473: Multifamily Values Down 25%. Will it Hit Residential? Featuring Neal Bawa

Failed deals. Capital calls. Lost investor money. A dreadful and sobering conversation ensues for many in some commercial real estate sectors.

Residential (1-4 unit) and commercial (5+ unit) real estate fortunes are decoupling. 

Multifamily commercial loans are at the mercy of interest rate resets.

Residential is stable due to low supply and sustained demand.

Neal Bawa from MultifamilyU and I outline the multifamily problem. Values have plummeted 25%. 

The magnitude of the multifamily problem is about 1/80th of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.

There are two reasons for the office apocalypse—both declining income and increasing expenses.

Only 3% of office buildings in downtown cores have a floor plan that can be converted to residential. Dreadful. 

There will be possible discounts in the hotel industry due to a lack of funding and loans.

Retail has surprising bright spots.

We discuss the future of rents through 2026.

Will multifamily problems create contagion into 1-4 unit residential? We discuss. 

Timestamps:

Multifamily industry changes and challenges [00:00:46]

Discussion on the new difficulties faced in multifamily, such as failed deals, capital calls, and banking industry challenges.

Opportunity arising in the multifamily market [00:01:12]

Exploration of the current opportunity in the multifamily market due to a 25% reduction in prices from the peak, caused by distressed transactions and high interest costs.

Anatomy of the problem with floating rate debt [00:05:57]

Explanation of the issues faced by apartment building owners or syndicators when they have floating rate debt without rate caps, leading to potential deal blow-ups.

The rate cap issue [00:08:29]

Discussion on operators neglecting to buy a rate cap or buying a rate cap set too high, leading to negative cash flow.

Magnitude of the multifamily reset problem [00:09:47]

Comparison of the current multifamily reset problem to the global financial crisis, highlighting the challenges faced by operators.

Challenges in refinancing properties [00:12:10]

Explanation of the challenges faced by properties in refinancing due to decreased net operating income and increased mortgage costs, leading to potential loss of investor money.

The availability of multifamily loans [00:16:50]

Neil discusses the availability of commercial real estate loans, particularly in the multifamily space, and how it differs from other asset classes.

Lending challenges in the commercial real estate space [00:18:03]

Neil talks about the severe lending challenges faced by asset classes like office, retail, and self-storage, while expressing confidence in the stability of multifamily lending.

Contagion and the impact on the 1 to 4 unit space [00:20:56]

Neil discusses the limited level of contagion that could affect the 1 to 4 unit space due to problems in the multifamily market, highlighting the healthiness of the single-family market and institutional interest in it.

The Troubled Office Sector [00:25:35]

The speaker discusses how the office sector is facing a long-term demand crisis due to the decrease in office occupancy and the challenges of converting office buildings into residential units.

The Ten-Year Problem in the Office Sector [00:27:06]

The speaker explains that the office sector is about to face a ten-year problem, with defaults and declining values affecting the downtown core and other assets.

Bright Spots in Retail and Hotels [00:29:21]

The speaker highlights that retail occupancy is higher than multifamily occupancy, and despite the Amazon effect, retail is doing well. They also mention that hotels have seen strong recovery post-pandemic.

Hotels and Multifamily Discounts [00:32:55]

Discussion on the current cash flow opportunities in hotels and multifamily properties, potential discounts in the next 12 months.

Retail Reinvention and Rents in a Recession [00:33:57]

Exploration of how retail can sustain itself through experiential offerings, the resilience of rents in past recessions.

Artificial Recession and Rent Growth [00:35:33]

Analysis of the possibility of a recession and its impact on rents, the strength of the US economy, and the expected short duration of the recession.

The recession and its frequency [00:40:56]

Discussion on the frequency of recessions and how they are a normal part of the business cycle.

Learning opportunities at MultifamilyU.com [00:41:31]

Information on the webinars offered by multifamily ewcom, covering various topics including single-family and multifamily projects.

Appreciation for Neil Bawa's insights [00:42:22]

The host expresses gratitude for Neil Bawa's informative contributions and welcomes him back on the show.

Resources mentioned:

Show Notes:

GetRichEducation.com/473

Neal Bawa:

MultiFamilyU.com and Grocapitus.com

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Complete episode transcript:

 

Speaker 1: Today's guest is well known as the mad Scientist of multifamily. He's a data guru, self-described self-described process freak, and an outsourcing expert. He's a ten figure man with his billion dollar plus multifamily portfolio and his 900 plus investors. He's also the CEO at a multifamily education company because he's a really good teacher. It's been about a year and a half since you were first here. Welcome back to Neal Bawa.

 

Speaker 1 (00:00:40) - Well, thanks for having me back on. It's it's a delight to be back. Had a fantastic conversation with you last time. So I'm looking forward to this one. We did.

 

Speaker 2 (00:00:46) - The last one was so fun and spirited. But my gosh, since then, Neal, about a year and a half ago, so much has changed in the multifamily industry. We know that a lot of new difficulties have come into multifamily, like failed deals and capital calls and the need to raise bridge debt and banking industry challenges.

