Keith talks with data-driven investor Neal Bawa, the "mad scientist of multifamily," about why apartment values have dropped 20%–30% while single-family prices have stayed resilient.
They break down how interest rate shocks, the homeowner lock-in effect, and a wave of new multifamily supply are reshaping returns for today's investors.
Keith and Neal also dissect the build-to-rent model—who it really serves, how apartment oversupply is pressuring its rents, and why pending legislation could upend the space.
Neal closes with a specific, data-backed timeline for when multifamily rents and values may finally turn the corner, giving listeners a concrete roadmap instead of vague market guesses.
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Multifamily U's Free eBook: Location Magic - https://multifamilyu.com/lp/location-magic-ebook/
Multifamily U's Investor Club – https://multifamilyu.com/club
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Complete episode transcript:
Keith Weinhold 0:00
Keith, welcome to GRE. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. The single-family real estate market is steady, but with apartment building values down 20 to 30% since 2022 when will the multifamily Armageddon end? We ask our qualified guest, and how will slowing birth rates in immigration affect real estate? And more today on Get Rich Education. You know, Mid South Home Buyers, that top Memphis turnkey provider. I learned that a secret weapon behind their explosive growth is more than just you buying their properties, it's an executive coach for nine years now, their CEO, Terry Kerr, and his COO, Pat Nix, have worked privately with a coach who I've now learned from too, and he doesn't market himself online anywhere. After 12 years behind the scenes, that coach is now making himself available exclusively for GRE listeners. His name is Daniel Thomas Hind. If you're a hard-charging business owner or investor who wants to get in the best shape of your life, physically, mentally, and professionally, you can fill out an application for a free consult. This is private one on one coaching for those willing to go to uncommon lengths to achieve uncommon results. Thanks to Daniel, we've all become better leaders, better operators, and better men. It started by showing up for ourselves. Now it's your turn. Go to Daniel Thomas hind.com H I N D, that's Daniel Thomas hind.com and sign up before Spotsville Flock homes helps multifamily owners exit the operator grind, whether it's your six plex or a 50 unit apartment, through a 721 exchange. This defers your capital gains tax. It's a strategy long used by institutions. Now you can swap tenants and toilets for passive income and zero management. Request your initial valuations. See if your property qualifies at flockhomes.com/gre That's F L O C K homes dot com slash G R E.
Neal Bawa 2:13
You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is Get Rich Education.
Keith Weinhold 2:29
Welcome to GRE from Valencia, Spain to Valencia, California, and across 188 nations worldwide. America's favorite shaved mammal on a microphone is back with you for another wealth building week. I'm Keith Weinhold, and you're listening to Get Rich Education. The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest businesses. That's not a coincidence, and that's why we discuss housing here. And there's been a chronic shortage of affordable housing last month at a commencement speech, Harrison Ford, yes, the guy that played both Han Solo and Indiana Jones, talked about how a fulfilling life has both passion and purpose. Passion is what gets you out of bed in the morning, purpose is what helps you sleep at night, you and I. We can bring this mindset to our lifestyle, to the business we do, and to our investing. Treating tenants well is what helps real estate investors sleep well at night. While we're doing well, we can be doing good too. Multifamily syndicators keep failing, going out of business, and losing all of their investors' money due to mortgage rate resets. It just keeps happening. What this really means, that these groups that pooled together investor money to buy apartment buildings, largely that were set up in 2022 and earlier keep blowing up almost fully due to the fact that interest rates reset higher. Some of them had a fixed rate for five years. Well, rates spiked four years ago, and that's why a lot of them have yet to blow up, and these apartments have lost so much value that no one will refinance them, you know. Even if that apartment operator increased the net operating income over the years, even if rents went up, it doesn't matter. So, you still haven't heard the last of it. Do you remember a couple years ago, when a lot of people in the apartment space, they were saying just stay alive till 25 and that nonsense, like if you keep your head above water until 2025 oh well, then rates are certainly going to fall, and everyone's going to be okay. Well, 2025 is long gone.
Keith Weinhold 5:01
Mortgage rates haven't fallen in any significant way, so that survive until 25 thing or whatever mantra derivative people used that was a farce, like I've said on the show here for years. You cannot predict interest rates, so I didn't make the call that they were going to go up or down at all, because you can't predict them, but so many people said, oh, rates will fall substantially by now, no way, you just can't make that assumption, you've got to take history over hunches, and all of that, a lot of those multifamily deals 100% depended. depended on refinancing at favorable rates, and that's exactly why they failed. A surefire way to look foolish is to predict interest rates. We'll talk more about the multifamily Armageddon with today's guest. I also want to get into what's called the 21st century road to housing act, because that became one of the most hotly debated housing policy provisions this year. And what this is, is a Senate bill, and it would require certain large institutional investors that develop these bills to rent single family communities. It would force them to sell those homes to individual buyers within seven years. So, in other words, what a big firm could do is build a neighborhood of rental homes, lease them for up to seven years, but they couldn't hold on to them any longer than that. They couldn't hold them indefinitely as rentals, this bill is not aimed at you, the individual investor. It is aimed at big institutions, and what I mean by that is that's generally defined as owning 350 or more homes. That's what we're talking about here. Small landlords and mom and pop investors are not the target, it targets corporate portfolios, and this means groups whose names you've probably heard of, like Blackstone, First Key Homes, Progress Residential, and Invitation Homes. They are some of the heavyweights that the government is looking to clamp down on, so whenever you hear someone talk about big Wall Street landlords, that is who they're talking about. Now, some groups are pretty worried about the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, like the NHB, that's the National Association of Home Builders, and a lot of multifamily groups are concerned, and why is that? Well, the effect is it could dramatically reduce new housing production.
