outside Hines or moving internally, or which posts either one is leaving, nor does it name the advisory board's members or say when it will be seated. What it does establish is that Jeff Hines will step back from day-to-day management and primarily advise the co-CEOs, and that all changes take effect Jan. 1, 2027, roughly three months after the announcement.

Jeff Hines put the moment in the firm's own idiom: "Hines has always been at its best when we look beyond the current cycle and build for what comes next," he said, calling this "the right moment for me to step back from day-to-day management." Between now and January, the things worth watching are the ones the announcement left open: the posts Steinbach and Munk vacate, the names on an advisory board that will have counsel but no vote, and the period over which the private wealth business doubled — the one figure the firm published without a date range.