BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 967: BiggerNews: Apartment Investing Took a Huge Hit, Is a Comeback On the Way? w/Brian Burke

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

Almost overnight, multifamily investing went from red-hot to something not even the most experienced investors would touch. After interest rates went up, rent growth stalled, and apartment supply floo...ded the market, the apartment investing industry became the ugly duckling of real estate. Owners struggled to get tenants and had huge balloon payments due, and no one was there to save them. But one man predicted that this would happen before anyone else—Brian Burke. After seeing a crash on the horizon, Brian sold off most of his multifamily real estate portfolio and did it at just the right time. Now, he has a new prediction that could make apartment investors very happy. But a market turnaround won’t come quickly, and if you want to ensure you don’t make the same mistakes most multifamily investors made in 2020 - 2022, you’ll need to hear this BiggerNews episode.  In this BiggerNews, Brian walks through everything that went wrong with multifamily real estate, signs it’s time to sell your properties, and some hope on the horizon for 2025 that most investors have no idea about. Support today’s show sponsor, Rent App: the free and easy way to collect rent! In This Episode We Cover A multifamily real estate update and Brian’s buying plans for 2024 and 2025 The “sobering reality” of the perfectly timed “traffic accident” that hit multifamily all at once  Why as soon as you sense “irrational exuberance,” it may be time to sell your real estate  An optimistic prediction from Brian on when multifamily could finally get back on its feet Syndication struggles and what every syndicator/investor should be doing NOW  Why the multifamily oversupply may NOT be a problem in the coming years  And So Much More! Links from the Show Find an Agent Find a Lender BiggerPockets Youtube Channel BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Pro Membership BiggerPockets Bookstore BiggerPockets Bootcamps BiggerPockets Podcast BiggerPockets Merch Property Manager Finder Join BiggerPockets for FREE Learn About Real Estate, The Housing Market, and Money Management with The BiggerPockets Podcasts Get More Deals Done with The BiggerPockets Investing Tools Find a BiggerPockets Real Estate Meetup in Your Area Expand Your Investing Knowledge With the BiggerPockets Books Be a Guest on the BiggerPockets Podcast Ask David Your Real Estate Investing Question Dave’s BiggerPockets Profile Dave’s Instagram BiggerPockets’ Instagram Listen to Dave on the “On The Market” Podcast See Dave at BPCON2024 in Cancun! On the Market Podcast 214 – What to Know About “Capital Calls” As Multifamily Syndications Get “Squeezed” w/Brian Burke Book Mentioned in the Show The Hands-Off Investor by Brian Burke Connect with Brian: Brian’s BiggerPockets Profile (00:00) Intro (01:57) "Irrational Exuberance” (08:52) Investors Get Hungry (11:34) Developers Come In (14:34) The Sobering Reality (19:01) Distressed Properties (22:02) Don’t Buy Anything? (23:41) Long-Term Multifamily Predictions (26:30) Syndication Struggles Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-967 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email advertise@biggerpockets.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 It seems like every single media asset that I look at has some sort of headline saying that you should stay away from commercial investing or that multifamily is in trouble. So when did all of this negative sentiment start? And why are we seeing this softness? Today, we're covering everything on the multifamily asset class. Hey, investors, I'm Dave Meyer. And in this episode, we were bringing back a fan favorite and a bigger pocket's OG member. Brian Burke. You've probably seen him on this podcast or some of our sister podcast. He was recently on on the market. And we bring him on a lot because Brian is a seasoned investor in the multifamily space. And today we're going to pepper him with questions about multifamily. And he's going to start by giving us a little bit of a history lesson to help us understand what some of the
Starting point is 00:00:58 macroeconomic, some of the housing demographic trends that led us to where we are in. multi-family. And before we jump into this, I just want to clarify that when we say multifamily, we are specifically talking about commercial real estate assets, which are defined as five or more units. And that may seem like a arbitrary number, but it's actually not. It comes from lending. And the reason we're sticking with just one side of this and just talking about those large multifamily assets is that the residential housing market and the commercial real estate, market work pretty differently, and you can see dynamics exist in one, and it can be the totally opposite in the other. And last thing, before we bring on Brian, our bigger news episode
Starting point is 00:01:46 today is brought to you by Rent app, the free and easy way to collect rent. Learn more at rent.com. App slash landlord. All right, let's bring on Brian. All right, Brian, to start the show from pre-COVID times, can you just give us a little bit of a history, and help us understand how we got to where we are now with multifamily in the somewhat concerning state it's in today. Well, how about irrational exuberance? Maybe that's how we got here. And I think that really applies on a number of fronts. So let's break that down.