Keith Weinhold 7:44
See, a big institution like First Key Homes or Blackstone, they wouldn't want to even get into this business anymore. They wouldn't want to build big build to rent communities anymore if they have to sell them all within seven years. See, they want to buy and hold for the long term, kind of like what you and I are doing, because you and I know that owning a group of selective buy and hold single family rentals is a really profitable place to be, but so if they don't want to build, then that creates a reduction in supply, which could make prices go up, and then obviously hurt those trying to afford their own home. Well, that would defeat the purpose of this whole thing. I mean, my gosh, this always seems to happen when government gets involved. So, the 21st Century Road to Housing Act could limit supply, which is the exact opposite of its intent to get first-time home buyers into their first home, and if this passes, it does have bipartisan support. This lower supply, then yes, indeed puts upward pressure on prices. Just amazing. So then it could actually go on to help the everyday mom and pop investor, like you and I, that already owns property, the individual at last check, though they're looking to pass a version that still restricts some of these giant institutions from getting into build to rents, but yet it does not have that seven year sale requirement. What's really important to remember here is that Washington, they're looking to stifle big Wall Street players from the rental market, which could reduce supply. They're not targeting individual investors. The context that's important is that these groups, they own 10s of 1000s of homes, they don't own hundreds of 1000s, and they don't own a million, so it's a really small percentage of the housing market, whatever direction policy breaks, then the headlines that it creates are just greater in magnitude than the effect on the market is. It's an important frame of reference here. Let's meet this week's guest. This week we're welcoming back a guest that we haven't heard from in a year or two in real estate circles. He is popularly known as the mad scientist of multifamily. He's quite an in-demand speaker. He has a $500 million multifamily portfolio that he essentially shares with over 1300 investors. He's sharp, a good educator, and a straight shooter. That's why he's here. It's a warm welcome back to Neal Bawa.
Neal Bawa 10:32
Thanks for having me on the show again. It's delightful to be here, and so many interesting things to talk about in the world these days.
Keith Weinhold 10:38
There really are.. I don't know if we can get it all in, Bawa is spelled B A W A. Neal, I want to get to your future housing market outlook later. How you think the future looks, including when multi families quasi Armageddon might end. But first, you're known as a data driven real estate guy. Tell us about that, and how being data driven makes you profitable.
Neal Bawa 11:03
I see concern, and I'll tell you why. The single family and multifamily market have been atrociously incredibly divergent since the first quarter of 2022 They have not tracked yet each other at all, even though if you look at the last 50 years, they tend to track each other. So you know, 2008 was a Armageddon for single family, Armageddon for multifamily, and they both sort of came up in 2012 2013 and then they had a really good time until Covid.
Keith Weinhold 11:30
Yeah,
Neal Bawa 11:31
but the second quarter of 2022 is when Fed started raising rates, and since then we've sort of slid - multifamily has gone down in terms of pricing between 20 and 30% depending upon the metro, you know, and depending upon whether it's new construction, new construction assets have gone down more than 30% and existing assets that are filled up have gone down by 20 to 30% depending upon the metro. So, metros that have a large amount of supply, closer to 30% decline in value, the metros that have less supply probably closer to 20% decline in value, right.
Keith Weinhold 12:03
Demand demand has been pretty resilient. It's more of a supply story.