 

Speaker 2 (00:01:06) - So where would you like to start to help give us some perspective on all that?

 

Speaker 1 (00:01:12) - Well, think opportunity is finally here. You know, when when we talked a year and a half ago, I was I said things like, well, prices are too high. I said things like, I don't know where the margins are. I don't know how people make deals work. I don't know how they make them pencil out. Right. Um, in some ways, I'm still saying some of those things, but it's certainly not because of pricing anymore. So, you know, the single family market is a perfect sort of benchmark for the world that live in multifamily. As far as I know, in the last 12 months, single family prices have either been flat or up 1% or down 1%, depending upon which analyst you pick. But it's certainly been an extremely, extraordinarily stable market in terms of prices, where it's it's you know, the volume, of course, has cratered. It's down a ridiculous percentage.

 

Speaker 1 (00:02:00) - Whereas multifamily was an industry that has hurt more because of the portion of multifamily that was purchased or traded in the 2020, 2021 and 2022 time frame. Almost all of those trades happened using bridge loans which were floating, whereas almost all single family transactions were 30 year fixed loans. Right. So so two completely different things have happened. Normally the single family and multifamily market tend to be in lockstep. And that's certainly been the case for ten years. But over the last 18 months, single family and multifamily have separated from each other. And the big reason for that is almost all of the distressed transactions that you're talking about, that you're alluding to all of those cash calls. They are related to bridge loans, which had floating debt. And that floating debt has gone from, you know, 6% to ten, eight, you know, 11%, even for for some of these, these operators making it extremely difficult to make numbers work, making it very difficult to pencil. But on the good side, we've now seen compared to the peak, which was probably about 20, 21 months ago, we've seen a 25% reduction in prices, which is huge because we mean multifamily usually as an asset class, doesn't go down 25% simply because it its value is based on rents, you know, and rents rarely go down.

 

Speaker 1 (00:03:22) - They hardly went down for 6 or 7 months in 2008, so we didn't see much of a decline there in 2008, simply because, you know, the, the, the income was strong, but this time, the much, much higher cost of interest means that our overall post mortgage income is down. And that's why prices are down 25%. So both opportunity and distress in the multifamily space.

 

Speaker 2 (00:03:46) - That's such a staggering number. So let's frame that. Multifamily prices down 25% since their peak or year over year. And then just to be clear, we're talking about five plus unit residential apartment buildings with that figure.

 

Speaker 1 (00:04:01) - Yes, I'm glad you asked the question that way because I do need to qualify a few things. So so first thing is down from peak and depending upon different markets, the peak was either the last quarter of 2021 or the first quarter of 2022. And in a couple of markets, even the second quarter of 2022. So it's I'm not saying year over year, it's basically they're down 25% in the last 18 or 20 months.

 

Speaker 1 (00:04:25) - Um, so the second piece is that the down 25% is predominantly, let's call it hotter markets in the United States. So if we're talking about a steady Midwest market like Kansas City or Indianapolis, then you're probably seeing a decline of half that amount. So maybe 12.5, 13, 14%, where if you're talking about a very fast growing market, you know, all the Texan markets, the Floridian markets, then you might be seeing declines of that 25% level, since a lot of the transactions that did happen in the last two years were in the faster growing markets, that 25% number is still reasonable. And some people listening to this show might say, no, I don't think 25% is right. It's more like 20, it's more like 18. So I'll. Be at that by saying it's a pretty wide range. We're seeing as little as 18% in some of these fast growing markets, you know, hot markets. And we're also seeing markets like Phoenix, where we're seeing 27, 28% declines in price.

 

Speaker 1 (00:05:23) - Also, the the range is dependent on the number of units. We are seeing smaller declines if you've got less than 100 units. Right. So smaller properties, we're seeing a smaller decline maybe 15%. And then when we are seeing properties that are 300 units or more, just the whoppers, we're seeing 30% declines in those assets. So so a lot of it is really dependent upon, you know, because the bigger the size, the harder it is to finance it these days, the less the banks want to take a risk on it. So the bigger the property, the harder, harder it's hit at this point of time.

 

Speaker 2 (00:05:57) - The bigger the property, the less liquidity. So maybe, Neil, to help the listener get a full understanding, maybe you can take us through the anatomy of where a common problem is with what happens to an apartment building owner or syndicator when they got this floating rate debt and they didn't get a rate cap and rates spiked? What exactly happens that makes these deals blow up?

 

Speaker 1 (00:06:24) - Right? First, want to, you know, set the size of the of the problem.