Starting point is 00:02:26 Residents, prospective residents, got some irrational exuberance of wanting to move into new apartments or move to new areas. And we're competing for a limited amount of apartment stock, which drove up rents tremendously, kind of starting pre-COVID actually, about 2018, 2019, rents started to climb. And then by 2020, after COVID, they just really went into hyperdrive. At the same time, investors got irrational exuberance because they all wanted a piece of the action. Everybody wanted to buy multifamily. You know, buy apartment complexes. That was the thing.
Starting point is 00:03:04 And then while all this was going on, developers were in the background going like, look at this interesting multifamily opportunity. Demand for apartments is really high. Demand from buyers is really high. Call your architects. Call your land brokers. And let's get going. And unfortunately, as the development business is, it takes two, three, four years before those projects go from concept to reality. And now kind of here we are post-COV.
Starting point is 00:03:34 and, you know, post-inflation and all these other things. And, you know, rents are a lot higher than they were pre-COVID. Pricing for apartments went really, really high. And then when the developers' projects all started coming online and inflation became a headline, interest rates went up. And all of this stuff collided at exactly the same time to find us where we are now. All right. That's a great summary. But I do want to dig in here because the whole point in this conversation is to really understand some of the context and history that's led us to today. So you can understand the dynamics that are going on and what might happen in the near future. So you started by saying that there is irrational exuberance among renters, which is not where
Starting point is 00:04:22 I thought you would start. So can you tell us a little bit more about that? You said even back to 2018 renters were starting to move and move particularly into mold. multifamily. Yeah, and renovated apartments. You know, there was a lot of demand for renovated apartments. There was a lot of demand for apartments in general. And that was just because we have a housing shortage. In general, there's a housing shortage in a lot of markets. And when people are moving around, especially if you're moving to a new city, you know, you're moving out of California because cost of living is so high or New York because cost of living is so high. And you're moving to a new area. Most people don't just move to the new area and just straight out buy a home. Usually they'll go rent an apartment. And when you have limited amount of supply, you know, these units will get bid up by tenants.
Starting point is 00:05:11 Not like the tenants are standing at an auction going, you know, another hundred, another hundred. It doesn't work like that. But those rents will go up as the occupancies start to get squeezed, you know, and when occupancies are 98, 99 percent, landlords are emboldened and they can increase rents. And that all started long before COVID came along. COVID just put it in amplified hyperdrive. Okay, got it. So people were moving across the country and they wasn't an availability or desire to rent a single family home.
Starting point is 00:05:41 And I also think one of the interesting things about multifamily, especially when people are moving, is that often they have multiple units on the market. It's easier to see them sight unseen. They're more, you know, preset layout. So people who are moving are often a bit more comfortable with multifamily than, you know, getting sort of a unique one-off, small multifamily or something like that. At that point, in 2018, 2019, that sort of thing, what was the supply level? It sounds like it was relatively low or stable in multifamily if vacancies were going down and, you know, occupancy was so high. Is that right? Yeah, it was relatively stable. There weren't a lot of housing units under construction. I think if you look at construction trends over the last decade, there's always been, well, actually, you can go back two decades, maybe even three.