Neal Bawa 12:06
It's a huge supply story, right. So, if you look at, you know, occupancy, essentially what's happened is there was so much supply that came in that really people started on those projects in 2022 maybe they didn't start a construction until 2023 they didn't finish construction until 2025 so they started leasing up in 2025 They had to give offer concessions two months, sometimes three months free, and so that pushed down the rents in 2025. And they're not done, because you typically can't rent an apartment in six months. If it's brand new, it's going to take you about 18 months to rent it, and sometimes 24 months, and so it's affected our rents in 2025 it's affecting our rents in 2026. Now it's unlikely to affect it in 2027 but we'll go there, you know, at a later stage. But at the moment, we, what we've seen is negative rent growth in the United States for multifamily for the last 12 to 15 months, and what I think is going to be negative rent growth in Q of this year and Q2 of this year, so Q1 was negative, Q2, which we are in now, is likely to be negative or flat now. Single family, on the other hand, has gone in a different direction, which has been very difficult to understand, and I believe it's taken me a while to really understand this, but I think I've finally figured it out. Single family prices are not down since 2022 which makes no sense at all, because the average mortgage in the United States today is almost double, almost double, not quite double, but almost double of what it was in at the beginning of 2022 when interest rates were about 3.3 3.4% Right now we're sitting around, you know, six and a half percent interest rates, so not quite doubled interest rates, but they've obviously gone up a fair bit, and as a result, your average, you know, mortgage has almost doubled, but home prices haven't dropped, which makes no sense if you really think about it, because home prices are a factor of demand, and they're also a factor of people's ability to pay, so if all of a sudden within four years you're paying, the mortgage is doubled, then less people are going to be able to buy, but it stayed up, the market has stayed up, and the biggest reason it stayed up is because of what is known as the lock-in effect. So, the US market typically has a million new homes every year, and there's more than a million existing homes that are transacted, right? So, it's an open market, it's a perfect competition market, but it hasn't been perfect competition for the last four years, because so many people locked in ridiculously low interest rates.
Neal Bawa 14:28
Perfect example, in 2021 and 2022 I have a 15 year mortgage at 1.75% If I sell my house back to myself, my mortgage quadruples, quadruples, right, because it goes from 1.75% to six and a half percent, so I can't even imagine even think about leaving my home, right, because it's just such a perfect loan. Most people don't have anywhere near 1.75% but there's lots of people with more mortgages in the 3% three and a half percent, and 4% range that basically can't go anywhere, and because those homes are not coming into the market. The last three years the market has had this unusual not enough supply factor, and that's been keeping prices up. That is ending. That is ending, because what we've been tracking is the percentage of homes in the United States that have low mortgages. Low is simply defined as anything under four and a half percent, and that percentage is going down each quarter, because you know divorces happen, deaths happen, you know people move for jobs, and so every time that happens, that locked in rate goes away, because you sell your home and move on, and so for a while that lock in effect was predominant, it was controlling everything, but as time has gone on, interest rates were higher in 2324 2526 For also almost four years have passed since the rate started going up. So each quarter the percentage of homes in the US that have these low interest rates has slowly moved down, and we're almost back to a normal timeframe.
Neal Bawa 15:53
And this is causing the single family market to not have a conniption, but we're starting to see a balancing of the market, where it's not just a buyer's market anymore, in some places it's actually seller's market, some places it's a buyer's market. So we're now starting to see home prices drop in number of markets in the United States. I can't say that they've dropped in super majors, but we're seeing a flattening out effect of home prices in most metros in the US, and there should be a flattening effect. Just to be blunt, I mean, obviously I own a bunch of single-family homes, so I just wanted them to keep going up for selfish reasons. But if you think about it, we had huge home price growth in like 30 plus percent in number of years, 2021 22 and even 23 and during those years, salaries only went up by two to 3% a year. In one year, they went up by 4% and rents also went up like crazy. There was a 2021 was 15% rent growth year. So, at some point, there had to be an adjustment, and we are in that period of adjustment where single family prices are basically flat on a national basis. Yes, going up in the San Francisco Bay Area because of AI, and going up in a couple other technology-heavy metros because of AI, but otherwise fairly flat, and I don't expect that to change for the next year. So, my forecast is next 12 to 18 months, home prices in the US are going to be flat on a nominal basis, they're going to be down on an inflation-adjusted basis, but you know, because of the Iran, more inflation's three and a half percent, so home prices should go up three and a half percent. So, if they stay where they are, well, they're really dropping three and a half percent.
Keith Weinhold 17:29
Yeah, before this year began, I released our forecast, it was for 2% nominal home price appreciation in the one to four unit space for the US this year, and I still like how that looks. There's so much to unpack with what you just talked about. In my view, there's nothing unusual at all that when mortgage rates rose sharply a few years ago, that home prices rose as well. Why? Because actually, that's what usually happens, which is counterintuitive to most people. In all of our lifetimes, residential real estate prices have only fallen significantly one time, that was around 2008 due to a number of unusual circumstances. The only thing that's a bit different this time is, of course, how fast rates increased in 2022 and 2023 and people wondering if residential real estate prices could still keep up, and they certainly have, but yeah, you brought up this dichotomy, this bifurcation about how the apartment market and the one to four unit space kind of separated from each other in 2022 or 2023 That's what's so interesting.