 

Speaker 1 (00:06:28) - Right. So when you compare it to 2008, it's not comparable in 2008, the total size of distress or you know, potential distress was 8000 billion or $8 trillion. So it was it was a it was an absolutely staggering event. Luckily, not a lot of that distress actually happened. So that was good. But the the total size of distress was in that $8 trillion or $8000 billion range, the total size of distress in the multifamily market appears to be in the $100 billion range, so about 1/80 of the size of the distress in 2008. So keep that in mind. Also, as a percentage of the overall multifamily industry, there's about 100,000 multifamily properties in the United States that are on the bigger size. Let's call them more than 50 units. There's 20 million apartment units total. 100,000 are the bigger properties. Of those 100,000, the distressed portion of the portfolios is about, from what I can tell, about 3000 properties. Maybe it could be as much as 4000, but 3000 is a very common number.

 

Speaker 1 (00:07:30) - So about 3% of the properties are distressed. And why are they distressed? Multifamily has been doing incredibly well. Rent growth has been phenomenal, especially in 2021 where it was 15%. Just so you know, they the 50 year average is about 2% rent growth. So 15% is you know, champagne time. So so we've certainly had positive trends. And we continue to see positive trends. You know there's there's less and less people can afford a mortgage. So there's basically a you know brand new renters being created every day because of mortgage rates being this high. But the, the the downside was that a portion of those 100,000 properties were purchased in late 2020, 2021 and then, you know, 2022, and they were purchased using floating debt. And the the so we're talking about those 3000 properties. Those 3000 properties either didn't have a rate cap. So when when you you're purchasing using, you know, bridge debt or floating debt, you want to buy a rate cap. So if rates do go up they hit that cap.

 

Speaker 1 (00:08:29) - And then anything above that cap is something that the rate, you know, cap selling company reimburses to you. So that way you're not affected by but by going above that, well, some of these operators neglected to buy a rate cap, which was a really bad thing to do. But then there were others that other operators that bought a rate cap, but their rate cap was set too high. So, you know, they basically didn't think that rates would go up. So they did put a rate cap in. But instead of buying a rate cap at 6% or 7%, they may be bought a rate cap at 8 or 9. They were basically looking for the worst case scenario, and so they bought the cheapest rate cap that they could find. And now, you know, rates have gone up and they've already hit that rate cap. Maybe it's eight and a half or 9% and it had eight and a half or 9%. That mortgage is still too high for that property to cash flow. So now the property has negative cash flow.

 

Speaker 1 (00:09:18) - So there's I personally know of a few dozen properties where the negative cash flow is between 20,000 and $200,000 a month. And that negative cash flow means that the syndicators, the the general partners are basically putting that money in themselves, or they're taking short term loans and they are now looking for a solution there and their solutions are limited. I can give you a list of those, but their solutions are limited because the property is is negative cash flow and nobody wants to touch a property that's negative cash flow.

 

Speaker 2 (00:09:47) - Did we say that he's a data driven guy or what? That was some great perspective that the magnitude here of the multifamily reset problem has been about 1/80 of what the problem was in real estate during the global financial crisis. That was a great way to put things in perspective. Yeah, Neal, you know, it's such an interesting mindset that an operator would have the awareness to buy a rate cap with their floating rate debt, but yet not have the cap be low enough in order to keep them out of trouble.

 

Speaker 2 (00:10:20) - That's really unusual to me. Do you have any idea what percent of operators have bought a rate cap with their floating rate debt?

 

Speaker 1 (00:10:30) - I think a majority of them have. So I'd say more than 50% of the properties that were purchased during this time did have caps, but a lot of the caps were set high. So that that was a very common thing, where the caps were set to 8% or higher, as opposed to them being set at, you know, 6 or 6.5%. So it's more of a high cap issue rather than a no cap issue. And I think the bigger the secondary challenges, let's say let's say they had a good rate cap, right? So I bought it. Let's say you bought a property in the, um, let's call it the final quarter of 2020. And you bought a two year rate cap. And the rate cap was good. It was 6.5%. Yeah. Good for you. Right. But that rate cap was a two year rate cap. So now it expired basically last year.

 

Speaker 1 (00:11:14) - And so since last year you're now up at 10 or 11%. And, you know, a year's gone by. Your property is bleeding. Maybe it was doing well, but now that it's been bleeding for a year and you've been paying all of that bleed out of your operating expenses, now you're in trouble. And maybe you bought it. Three rate cap. Well, if you bought the property in the final quarter of 2020, then in about a month or two months from now, we're in the final quarter of 2023. Well, that rate cap is going to be gone. And then maybe in the next three, 4 or 5, six, seven months, all of your operating budget, all of your operating, you know, fund is going to be, you know, gone because you have this much higher mortgage. So what's happening is that this is one of those situations where there isn't a trigger on any one particular day, and a huge number of properties come to market. There were a lot of properties purchased in the final quarter of 2020, all four quarters of 2021 and the first three quarters of 2022.