Starting point is 00:06:29 there's been dialogue about how construction isn't keeping up with household formation, increases in population and that sort of stuff. And, you know, population of the U.S. was increasing pre-COVID. Actually, post-COVID, it came to a grinding halt. But pre-COVID, we had population growth. And, you know, I know you're surprised that I started with irrational exuberance from tenants, but all of this has to start somewhere. Investors aren't interested in buying apartments no one wants,
Starting point is 00:06:58 but when people want apartments, and that's driving up incomes, investors then want a piece of that. And so that's what drives buyers. And then the buyers and the tenant prospects is what drives the developers. So it all has to start somewhere. If the tenants didn't have irrational exuberance early on, none of those other things would ever have happened. And let's take a quick break here from the history lesson. I want to know what you were doing and thinking at this time, the 2018, 2019 time because you once on a previous episode of the show said something, I always remember you said,
Starting point is 00:07:34 there's a time to buy, there's a time to sell, there's a time to sit on the beach. So which of the three were you doing in 2018 and 2019? That was the time to buy. And we were buying. We were buying in 20, well, all the way from 2011, all the way through 2020, we were buying. 2018, 19, we were buying a lot of units, hundreds of units per year, maybe even thousands in some of those years. And we were renovating and, you know, improving revenue and doing all the things. And what was funny is every time we did that, I would always get a comment by someone where they would say something like, how is it even possible to make money in this market?
Starting point is 00:08:20 You know, prices already went up. You know, they're just going to go down and it's impossible to make any money. And it's like, all right, all right, watch this. And then we would get another one. And then six months later, you know, we'd get another one. I'd get the same comment. Well, how is it possible? And so, you know, that's when I think it's a good time to buy is when some people are still
Starting point is 00:08:41 questioning whether or not it's a good time to buy is a lot of times a good time to buy. Well, that makes sense, and good for you. I think that that was probably very wise in retrospect. So right after this, maybe 18 and 19, is that when the investor irrational exuberance kicked in? It really started kicking in 2021. It was when it really went overboard. So there was a lot of investor interest in 2019 in multifamily, because I think a lot of people were saying like, all right, for the last five years, I've been saying that we missed it. It's too late. And I keep not buying anything. And the prices keep going up. So they finally started to give in and say, like, we're going to buy. And so we started to get just a threat of this irrational exuberance in 2019.
Starting point is 00:09:30 And that all got erased in early 2020. As soon as COVID came out, everybody was like pencils down. We don't know what's going to happen. The world's going to come to an end. Nobody can leave their house ever again, and all this stuff. And transaction volume plummeted very, very quickly. In a matter of days, transaction volume went down about 75, 80 percent from where it was just months prior. So it didn't take long, though, to realize that the worst of the fears weren't going to materialize and actually rent started climbing dramatically. And once that happened, that's when the investor irrational exuberance really kicked into hyper speed. And I just want to help people understand why increasing rents might create that exuberance,
Starting point is 00:10:20 because if you're not familiar, one of the common ways that people think about valuing commercial real estate is based on net operating income. A lot of how, as an investor, you look at it as like, how much revenue can it produce? And so when a asset, like a large multifamily property, starts to see rent increase, a lot of investors think I should buy now because the value of that asset's going to be tied to, in some ways, to that rent increase. And is that why people were buying despite some of the warnings, Brian? Yeah. I mean, when you think, when you really break this down into the simplest, you know, of terms, forget about the real estate. You're buying an income stream. and a growing income stream is always worth more than a stagnant income stream or a shrinking income stream.
Starting point is 00:11:10 So if rents are increasing and this income stream is getting larger and you pay X for Y of income, it stands to reason that Y plus one will be worth X times two. So that's the whole theory behind it. The real estate is just the hard asset that gets you there. But really it's the income stream. is really what you're buying. Very, very well said. All right, so we're starting now to get a sense of how multifamily arrived at this point,
Starting point is 00:11:39 but how has this perfect storm impacted investors? And how can investors deal with the issues facing this sector today? Brian's going to break down his take on occupancy, funding, and more after the break. Most investors spend more time chasing deals than reviewing their insurance. But a quick coverage check can be fast. easy and one of these smartest ways to protect and even improve your property's cash flow. As the months get colder, frozen pipes, icy walkways, and seasonal wear and tear can increase the likelihood of claims. And traditional insurance companies aren't always built to handle these
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Starting point is 00:15:24 landlord insurance designed for the modern investor. Welcome back to bigger news. I'm here with Brian Burke talking about the state of multifamily. Let's jump back in. I want to revisit what you said earlier about developers. And as you said, it could take three, four years to get a multifamily development. When did we start to see an increase in development activity, pulling permits, starting construction? It really started kicking in about 2022. In fact, I'm looking right now at a chart put out by Real Page that shows multifamily quarterly apartment supply. And the supply started really kicking in middle of 22. There was a little bit of bump in mid-20, but it really started to kick in in 22. Now, that means that they would have started all of that process in 2017 to 2018. maybe 2019.