Neal Bawa 18:36
I do want to point out a couple things, though, and I don't want to be a Pollyanna here and talk about negative stuff, but I think that there's big difference between 2008 and that timeframe and where we are today, and that difference is, and it has multiple parts. Not all of your audience is aware of this. Until about 2012 the United States had very reasonable birth rates. You know, we were one of those countries that had avoided the debacle that Japan, Korea, China, and a number of other countries are seeing South Korea being the absolute worst, where basically they were producing one baby per generation, where you need about 2.2 babies just to kind of keep your population where it is, right, and the US was unusually high in that, and that we were still above that threshold, which meant that our population would continue to grow and not fall. Now, there was two reasons our population was growing: One, we had more than 2.2 babies per household, and second, we had a very significant amount of legal and a very significant amount of illegal or undocumented immigration. Right, so we had both of those pipelines today. All three of those have flipped, so the United States now basically looks like Korea or China or Japan in that every household is producing about one and a half babies, which means that our population growth, which hasn't stopped yet, because it takes a while for these things to catch. Up is likely to stop, like it's, and at some point decline again. Luckily, we're not there yet. The US is a fairly young population, unlike Japan, which is one of the oldest populations in the world. So, it'll, we'll still continue to see population growth, but there is no doubt. And you can ask Chat GPT, right? How has population growth in the United States slowed over the last 20 years.
Neal Bawa 19:22
Make me a graph, and it will make you a very nice graph, and you'll very clearly see there's a slowdown in population growth. The second part is both documented and undocumented immigration. It's my estimate that since this administration took over, somewhere between half 1,000,001 million people have left the United States. Now it's very difficult to get an actual number, as you can imagine. A number of these people were undocumented, so we didn't really know how many there were to begin with. And a number of them, when they left, they also left by an undocumented rate, that you know, path. So we've lost a bunch of those people, and also the people that have stayed in the country, we've lost a number of them in the workforce. Here's a perfect anecdote, Keith. About 33% of the construction workforce in the United States was undocumented, one in three. In Texas, as much as 40%
Keith Weinhold 19:45
Yeah, that's huge.
Neal Bawa 19:45
It's very significant. Number of those people don't show up for work anymore. I don't think they've left the US, at least I don't think so. But they don't show up for work anymore, because that's how they get caught, right. So, what we've seen is that the construction workforce in the United States has become been decimated over the last 12 months, and the impact is much greater in the second half of 2025 than the first half. Why? Because even though they wanted to do ICE enforcement, they just simply didn't have enough agents, enough facilities, enough judges. When the second half of last year, they sort of started catching up on that, hiring more agents, getting more facilities, getting more judges, and so we started to see a real challenge there. I have properties in 10 markets in the US, and what I can say is about seven of those markets, mostly Southern markets, I am beginning to see dropping occupancy related to this phenomenon. I'm seeing a reduction, and so markets like Georgia and Texas, Florida are more hit than my northern markets like Idaho. I haven't seen any impact at all, but these southern markets, multiple properties, multiple metros, I'm seeing this - people, mostly of Spanish, Mexican origin, not renewing leases. I don't know what they're doing. I don't know if they're sleeping in their cars. I don't know if they're basically just, you know, staying with mom or staying with, you know, some other family. But I'm seeing a very, very big pullback in my leases tied to this, and occupancy is dropping in those markets that are heavily Hispanic. And so I'm seeing the impact of that on landlords, but I also know that there's an impact on the US at all, and overall demand on rentals, whether it's single family or multifamily. This is a significant impact, because I don't think that the Republicans are going to make a U-turn on this. I don't want to get political, but you know, stating the obvious.
Keith Weinhold 19:45
Yes, United States had its biggest birth year in 2007 when there were more than 4 million babies born. The average age of the first time homebuyer today is 40 years old. If that holds true, that peak would take place in 2047 And then, yes, to your point about changes in immigration, yes, it sounds like a potentially a reduction in demand with what you're talking about, with some vacancies, and also maybe a reduction in supply when you have fewer construction workers to build these places as well, we're talking about building properties. Neal, I want to talk to you about the build to rent space. Somewhat is build to rent better than traditional real estate? I think that's what we really want to know. And for those that don't know, build to rent means when you construct a property where from day one that construction project is built for a tenant, not an owner occupant. I see a lot of pros and cons there. Can you talk to us about the trade-offs between build to rent and traditional real estate?
Neal Bawa 19:52
Yeah, if you think about it, it's a really terrible word, built to rent, because if you think about the word built to rent should be apartments, right, but actually doesn't mean apartments, right? So, built to rent actually means single family or town homes that were built to rent out, right? And then you're like, why don't they just said built to rent apartments and town homes? Well, you know, was too long an acronym, and we suck at acronyms anyway. But BTR, or built to rent, is essentially building single family or town homes, but specifically building them to rent, and it doesn't include any apartments at all, right? And the reason why the BTR market was growing in the last five or six years is that roughly 18 million American families can no longer afford to buy starter single family homes, you know, and by starter I mean, small old single-family homes. That's how Americans usually started, you know, in their 20s and 30s. They would buy these homes, some of them, but they would fix up, and then they over time, in their 30s, late 30s and 40s and 50s, they would upgrade, and then at starting the 50s, it would flatten out, and then the 60s, they would start to downgrade, right? That's been a typical thing that's happened in America for 56 5070, years. Well, that is, cannot happen anymore. And it broke in 2022 until 2022 It was a normal cycle beyond 2022 because interest rates almost doubled, and the mortgages almost doubled, but the incomes only increased by 10 to 20% There became this orphaned generation of Americans, roughly 18 million families, that simply cannot afford to buy that starter home, and they are now forever renters. They don't know it. They think that they're going to catch up at some point, but five minutes with an Excel spreadsheet, I could prove it to them that they're not going to catch up.