 

Speaker 1 (00:12:10) - Right. So you're looking at a total of eight quarters. So each quarter, a certain percentage of those properties get to the point where either their rate cap is gone. Right. So it's finished because you bought a one year or two year rate cap, or they're they're at the point where even without the rate cap, their loan is expiring. So a lot of these bridge loans were two year loans and three year loans. And so the vast majority of the challenges that the multifamily industry is going to face are going to be in 2024, because that's when a vast majority of either rate caps or mortgages expire. And because because the net operating income of these properties has gone down and the and the mortgage cost has gone up, most of these properties cannot be refinanced. So I'd say out of the 3000 properties, you could probably refinance using some mechanism, a thousand of them, maybe a third of them. And that could be, you know, do a cash call, get, you know, money from your investors.

 

Speaker 1 (00:13:07) - Or you could do what is known as a pref lending, where you basically take money from an outside party and that outside that extra money helps you refinance into into perm debt. So those are your options. And the third option, which is likely to be most common, is that you go out and sell your property. But from what I'm seeing, the vast majority of these properties that don't get refinanced. So out of 3000, the 2000 that don't get refinanced are likely to come to market, and the vast majority of them will end up losing all of their investor money or a majority of their investor money. And so you, you know, if it's a $100 billion problem, that's, you know, we're talking about 30 to $40 billion of investor money, and a majority of that 30 to $40 billion could be lost.

 

Speaker 2 (00:13:48) - Yeah, that is troubling and really concerning as far as those LPs, those limited partners, those investors in someone else's syndication, hopefully that syndicator, that operator is communicating with their investors.

 

Speaker 2 (00:14:03) - But for investors, is there anything they can do to identify cracks in the arm or where they might be losing their deal, where they might be losing their money, where they might be throwing good money after bad if a capital call is requested?

 

Speaker 1 (00:14:18) - I think it's a very difficult thing to do for a limited partner because you have, you know, you have more, you have much more exposure to the deal than you would when you invest in the stock market, where you know, there's almost no exposure unless it's a public company. Um, but and these are all private syndications. But I think that a lot of investors simply don't know how to read the, the budgets versus actuals. They don't necessarily know how to read the Performa. So it's it's challenging. So if you're somebody that is. Comfortable doing that. I suggest you dive in and basically ask a lot of the questions of the syndicators. I have one such property, so, you know, I was lucky in that during that time a lot of my colleagues had I have people who I know colleagues that bought 10 to 12 properties during that time frame.

 

Speaker 1 (00:15:02) - It was very normal. I bought one and a half. So one of those properties was my own property, exited one of my partners. So I call it a half a property because it was already mine. Um, and then I bought purchased one other property in a military metro. So I was able to get it for a lower price because it was a military metro. And usually the prices are lower for, for for military towns and, and that property, you know, I'm having the same challenges that I've described. So, you know, the the rate cap issues and the fact that basically prices have gone down by 25%. And I'm dealing with it by constantly communicating with my investors, giving them, you know, options. You know, here's, you know, how when, when we were when we were all selling these these shares to investors, we gave them a, um, a sensitivity analysis showing them, you know, worst case scenario, best case scenario, you know, in a middle case scenario.

 

Speaker 1 (00:15:55) - And so now we're basically doing a sensitivity analysis based on what we are seeing in the marketplace today. And and giving them feedback on what our options are and think a lot of it comes down from the the general partners communicating with the limited partners. And if the your general partner is not very communicative, is not giving you information, ask for one on one meetings, ask for you know, more information in their webinar or in their updates. I think this is a time for limited partners to be vocal.

 

Speaker 2 (00:16:25) - You've learned about the problem in the larger apartment space. You've learned about how operators and apartment syndicators are dealing with the problem. And then, Neil, where do you think that we're going next and think maybe we should ask and look at it through the lens of where do you think we're going next with the availability of multifamily loans, could this help the source of capital dry up?

 

Speaker 1 (00:16:50) - And so I think the answer is we are going to a very dark place with availability of commercial real, you know, loans.

 

Speaker 1 (00:16:57) - Multifamily is in a privileged asset class. So, you know, the the term commercial real estate is sometimes meant to include multifamily, sometimes not. So I'll assume that multifamily is part of commercial real estate, but there are many other asset classes. So there's office which is the next biggest asset class. There's retail hotels, there's self-storage, you know, and and a few others like mixed use. And of those commercial real estate asset class, there's only one that's privileged and that's multifamily because there are not one, not two, but three lenders who are government or quasi government organizations whose only job it is to keep lending in the multifamily space liquid, and also the single family space liquid. And they are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and hard. Right. So Housing and Development Authority. So these three lenders right now are extremely, extremely active. And what has happened is that in in good times, call it 20 early 2022. You had life companies. You had all these private, you know, bridge capital, you had all kinds of capital that was lending to the multifamily space.

 

Speaker 1 (00:18:03) - Now some of that capital has backed off. There's still a huge percentage, I'd say probably 40, 50% of all loans that are being done today are these kinds of private, you know, groups. But think the government or quasi government groups are much more active today and their lending. So I don't think multifamily lending dries up at all. I don't think that that's the case. I think it dries up for the non privileged asset classes, hotel, retail, self-storage, office. These are the classes that are likely to see, you know, near lending dry up especially because on a fundamentals basis there's absolutely nothing wrong with multifamily. In fact as I mentioned I think we're a lot better off than 2019 to 2023 given that home prices have gone up 40%, incomes are only gone up 15%. So there's a very large number of Americans that simply cannot qualify for a single family home anymore. And so those people have to go to apartments. So the the fundamentals are really good for apartments. That is not true of office.