Starting point is 00:16:28 So about the time when I said that buyer irrational exuberance was just kind of beginning, developers saw that right away. And like I said before, they call up your architect, call up your landbroker, they get these projects underway. And then by the time they start releasing out units, it's now three to four years later, which coincides exactly with the increases in deliveries that we saw in middle of 22. Yeah, and I just pulled it, just to help us out here, I just pulled up the number of multifamily building permits.
Starting point is 00:17:01 So basically when they start construction. And, you know, through the early 2000s, it was 400, 450,000. It totally plummeted during the financial recession. And leading up to COVID, we were back to that level, 450,000, 470,000. Well, we got to 2021, it went up nearly 50% to 600,000. And in 2022, it went up to nearly 700,000. thousand. So it seems like even past the point where you were feeling irrational exuberance, people were still starting projects, which I think we'll get to in a couple minutes,
Starting point is 00:17:37 but may lead us to why we're still seeing sort of this increasing amount of supply. But before we go there, I want to get back to this 2021-2020 era and return to what I guess we'll call the Brian Burke Index, where you buying, selling or sitting on the beach during that time. In 21 and 22, I was selling. I could clearly see the irrational exuberance on behalf of buyers. And when someone wants something really, really badly, and you have that something that they want, you should not deny them the opportunity to have it. How generous have you.
Starting point is 00:18:16 Yes, of course. So I was aggressively selling in 21 and 22, sold about three quarters of our portfolio during that 18-month period of time. Well, good for you. It sounds like you timed the market very well. So with that history lesson in mind, can you maybe just bring us up the last year or two, 2023, 2024, where it seems like things spilled over from irrational exuberance to sobering reality?
Starting point is 00:18:44 Or I don't know what you would call it. Yeah, that's a really good term. I like that a lot. I say either it's that or it's a, you know, a travering reality. traffic accident that spread glass all over the intersection. Oh, God. Because everyone showed up at the same time and nobody stopped at the red light. Oh, wow.
Starting point is 00:19:03 And they all hit each other right in the middle of the intersection. And so who got in the crash? Interest rates got in the crash. Insurance prices got in the crash. General costs of doing business, such as payroll, office supplies, building materials, everything else got in the crash. rents got in the crash because the developers are in the car too, and they started releasing all these units, and now there's so many apartments that she's from that vacancy started to increase. So there was this
Starting point is 00:19:35 kind of perfect storm where apartment owners were getting hit from all directions. This is a four-way intersection, and there was a car coming from every single direction, and they all collided in the middle because you're getting hit from your debt service, expenses, and income all at the same time. That is a very good and graphic description of what's going on, but I think it does paint a very good picture of how challenging things are right now. And so how does this play out? If you were someone, let's just say, who bought in 2021 or 2022, how would this, you know, confluence of negative events impact valuations, rent, everything? Well, a lot of it depends on how your capital is structured. If you have a loan maturity coming within the next year or two, or you already have faced a loan maturity and you're on some sort of a kick-the-can down-the-road extension, this situation could play out much differently than if you have a long-term time horizon. Because if you have the ability to wait, as always has been the
Starting point is 00:20:46 case with real estate, time heals all wounds. And eventually, these things will normalize, things will come back, rent growth will come back. I kind of see the path of progress to look something like this. The high number of apartment deliveries, meaning new construction, is going to decline because these developers can't continue to get financing for these projects at today's interest rates, material costs are higher. You know, a lot of the reason some of these projects still went off the ground was because they were past the point of no return. They kind of had to finish them.
Starting point is 00:21:25 That's going to come to an end. And once that supply starts to come down, that's going to help. The other thing that I think will happen is with less to choose from, residents are going to fill the apartments that remain, and that's going to solve. to a degree the occupancy problem. Perhaps insurance rates will normalize some. Perhaps this is the new normal. It's hard to say.