Neal Bawa 25:35
Maybe one in 100 families would see a very large increase in income, and that would result in them catching up, but for the most part, as a group, these 18 million families, they're forever enters as a group that didn't exist before 2021 right. It's entirely because of this outrageous increase in mortgages, while not seeing a drop in home prices, that led to this, and so those orphan families, they actually earn pretty well, so these are families that make 70, 80, $90,000 in mid markets. They make over $100,000 if they're living on the coasts or in expensive markets, and they still can't buy that, you know, starter home. And so they don't want to live in apartments. I have lots of apartments, old ones, new ones, and I want these people to live there, but they don't want to live there, and so they've been looking for an option, and that option has been developers like me building communities of 200 300 townhomes or single family homes with a small little yard, and then basically from day one, instead of selling them, renting them out, and then once you're done renting out the whole community with 200 tenants, then you sell that to an apartment company. You know, there's lots of apartment companies in the US that have 100,000 units. Well, they want to buy these because the turnover is lower. So, what happens is most of these town homes and single-family homes for rent. Families come in, and they typically rent for three to five years before they move, whereas in on my apartments I lose 40% of my tenants each year. So, if I have 200 tenants, I lose 80 of them every year, and I have to basically go back, clean up those units, deal with the vacancy. But when I have townhome communities like my Idaho Falls townhome community. I lose a tenant at roughly every four years, and so, as you can imagine, profitability goes up when turnover goes down, right?
Neal Bawa 27:31
Because you don't have that cost of turnover and vacancy, and so eventually those large landlords that are holding 100,000 units figured out, I like this, what Neal Bawa is doing, he's building these 200 townhomes, I want to buy these from him when they're rented. I don't want to build them, I don't want to lease them up, I just want to buy them when they're stabilized. And so BTR became that name for that marketplace where developers would build townhomes and single families, rent them out, and then sell them to institutional, and it was some—
Keith Weinhold 27:56
People think of fabulous institutionalization of the starter home.
Neal Bawa 28:00
And in many ways it is, because what happened is, for a while, these institutional players, like Blackstone and BlackRock, they were like, we are just going to go out and buy 50,000 single-family homes, and that's going to be the institutionalized. Well, that worked really well if you bought in 2008 2009 2010 2011 because you got them bought them at a discount, but when they started buying them in 2015, 16, 17, 18 at ever higher prices, they didn't make any money. So the vast majority of these public funds that were created to buy large amounts of single family have failed if they've purchased anything in the last seven or eight years. If they bought before that, they made huge amounts of money. Family homes are so expensive that basically buying them for rental did not make sense, so these companies have now pivoted to saying we'll only buy communities that have 100 or 200 or 300 of these homes, because then we get the benefits of having centralized leasing, centralized property management, centralized maintenance, and I don't have homes spread all over the metro, they're all in one place, and I can make more profit from that. In theory, that's been good, and you might think that I'm bullish on BTR, but I'm actually today bearish on BTR for one single reason. About seven months ago, Republicans started talking about a bill - I don't know what the name of the bill is, but what this bill does is it forces builds to rent developers like me within seven years of building the property to sell all of the homes in that property to single family tenants, not to Blackstone, not to Blackrock, but to single family tenants. Hasn't passed yet, but it passed the Senate with an 8910 vote, which means that both Democrats and Republicans wanted to vote for this. If it passes the House, and because Donald Trump himself is very heavily opposed to it, he's made it very clear he doesn't like this. He's a developer, obviously. It hasn't passed the House yet, but if it passes the house, that will destroy the build to rent market. No one will ever build build to rent, because the worst possible thing is I build this, and within seven years I have to actually sell it to individual buyers. If I do that, my banks are going to hate me and not give me loans to build BTR anymore. Obviously, there's going to be some grandfathering to the communities that I'm building now, or maybe even build the ones that I'm building in 2027 maybe grandfathered. It usually is, because you know, Congress never does anything retroactively, and they give you a year or two, but if it passes, it's doomsday for BTR. I hope it doesn't happen, but that's the way it's looking, because it's bipartisan. Bipartisan bills are more likely to pass
Keith Weinhold 30:40
Now for the mom and pop investor, the individual investor build to rents have obvious appeal due to your point about the lower turnover, lower maintenance costs on a new build, lower insurance costs often on a new build, and then there's the tenant appeal to a new build as well, but of course there is that investor downside. I think a lot of investors are aware of their thin initial cash flow that they're going to have on build to rent, but you know, Neal, another downside with build to rent, I think a lot of investors don't look at is, hey, just how many of these things are they building? Are they building 500 of them? Do I have some overbuild risk if I buy into this community that could suppress occupancy and rents for a while.