 

Speaker 1 (00:19:02) - So office is an asset class that is experiencing the worst fundamentals it has seen in its entire history. And so I do think that there's going to be very severe lending challenges in the commercial real estate space. But I haven't really seen that multifamily, and I don't anticipate seeing it in the future as well.

 

Speaker 2 (00:19:20) - Well, I don't know if any of that could have as much fun as last time. There were rather gloomy subjects to discuss here with Neal and come back. Can this problem in the multifamily space create contagion for the 1 to 4 unit space? And like with what Neil touched on, what about other commercial sectors like office and retail? How troubled are they when we come back? This is get recession. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. 

 

Speaker 2 (00:20:14) - Welcome back to Get Rich Education. We're talking with the mad scientist of multifamily, a big brained visionary. He's also an excellent teacher. I'm sure you can tell as you're listening to him here. And if you're listening in the audio only Bawa is spelled b a w a new. Here on this show, we talk an awful lot about investing in the 1 to 4 unit space and the advantage of the 30 year fixed that long term fixed interest rate debt. Do you see any areas for contagion with problems in the multifamily five plus unit space bleeding over into the 1 to 4 unit space?

 

Speaker 1 (00:20:56) - Yes, but to a limited level, I think that the the 1 to 4 unit space is the healthiest that I've seen in a very long time.

 

Speaker 1 (00:21:05) - And there's reasons for that. One of the biggest reasons is multifamily, which is the most well sought after asset class for institutional investors who don't typically don't usually like the 1 to 4 unit space. There's a few companies in that space, let's call them half a dozen, but there's several thousand companies that invest in the multifamily space. Some of them are right now looking at single family as a, you know, as a, you know, safe haven to park some of their money. Right? So there's, you know, more institutional level interest in the single family space because of its access to those, you know, those those 30 year fixed loans. So there's and the fact that single family prices basically haven't declined. So I think that there's there's a lot of interest in the single family space. Um, keep in mind that millennials are reaching their peak years of household formation. So they started in 2019. So until 2025. So from 19 to 2025, those are the peak years of household formation for millennials.

 

Speaker 1 (00:22:01) - And that's also putting a cushion under the single family space there. Contagion is some form of contagion is inevitable. I think that the office market is going to see spectacular levels of contagion, similar to 2008. I think that the other associated markets, like hotel and retail, are going to see some level of contagion, though I certainly don't expect it to be as bad as office. And then multifamily is going to see some contagion, as we mentioned, because of these 2 or 3000 properties that have to be basically sold into the marketplace and prices are down, which always creates contagion. Why? Because think about it. You're a mid-level bank. So a mid-level bank in the US is $250 billion or less in assets. Well, a lot of these assets are these banks are the ones that loaned out money to multifamily and retail and hotel and in office, and now are being forced by the Federal Reserve through a process known as mark to market. They're being forced to write down the value of these assets because these assets, you know, there's still you know, there's still active loans, but maybe they they loan $20 million.

 

Speaker 1 (00:23:00) - And now basically they're $20 million is only worth 18 or 16 or 15. And so now the fed is saying, hey, you know, you got to mark these assets down in value. And as they mark them down to value, that can lead to the banks becoming or mid-sized banks becoming less stable. I don't think this affects any of the large banks in the US, but the midsize ones are affected. And some of those mid-sized banks do lend to the single family space, but not a lot. I find that the single family space, when I look at their source of lending, not a lot of those mid-sized banks are involved. There's a little bit they do some brokerage work, but then they're selling those loans back to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and a bunch of other, you know, governmental type organizations. So I don't see a sense of contagion in the single family space. I do see potentials of some price declines because until about two months ago, mortgages were predominantly in the sixes. They, you know, they spiked up once to the sevens and then they pulled back into the sixes.

 

Speaker 1 (00:23:56) - Now they've gone into the sevens and they may stay in the sevens for a substantial amount of time. When that happens, that can affect the single family market as well, simply because, you know, you can get to the point where supply is higher than, than demand. So I wouldn't be surprised if there's a pullback in single family prices. Let's call it 5%. But I'm not predicting the kind of challenges where the office market think we could see 40% declines in prices from peak, whereas single family you might see 5%. I think that's still an incredible outcome for the single family market compared, you know, just looking at the outrageous increases in prices since Covid don't I don't think that's a even a pullback. I would just say that's a balancing out.

 

Speaker 2 (00:24:44) - Who know the residential housing market. Really, it's something that's non-discretionary on a human need basis. Everyone needs to live somewhere and they will either own rent or be homeless. And you talked about some of those affordability challenges before. The lower the homeownership rate gets, the more renters you have.