Starting point is 00:21:53 That depends a little bit on natural disasters and insurance companies and that sort of stuff. And I think at some point, inflation will finally moderate, not because the Fed was brilliant and used the best tool in their toolbox to tamp it down, but just because eventually that's going to happen,
Starting point is 00:22:14 And that will force interest rates to normalize. Now, what normalize means is anybody's guess. Does it mean zero interest rate policy again? Probably not. Is today's higher rates the new normal? Maybe, maybe not quite as high. It's a little tough to say. But I would assume that the way this kind of plays out is over the next three to five years,
Starting point is 00:22:35 you're going to see demand, improve, supply, reduce, interest rates normalize, costs normalize, and then the apartment market will begin to accept the current reality, get back on its feet, go to the body shop and get the car fixed, and get back on the road. Okay, super helpful context there. Thank you. I'm curious because you said so much depends on the debt structure and the capital stack. Do you have any sense of what percentage of multifamily assets are in some sort of distress? Well, this is a little bit all over the board. If you look at agency statistics like Freddie Mac, they have a delinquency rate right now, double what the delinquency rate was pre-COVID. However, double is four-tenths of one percent
Starting point is 00:23:31 versus where it used to be at two-tenths of one percent. So it's very, very low. But agency financing is kind of like only the best borrowers and the best properties had agency financing. Their lower loan to value ratio. So it stands at a reason that those loans wouldn't be in an extreme amount of distress. Couple that up with data from debt funds, i.e. bridge lenders, who made short-term loans for the purpose of repositioning properties. Those are the ones that come due in three to five years, which that's now because if people were buying in 2021, here we are. It's three years later. Notes do. Someone's knock at the door. Those delinquency rates are, I don't have data on it because it's a whole bunch of different lenders. So they don't publish like, oh,
Starting point is 00:24:23 guess what? Here's our delinquency rate. But you can tell just by looking at things like, you know, Arbor is a big bridge lender and their stock is in the toilet and there's all kinds of stuff going on. and there's major short interest in the stock. And, you know, you look at some of the other CLOs and debt fund stuff out there. And there's a lot of talk about distress. There's a lot of talk about loan extensions and, you know, maturity extensions. Even maturity extensions at the bars wouldn't really otherwise qualify for because the lenders are kind of hoping they can kick the can down the road a little bit. And maybe the recovery will happen before somebody knocks on their door and tells them they've got to get this loan repaid.
Starting point is 00:25:05 So I think the percentage is higher than what the data is showing. Now, having said that, that's really limited mostly to the subset of properties that were purchased in, call it, you know, 2021 to 22. You know, that two-year period I think is the worst, you know, call it vintage and vintage not being year of construction, but year of acquisition. Stuff that was bought before then is probably largely okay. stuff bought very recently, like in the last six months to a year, jury is still out. But I would suspect it will be better off than the 2021 and 22 stuff. So it's the people who bought the properties you were unloading.
Starting point is 00:25:50 It was. And in fact, a lot of the properties that we sold have been offered back to us, some of them for less than the loan amount for the new borrower. So yes. Wow. And so, I mean, no one knows, as you said, it's impossible to, know exactly when rates may come down, if they come down at all, when inflation gets nipped. But it sounds like you're not seeing a recovery or any sort of fundamental change in market fundamentals in the imminent future. Let's just say the second half of 2024. For me, this is the sit on the
Starting point is 00:26:23 beach period. Yes. Okay. This is the sit on the beach period. No, I don't. I wonder you're so easy to book for this podcast, right? Oh, yeah. I'm available. You need me tomorrow? Yeah, sure. What do you doing this afternoon? Well, nothing. Excellent. It works for us. It's easy to get it to get on the podcast. That's for sure. Because there's not a lot going on. This isn't a really good time to buy. It's not a good time to sell. And for me, it's not even really a good time to get ready to buy. You know, we're not even really gearing up to buy anything. Right now, it's wait and watch. And I think we're going to be doing that for a while. I don't expect we'll buy anything in 2024. 25 is still a little bit further out than my crystal ball is giving me clarity on, but I think early 25 is probably not going to be all that
Starting point is 00:27:10 active. Maybe we get into later 25. I think we might have some, you know, some possibilities. But I'm kind of, like, I don't need to be the first guy to buy. I don't need to say, like, I'm going to start the next market cycle. I want to see some evidence that the market cycle has shifted direction before I'm ready to jump on board. That makes a lot of sense. It makes sense to be pretty patient right now. Okay, we have to take one more quick break. When we come back, we'll hear from Brian about what he sees on the horizon. And while we're away, if you feel like you've learned something so far, and I hope you have,
Starting point is 00:27:51 take a minute and hit the follow button wherever you're listening. It helps other people find the show so they can learn too. Plus, it makes us feel good. We'll be right back. If you own a short-term rental, here's something worth knowing. Not all landlord policies are built for your type of property. And with holiday bookings, chilly weather, and higher guest turnover, having the right coverage is more important than ever.