Neal Bawa 31:21
What we've seen is that when Built to Rent started out in 2017-2018 it was its own asset class. It wasn't competing with apartments, it wasn't competing with single family rentals, it was just its own thing. However, in the last two or three years, as more and more apartments flooded the marketplace, we had a glut. It moved away from that. It basically started getting affected, and the rent started falling, just like any other portion of the market. You know, think of it as three portions of market. There's the built to rent, which I described, you know, brand new single family homes, town homes per rent. There's the apartments, both brand new and existing, and there's the single family rentals, right, which there are millions of. What we are seeing now is it's become one market, right? All of them are affecting each other, and the apartments, which have a huge amount of glut, there's a massive amount of new apartments that have come in in the last two years, are really pushing the rents down for single family, they're pushing that rents down for BTR. So, at this point, what I would say to people that have this concern, Keith, is simply look at incoming apartment supply, because if you're in a marketplace, and I'll give you examples of really good markets that are crushed right now. If you're in a market that has a lot of incoming supply, whether you buy a single family rental, a quadplex, a 50 plex that's an apartment, or 100 unit BTR, you're going to suffer for rent growth if you have a lot of incoming supply in 2026 and that is across the board in every market in the US. Huntsville, Alabama is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting markets in the US for 5 year, 10 year growth, right?
Neal Bawa 32:54
If I had to say you don't need a loan, it's just your own cash, no investors, where would you put money in? It would be at the top of my list, not at the very top. Idaho Falls is definitely the number one market in the US in my list, but Huntsville is up there. But right now, do you know what rent growth in Huntsville is? Minus 2% negative 2% Why? Because there's 6000 units coming into a market that's, you know, 1/5 or 1/10 the size of Phoenix, right. It's 1/10 the size of Dallas, but it has half the units of Dallas or Phoenix coming in, and so rent growth is negative there. So, what I would say is today absolutely everyone that is an investor should understand that we live in the magic world of AI, and you should be talking with Chat GPT about incoming supply for any market that you're interested in, and using that to make your decisions, because all of these markets merged, BTR, new apartments, old apartments, single family, everything has emerged in the last 24 months, where they're all affecting each other, and if there's too much supply of any one kind, it's affecting all of the other markets, and that's the message that I have. And none of this is like you have to go buy a $25,000 software like Costar today. Chat GPT is your costar.
Keith Weinhold 34:11
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Speaker 1 36:00
This is the star of the A E Show, The Real Estate Commission. Todd Rollette. Listen to Get Rich Education with my friend Keith Weinhold, and don't quit your daydream.
Keith Weinhold 36:20
Welcome back to Get Rised Education. We're talking with Neal Bawa, a really sharp multifamily syndicator who's also highly data driven. And Neal, tell us more about the beleaguered multifamily market that had those aforementioned problems really cropping up in 2022 and we had a lot of supply and spiking rates. What does it look like for the path to recovery for the US multifamily market?
Neal Bawa 36:45
Luckily, demand is strong, and even though occupancies have dropped, typically the multifamily market, the large multifamily market in the US, tends to be between 95 and 96% occupied. Okay, and right now we're on 93% so that all that incoming supply means that about 7% of our apartments in the US are empty at the moment, we're trying to fill them, and we are seeing that occupancy drop, not across just new apartments that are leasing up, but also drop in class B and class C. We've also seen a huge increase in concessions, so I studied this quite obsessively, and I can tell you that 2026 in some markets is the recovery year, but not across the board in the United States, and the reason for that is sentiment. Once renters get used to huge amounts of concessions, it's like a drug, it takes a little while before you wean those renters off of those drugs, and so there's that hit right now. Every renter program,
Keith Weinhold 37:44
Everyone wants their freebie for good.