 

Speaker 2 (00:25:05) - So long term, we will have some demand baseline for both multifamily and properties in the 1 to 4 unit space, of course, but the same thing cannot be said about some of these other commercial sectors, especially the troubled office sector space, where you have more and more abandoned buildings downtown. And a lot of these office buildings cannot be easily converted from offices to residential units. So why don't you talk to us about some of those other troubled commercial sectors, starting with office.

 

Speaker 1 (00:25:35) - Office is in a apocalypse. I think that this is far, far worse than 2008 and far, far worse than than 2001, because 2008 and 2001, they were liquidity crisis. They were short term, you know, demand crisis. This is a long term demand crisis because, you know, I read very important documents from companies that are in the key swiping business. You know, when you enter an office in a downtown core, you're swiping your card. And so those companies actually have phenomenal day by day data of how many people are actually going into offices today.

 

Speaker 1 (00:26:11) - It's been more than a year since companies started calling back, you know, people to the office and think that by now every company, whether you know, they're they're forcing five days back to the office or four days or three days or two days, everyone's sort of, you know, put their line in the sand. And we're at the point where, you know, this, this is what offices look like going forward. And if I'm right and this is what it looks like going forward, it is simply catastrophic for the office market in the United States, because we're still seeing key swipes at 50 to 60% of the people that used to swipe in before Covid. And that number is staggeringly, staggeringly low. And if this is what it settles at, you know, some companies are two days, some three, some four. I think we're in for a world of pain for the office market. You also, you know, there's a lot of people that in these podcasts basically will often say something like, no, the office stuff will get converted into residential.

 

Speaker 1 (00:27:06) - And I have news for you, only 3% of office buildings in office in downtown course have the floor plate, the floor plate necessary for residential conversion. Why? Because residential conversion by law requires that every every single room have a window. So what is happening is most of the time you basically can only convert the buildings on the edge, the, the square footage on the edge of a building, but that's central core but then becomes worthless. And if you don't have a use for it, then you still have to buy that office building to convert and you have to buy it at a reasonable price. The math doesn't work. I mean, you'd you'd need to see office values down 80% for, for, you know, a somebody who's converting to multifamily to say, fine, I'll just leave the 60% in the middle empty and I'll just convert the size. So 80% declines in value are needed for that kind of conversion to happen. So we are about to see a ten year problem in the office sector.

 

Speaker 1 (00:28:03) - And it's also dragging down all of the other assets in the downtown core. So we are seeing we just saw a $727 million default on two hotels in San Francisco. We saw a $558 million mall default. Also in San Francisco, we're seeing defaults across the board in New York, Boston, Seattle, San Diego, Miami, sort of heavy markets where this these challenges are happening. We're seeing a lot of these and it's happening in a very, very slow way. Keith. And the reason for that is the office market, their average lease is, you know, five years long. Some leases are ten years long, and a lot of these companies haven't gone out of business. So if the company is in the lease, they're continuing to pay even though the office is empty. But the moment that lease comes up for renewal, either the company doesn't renew it or they renew maybe half the space. Right. And so we we already know that this is an incredible debacle, but it doesn't seem like it at any given point of time because it's happening in a very slow motion way.

 

Speaker 2 (00:29:02) - Well, that's such a good point about how there will be this slow drain, this slow leak when these office leases expire over time. What about other areas of the commercial space, any other particularly troubled areas or bright spots that you see going forward?

 

Speaker 1 (00:29:21) - Ironically bright spots. And this is where I've been proven wrong in the past. You know, I've often maybe 4 or 5 years ago talked about the retail apocalypse, right, where Amazon would basically, you know, lead the retail market to become illiquid. Well, none of those things have happened because of two reasons. One is the retail apocalypse with people like me, you know, being on on 200 podcasts, talking about it, a lot of development of retail that was scheduled to happen simply didn't happen. So the very.

 

Speaker 2 (00:29:48) - Late podcast, people lost confidence. No. They were invested in retail.

 

Speaker 1 (00:29:52) - Exactly right. So so, you know, I fulfilled that prophecy. Think. But bottom line is that there's there's been very responsible levels of new construction in retail.

 

Speaker 1 (00:30:02) - So, you know, they haven't built a lot. Very few models have been built in the United States in the last few years. And even some of the malls that have been repurposed, some of their square footage is being used up for, for multifamily. And so that was one. The second reason is that retail is being very careful with pricing. So, you know, over, over the last 5 or 6 years, the retail market has adjusted to new forms of pricing, where, you know, you go into a mall and you see a gym where before the pricing of that mall never really allowed for a gym to be in a mall. It just gyms, you know, they want, you know, a lower price per square foot. And so malls have adjusted, strip malls have adjusted. And so today we have a surprising event where retail occupancy in the United States is higher than multifamily. This is the first time ever that multifamily is about a little under 95%. Now it's 94% occupied.