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Starting point is 00:28:39 Steadily, rental property insurance for the modern investor. For decades, real estate has been a cornerstone of the world's largest portfolios. But it's also historically been sort of complex, time-consuming, and expensive. But imagine if real estate investing was suddenly easy, all the benefits of owning real, tangible assets without the complexity and expense. That's the power of the Fundrise flagship fund. Now you can invest in a $1.1 billion portfolio of real estate, starting with as little as $10. The portfolio features 4,700 single-family rental homes spread across the booming sunbelt.
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Starting point is 00:29:57 this and other information can be found in the fund's prospectus at fundrise.com slash flagship. This is a paid advertisement. Most investors spend more time chasing deals than reviewing their insurance. But a quick coverage check can be fast, easy, easy, easy coverage check. And one of these smartest ways to protect and even improve your property's cash flow. As the months get colder, frozen pipes, icy walkways, and seasonal wear and tear can increase the likelihood of claims. And traditional insurance companies aren't always built to handle these claims quickly or smoothly. That's why more real estate investors are turning to steadily. They focus exclusively on landlords, whether it's a single-family rental, a burr-builder's risk policy, or midterm holiday guests. You get fast quotes, flexible coverage, and protection for property damage, liability, and even loss of rental income. Now is the perfect time to review your rates and coverage. Get a quote in minutes at biggerpockets.com slash landlord insurance.
Starting point is 00:30:35 Steadily, landlord insurance designed for the modern investor. Welcome back to the show. We're going to jump right back in. You know, I'm curious about the long-term implications of this. We don't know when dynamics will shift, as you just said. But one of the interesting things I'm curious about is we hear these reports from all sorts of government agencies and think tanks that were X number of housing units short in the United States. And that number is anywhere from, I think I saw Freddie the other day, said
Starting point is 00:31:09 1.5 million. NAR says it's something like 7 million. So there's a pretty wide range. But we're going from this era where we're still delivering a lot of multifamily supply. But from that chart, I was just talking about earlier where we look at permits and new starts for multifamily. It's almost completely stopped. So the pendulum has swung almost the entire other way for developers. And I'm wondering if that bodes well maybe for long-term multifamily. Like once the dust settles, is there going to all of a sudden be a lack of supply again? I think there will be. It may take a while for that to happen because there was so much supply to absorb. So I don't think they're going to see like that V-shaped recovery. It's going to be a little more of a U-shaped recovery or an L-shaped recovery.
Starting point is 00:31:57 because it's going to take some time to absorb that amount of units. I think also the growth of the U.S. population has been declining. I think it was 2021 was the lowest amount of population growth since, like, the Great Depression. I mean, it was the first time in 100 years, it was below a million people. And so, you know, that also shifts, right? But, you know, there are things to think about, like, you know, birth rates are declass. and, you know, there's a lot of factors at play. And I think, you know, it's going to take time for this to shake out. It's not going to be evident immediately. But long term, I'm very bullish on
Starting point is 00:32:43 housing. I think, you know, if you look at this, you know, the more you zoom out, the better it looks, right? If you look at it like, what's going to happen this week, nothing good. What's going to happen this year, probably not much. What's going to happen this decade? Yeah, there's probably some real opportunities. What's going to happen over the next 50 years? If you own property right now, you'll be the king of the world in 50 years. You know, there's a lot of growth potential over that period of time. And I don't think it will disappoint anyone. But you have to be able to have that kind of staying power. That's great insight. And I totally agree. I think it's, it's, this is a game where you just have to be patient and look long-term and not try and jump in at an unideal time.