Neal Bawa 37:46
Yeah, exactly. It's like, hey, what, you're not giving me two months free? Hey, what, you're not even offering me one month free? It takes a while for that expectation to happen, because there's such a huge amount of concessions in the US. So, to me, there are a few markets, usually the smaller markets or very fast growing markets, where there's a recovery in 2026 but otherwise 2027 The first half of 2027 is recovery. The second half of 2027 is fast rent growth in a lot of markets. Why? Because remember, interest rates have been high since 2023 A lot of projects were started in 2022 went into construction in 23 came to market in 25 and 26 Lease ups are happening in 25 and 26 By early mid 27 these are all leased up, right? The second half of 2027 there isn't a lot of delivery in any of these big markets, because to deliver in the second half of 27 you would have started construction in that second half of 2025 and I counted those permits market by market. There's just not a lot, because by that time everyone knew that projects were not getting funded, everyone knew that interest rates were high, so there wasn't a lot of supply of new starts in the apartment market in the second half of 25 so there's not going to be a lot of delivery in the second half of 27 and all of the existing stuff would have been leased by then. So 2026 is one of those years where we could still see more concessions in the second half of 2026 I still see rent growth for apartments to be flat. You mentioned single family might be a little bit higher. It tends to be a little bit higher than apartments in terms of rent growth, but I think flat rent growth for 2026 is what I'm projecting. I'm projecting small rent growth in the first half of 2027 for most markets, and then I'm projecting robust rent growth, call it 3% or greater on an annualized basis, in the second half of 2027 and I'm projecting that most markets in the US that are not seeing a population drop, so count out places like Detroit are going to see a very aggressive rent growth, four or 5% rent growth, that's aggressive in our world, in 2028 28 and 29 are shaping up to be. Supply deficit years, years where supply is well under demand.
Keith Weinhold 40:05
It's pretty easy to project completions when you just go ahead and look at starts, and really, what you're counting is the story of absorption.
Neal Bawa 40:14
Yep, and what's nice about apartments is you can actually build a single family home in about nine months, right, but you can't build apartments in less than 24 months. There's just so much permitting issues, there's so many delivery issues, fire code issues, and so we have a crystal ball on the multifamily side that we are now getting better at using. I don't think the industry was very good at this in 2022 but now we're really all obsessed with how many permits does my metro have, and how many permits does my state, and how many permits does the US have? And everyone that I know in the industry that's data driven knows that there's a massive glut now, maybe a little bit of a glutton that remaining portion of 2026 equilibrium in 27 and a huge, huge supply deficit in 28 and 29 So everything that I'm doing is based on this, and this crystal ball actually works because of that two year gap between shovels in the ground and delivery,
Keith Weinhold 41:10
and it sounds like you've recommended Chat GPT as a go-to source for investors to look into these things, that happens to be my favorite one as well, and you are well, maybe it's a bit too much to say, but it almost feels like to me pioneering with the way that you use AI. In fact, I know before our show today you were running some other things in the background that made me wonder, hey, am I talking to the real Neil or the clone Neil? I know I've got the real Neil here, but why don't you tell us about how you're using AI to make data-driven decisions in real estate?
Neal Bawa 41:40
Sure, so the first thing is that we've completed our journey with the low hanging fruit of AI. Every single person in our company is fully trained on how to use Chat GPT. Most of our research-related processes are automated. For example, 100% of our investor updates are now written by Chat GPT. What we do is we go into our property manager meetings on Mondays or Tuesdays sit down with them, beat them up, and the transcript is then taken by our team in the Philippines. They take that transcript and put it into a pre-trained Chat GPT string, it's called a custom GPT, and the string took a while to train, but now that it's trained, all it needs is a transcript. We just copy paste it in, we don't give it any instructions, and it outputs a really wonderful investor update, right. And so our updates for our investors are 99% written by AI. Of course, we'll go in and add our comments at the end of the process. So we've automated investor updates, rent comps, so you know if we are underwriting a new property today, what we do is we simply go into a Google file and copy paste the address and hit enter roughly once a minute. A software, which is written by AI - we're not coders, but the software knows how to write code - it checks the file, if it sees a new address, it goes in there, grabs the address, and then it basically goes to apartments.com rent.com realtor.com and all of these places, and checks the rents for this particular property in two mile radius. It eliminates all the ones that don't match, like you don't want to match the rents of a 1970 or 80s built property with a brand new 25 built property. Those are not comps, it's not comparable. So it basically is very careful, it keeps a radius range of two miles, and also basically is a property of the same kind, you know, like it never matches up a three story property with a 10 story property. Those don't match, one of them obviously is more of a central business district or downtown sort of thing, and so it basically grabs all of those rent comps and then puts them into a file and posts in a Slack channel. Usually it takes it about 1213 minutes to do that, and so whoever put that address in about 12 minutes later goes into the Slack channel and says, "Hmm, these are all my rent comps, right? And boom, now you're basically, you have all these ready rent comps. So, what we've done is, we've automated a significant portion of what we are doing with both our property managers and inside the company with acquisitions and things like that, we're also scraping massive amounts of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, which we just couldn't deal with that data before, and building very beautiful, very interactive dashboards. We don't use Chat GPT for that. We find for dashboarding a tool called Claude, which is by a company called Anthropic, is much better, so we have currently over 150 interactive dashboards that Claude has created that update in real time and give us access to data. If anything, I find that we are in this incredible time where decision making has become much easier, as long as you spend time with these tools. So, in our company we have an absolute mandate that no one has broken for the last year. One year per day, people must program, and by programming we mean issuing common language instructions to tools and build dashboards and build software that automates our work. Have we laid off anyone because of this? I mean that. Be the next obvious question. The answer is no, because it's made it easier for us to serve a much larger audience, so it's easier to grow your company. We just are not hiring anyone, and we haven't hired anybody for the last 18 months, so we have a hiring freeze, but at the same time all of our people are employed because they're they're now much more valuable. So everyone in our company is now a programmer, and even though that sounds weird, it's completely true.