 

Speaker 1 (00:30:52) - Retail is 96 or 97% occupied, which never happens, right? Normal. Normally retail is right around 90%, 88%, something like that. But the high level of occupancy shows that that retail is doing well. Now, having said that. So so on the occupancy side, they're doing really well. There's there's really no pullback in terms of demand. But on the other side, because of the fact that interest rates are so high, retail cap rates are very high, which means prices are low. So prices are very reasonable there for retail. And so I think that real opportunity that I'm seeing I wouldn't invest in office at this point, Keith, because you don't know the end of this process. You don't know how long it takes. I think it takes a decade. So I might get 50% off in office and I don't want it. I just don't want to touch that asset class. It's tainted. Now, if I get 40% off in retail, I think I'm interested because fundamentally I don't see a demand issue if this is the highest occupancy that retail has seen ever.

 

Speaker 1 (00:31:53) - And at the same time, I'm getting a 40 or 50% discount simply because of lack of lending. Well, that is to me a classic opportunity to look at because once again, fundamentally, nothing is wrong with demand. And I realize that the Amazon effect is extremely real. But what I'm seeing is that that people want that experience of shopping. And so even amongst the young people, sure, each year Amazon, you know, goes up a little bit. But now Amazon's growth is no longer a hockey puck. Amazon's growth is sort of like this. You know they're growing by 10%, 15% a year, which is still great for Amazon. But I think when you when you project that across a 300 million person market that the US is retail no longer has to fear for an apocalypse. So this is actually a pretty good time to take advantage of the 40% discounts that I think will happen in 2024 for retail. Same thing. Everything I just said also applies to hotels. Hotels came out of the pandemic very strong, with huge increases in ADR or average daily rates and huge, huge increases in occupancy.

 

Speaker 1 (00:32:55) - So hotels right now are a very robust cash flowing business. If you've got good hotels and good locations, you're making a lot of money. They're cash flowing like crazy because their orders have gone up and their occupancy has gone up. So they've taken two positive hits. But once again, I expect there to be discounts simply because of a lack of funding, a lack of loans. And you can you might we might easily see 30%, maybe not 40, but 30% discounts in hotels in the next 12 months. So think both of those are really good opportunities, along with multifamily discounts at 25%. So this is an opportunity. This is a case of distress creating unusual levels of opportunity. I don't think we're quite there yet, Keith. We're beginning to see some distress in multifamily. We're certainly seeing distress in office. We haven't heard anything about the distress in retail or hotels yet. That's because a lot of their their loans don't don't trigger until 2024. Right. So that's we'll see what happens next year when these loans start to trigger and you can't really refinance them.

 

Speaker 2 (00:33:57) - I completely believe that inflation has thoroughly soaked in to hotels. You talk about their ADR, their average daily rate. I've recently stayed at hotels in Denver, Omaha, Chicago, Toledo and Boston, so I've gotten a pretty good sample size and sure feel the hit there. And interestingly, the last time I shopped at a mall, it was the biggest mall in this city, and I noticed a bowling alley that I had not noticed there before. And I went bowling and noticed an ice skating rink was there. So I just wonder how much retail can reinvent itself if it tilts enough into the experiential part, rather than just buying items off a shelf at a store, maybe that can help sustain that retail sector, to your point. Well, Neil, maybe we should wrap up really on what supports an awful lot of values in multifamily, and that is rents and the direction of rents, especially if we have almost hate to say this. R-word, a different R-word, a recession, because it seems like this thing has been around the corner forever.

 

Speaker 2 (00:35:03) - I know historically that rents are quite resilient in a recession, something that you touched on earlier back even during the 2008 global financial crisis, when I was a landlord, I owned fourplex buildings. Then I noticed that I had a pretty good steady stream of renters. My rents didn't really go up much, but they were really resilient. They didn't go down, and that's because people couldn't get a loan. So that was an affordability problem. Then we have another affordability problem now. But if we do tilt into recession, what do you think that is going to do to rents?

 

Speaker 1 (00:35:33) - I think we are going to see a decline in rents if a recession happens. Now, that's a question. By the way, six months ago, if you told me, you know, a recession wasn't going to happen, I'd say, no, that's not possible. We are going to go into a recession. However, I must admit that the US economy has truly, truly, truly outperformed beyond anyone else, beyond anyone's imagination.

 

Speaker 1 (00:35:54) - So today, the chances of a recession are certainly not 100%. Might be 50%. But let's assume that it happens and a recession happens. I think what is very, very likely is that this recession will be very short. So once again, if you're not paying attention to to to what's happening in the marketplace, this is a time that, you know, I was born in India and this is my adopted country. I feel very proud of the US economy today. If I compare the US economy to the Canadian, the eurozone, the Germans, the Japanese, we are outperforming every one of those economies. We're at the point where we're outperforming China, which almost never happens, by the way. And so we have an extraordinarily resilient and strong economy at this point. So if it falls into a recession just because the fed keeps hitting it over the head with this interest rate hammer, I think that recession will be fairly short, because as soon as the economy does go into a recession, the fed usually figures that out within a few months.