Starting point is 00:33:27 That's not to say there's not some deals possible right now, but it is a challenging market. That brings me to my last question. You know, you're a syndicator, or you have in the past done syndications. And I hear a lot of things these days about syndicators with capital calls. You've come on on the market to talk about capital calls, which we greatly appreciate. but can you offer perhaps some words of advice on how investors listening to this who are interested in passive investing may vet or think about participating in syndications in this current environment? Yeah, and you know, you could have a whole show on capital calls. And by the way, didn't we just, we think we did one.
Starting point is 00:34:09 I think we did one. Yeah. We'll link to that one in the show. It was on our sister podcast on the market. So if you guys want to learn more about capital calls, Brian came on the show with Kathy. We did a great episode about that. So check that out in the description below as well. Yeah, we did do a whole show on capital calls. And you're right, there are syndications that are running into trouble. You know, the same thing happens every cycle. And it's not unique to syndications. Even owning real estate directly, syndications is just a method in which you own real estate. So when people say, oh, there's all these failing syndications, it's really failing real estate investments. And in most cases, it's failing real estate investments in large part,
Starting point is 00:34:49 due to inappropriate capital structure, such as loan maturities at an inopportune moment is really what's causing the majority of the pain that you're seeing out there. So I think you have to approach syndication investing in the future the same way you always approach it in the past, but with the awareness that I've been trying to spread for years. I started with four years ago writing the hands-off investor to try to spread the awareness of what to look for. And that is you need to look at how the capital is structured. You need to really dig into what the investment plan is and make sure that you're buying at a good basis with enough staying power to be able to ride through a market. And staying power means longer loan maturities, plenty of cash reserves, a really strong sponsor
Starting point is 00:35:36 who knows what they're doing, preferably one that's survived a market cycle in the past. And if you have all of those things, you can set yourself up really well. And it's the same as if you were to go buy an apartment complex on your own. And you're the only investor in it. You're going to buy it yourself. You would look for the same thing. You would get a good loan with long-term maturity. You would have cash on hand in case the unexpected things happen. All of those things, you would look for the same thing in a syndication investment.
Starting point is 00:36:04 That is absolutely true. The syndication is just the way of collecting money and what's failing is the real estate. I do think, though, the focus has been somewhat on syndications because it does seem that a lot of less experienced syndicators may have been involved in this most recent cycle. I, e, the irrational exuberance I was talking about earlier. And I think that's true. I think that they drove a lot of the irrational exuberance, and they were fed by investors that had irrational exuberance and gave them the money to do so. That's one of the things about syndications and multifamily investing is that through syndication,
Starting point is 00:36:42 small investors can buy large properties. Without syndication, only big investors can buy large properties. And generally, big investors are going to have a little bit more discipline. And there's a lot of money at stake. But as with anything, if you remember the dot-com stock bubble of 2000, when all the little, so-called little investors got into the stock market is when stock values inflated and then came crashing down. So the same thing happens in real estate.
Starting point is 00:37:12 when you make real estate accessible to people that don't really know what they're looking at or looking for, these kinds of dislocations can happen where they feed groups that are taking their money to make bad investments, and they end up predictably in the situation we find some of these in now. So hopefully the takeaway from all this will be for the smaller passive investors to use discipline when making these. investments and not just fund any business plan that they see crosses their email inbox. Well, that's great advice, Brian. Thank you so much for sharing this history lesson. We've now coined the Brian Burke Index, and we're going to have to monitor this over time.
Starting point is 00:37:59 Maybe we'll publish it on the Bigger Pockets blog. But we really appreciate you sharing your insights and experience here. Thanks a lot. Good to see you again, Dave. Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast. Make sure you get all our new episodes by subscribing on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Our new episodes come out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I'm the host and executive producer of the show, Dave Meyer.
Starting point is 00:38:42 The show is produced by Ian K. Copywriting is by Calico content, and editing is by Exodus Media. If you'd like to learn more about real estate investing or to sign up for our free newsletter, please visit www.com. The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only. All host and participant opinions are their own. Any asset, real estate included, involves risk. So use your best judgment and consult with qualified advisors before investing.
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