Neal Bawa 45:24
Every single person in our company writes code, and they write code by talking with Cloud Code or talking with Chat GPT, and then Chat GPT, of course, does the actual code writing, but people have become very, very good at answering questions and saying, "I want a dashboard like this, turn these radio buttons into drop boxes, and give me the last month, and last three months, and last 12 months, and do this, and do that, and connect this, and I also want to host this on a server, but I want to make sure that only I can see it. I need a password added. Imagine 1000 of these conversations happening in our company every day. Yeah, that's interesting. And what you just described
Keith Weinhold 46:00
there at Gro Capitas is somewhat of a microcosm for what's happening in the broader economy, where we've been in this low high or low fire environment for quite a while. Well, Neal, as we're winding down here, we recently had a new Fed chair come in. It seems incomprehensible to me that there could possibly be any rate cuts. I don't know how we could responsibly make a rate cut with all these inflationary layers. We had the pandemic, and then terrorists, and then the Iran war, and the energy shocks, and all these bottled up supply chains. What are your thoughts with regard to the Fed?
Neal Bawa 46:29
I still think that we'll get one rate cut, and that rate cut will be based on political pressure. So, for the first time ever, I have seen the Fed break into factions, so if you look at the latest Fed meeting, which happened, you know, there was dissent, there were two clear factions, so the Fed is becoming less data driven and more faction driven, and I think that one of the factions, which obviously wants rate cuts to go down, is going to triumph at some point later in the year, but until we get past the incredible increase in inflation because of the Iran war, I don't think that faction is going to win. Right, there's three or four people in that faction, that's not enough votes to get past the others. So I'm predicting no rate cuts until Q4 of this year. If the Fed was entirely logical, there should still not be a rate card in Q4, but I think it'll happen because there's political pressure.
Keith Weinhold 47:25
The preservation of independence is key. Neil Bhawa, this has been great, and a lot of people learn from you. You're a brilliant educator, as well as what you're doing in the multifamily space, and a lot of other places. So, if someone wants to connect with you, learn more about what you do. What's the best way for them to do that?
Neal Bawa 47:43
So we built a website called Multi Family University. It's completely free. There is no subscription. There's no upsell. We do not have an educational product, but what we do is each year we have 8-12 webinars that we create with their extraordinarily good looking thanks to the use of AI. Yay, and we share them with an audience, and usually between 5000 and 1000 people attend our webinars each year, of which roughly 1% become investors with us. The rest, the remaining 99% just continue to get free access to data, and we cover every imaginable real estate topic: Single family, multifamily, industrial hotels, self storage, Airbnb, and even controversial topics outside of real estate, like climate change or impact of climate change and impact of AI. So you know, multifamily university is the best place you can go to, multifamily you.com/club It's a free club, and it's free forever.
Keith Weinhold 48:42
Neal, it's been valuable to our audience. Thanks so much for coming back out of the show.
Neal Bawa 48:46
Thanks for having me.
Keith Weinhold 48:53
Oh, a terrific, wide-ranging chat with Neal. There, yes, this interesting 2022 divergence between single family and multifamily, the slowing birth rate, and how that won't really catch up with real estate in a big way for perhaps 20 plus more years. How single family rentals beat multifamily on the basis of tenant retention, and a lot more that we covered there, and he's got a good data driven timeline for apartments being back in favor by 2027 and 2028 After the interview, Neil and I chatted some more off Mike, and he would like to come back on the show next year. We're probably going to have him, because we have a lot more to talk about at that time. We can see if the multifamily market is really healing. Also, did you pick up on this? I wonder why, for his own home he would get a 15 year mortgage at 1.75% interest, so I'll have to ask him about that. That's surely a fantastic interest rate, but a 15 year loan rather than a 30 year that maybe he could have gotten at two and a half percent at the time. Well, 15 year probably. Is not the best use of capital, because it increases your equity position rapidly. When instead, those dollars could have been out in the market earning an actual return somewhere else. But he's a smart guy, he must have an answer. We can talk about that at that time. We've got a lot of terrific shows coming up here on the GRE podcast, specific learning episodes, where it's just me teaching you, as well as new guests and returning guests too. Until next week, I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your daydream.
Speaker 2 50:35
Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial, or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of Get Rich Education LLC exclusively.
Speaker 2 51:03
The preceding program was brought to you by Your Home for Wealth Building, getricheducation.com.
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