 

Speaker 1 (00:36:47) - Then they can stop hitting us with a hammer. I'm not saying that they'll just cut interest rates back to zero, but they certainly will provide some cushion. Maybe they cut rates by one one time, two times, just to make the market breathe a little bit easier. Because this is an artificial recession, there is no shortage of demand in the US economy. There's an incredible number of open jobs. There were as many as 11 million jobs now. Now there's about 9 million open. So there's there's a and wage growth has been so strong. Right. Because we have so many people retiring that at this point, for the first time since the early 60s, I believe, or late 60s, we actually have pricing power. So anyone who wants to be employed can ask for more money and get it. And so wage growth has been about four, 4.5%, which is really good for rents, by the way. It's phenomenal news because we needed wage growth for future rent growth. So we have a artificial recession if it does happen.

 

Speaker 1 (00:37:38) - And that artificial recession is being caused by the fed because they want that wage growth to come closer to 2% from the 4% that it's at, because everything else has come down. Right. So commodities have come down with the exception of oil, and so has, you know, so have the supply chain issues are gone, rents are down. So in the US the last 12 months, rents were flat and in some markets they might be down 1% or 2%. Austin I think was the only market that was down a lot. But most other markets were down very, very small amounts. So rents have been flat, which is, I think, really credible because if you look at rents over the last two years, they're up 16%. So in 2022 they were up 16%. In 2023 they were up basically zero. So if you average that out now you're looking at 8% rent growth, which is phenomenal compared to the long term average of 2.5%. So we've been outperforming on rent and we needed to take a breather in the last 12 months have been that breather.

 

Speaker 1 (00:38:32) - Now, if the recession happens, I do expect rents to go down, but not normally they don't. So in a in a in a six month, three month or six month average recession, you know, the average US recession is two quarters. So six months normally you don't get rent drops. You might get, you know, the rents plateau out. Or maybe their rent growth drops from 3% to 1%. That's that's much more common this time. We might see rent growth in a short recession drop by maybe 1% or 2%. And the biggest reason for that is supply. The largest supply of apartments in the history of the country is delivering, starting basically the beginning of 2023 until the end of 2024. So these two years, 2023 and 2024 are massive apartment supply years. And obviously, as you supply 500,000 apartments into an economy that overall is not outperforming, is is doing okay, but and it starts to go into a recession, then you're going to see some concessions. And that concession drives down the price of multifamily, which then drives down the price of single family rentals.

 

Speaker 1 (00:39:36) - So we could see a decline in rents. I'd say probably 1% to 2% is is possible, but that decline is likely to be short. So I think let's assume that the recession starts in the final quarter of 2023, which might not happen. I think it's more of a Q1 and Q2 of next year. If the recession does happen, those are the two most likely quarters. As soon as the economy rebounds and becomes positive, we should see very strong and stable rent growth. Well, I would say stable rent growth for the rest of 2024 by 2025, a lot of that incoming supply is done. So now supply supply and demand are in balance. So in 2025 I expect strong rent growth as much as 4 or 5%. And in 2026 I expect very, very strong rent growth. We might we might see 6% rent growth in 2026. So 2024 is that year where rent growth is a little bit shaky because of this. Word, the recession word. And, you know, whether it happens or not is we don't know.

 

Speaker 1 (00:40:37) - And when it happens, we don't know how long it lasts. But I think because it's an artificially induced recession, it's likely to be the vanilla US six month recession, which basically drives wages closer to that 2% target for the fed, and gives the fed the room to start easing up on interest rates.

 

Speaker 2 (00:40:56) - Recessions are not good. Perhaps the one positive about a recession is that then we can all stop talking about and speculating upon when does eventually happen, because on average, it does happen every five years. It's just a normal part of the business cycle. Well, Neal, this has been very informative around the multifamily world and beyond, including projections for the future. You've always got such great insight in stats on the pulse of the market. If someone wants to learn more about you and your resources, what's the best way for them to do that?

 

Speaker 1 (00:41:31) - Come join us at multifamily. That's multifamily, followed by the letter EW.com we get about 20,000 registrations in our webinars. We do about a dozen webinars each year.

 

Speaker 1 (00:41:41) - We do them on single family multifamily. We do them on other asset classes like office. We just did one on on on the office apocalypse and people like that because there's no education fee, there's no subscription, there's no upsell. People come join us. They learn a lot. And occasionally during one of these webinars, if you have a multifamily project that we are doing, we mention it for about 30s. And if that sounds like it's interesting, you can, you know, jump in and you know and participate. But otherwise, you know, there's a lot of tens of thousands of people that have never participated with us in any of our projects that come and join us at this ecosystem of learning called multifamily EW.com.

 

Speaker 2 (00:42:22) - Neal Bawa, Gro Capital and multifamily EW.com. It's been informative, just like it was the last time you were here. It's been great having you back on the show.

 

Speaker 1 (00:42:32) - Thanks for having me on, Keith.