Motley Fool Money - Meta Has 3 Billion Users. Now What?

Episode Date: July 27, 2023

Meta has our attention but will we follow Mark Zuckerberg into the metaverse? (00:21) Asit Sharma and Deidre Woollard discuss: - Meta’s soaring ad impressions amid a tough advertising market. - If ...Mark Zuckerberg will need to choose between AI and the metaverse. - How Chipotle is using robots to boost efficiency. (19:45)  Matt Frankel interviews Walker & Dunlop CEO Willy Walker on commercial real estate debt and the challenges facing multifamily housing development. Companies discussed: META, CMG, SBUX, WD Host: Deidre Woollard Guests: Asit Sharma, Matt Frankel, Willy Walker Producer: Ricky Mulvey Engineers: Dan Boyd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi everyone, I'm Charlie Cox. Join us on Disney Plus as we talk with the cast and crew of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again. What haven't you gotten to do as Daredevil? Being the Avengers. Charlie and Vincent came to play. I get emotional when I think about it. One of the great finale of any episode we've ever done. We are going to play Truth or Daredevil.
Starting point is 00:00:18 What? Oh, boy. Fantastic. You guys go hard, man. Daredevil Born Again, official podcast Tuesdays, and stream Season 2 of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again on Disney Plus. million people a day using Meta Product. But will they follow Zuckerberg into the Metaverse? Motley Fool Money starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Deidro Willard here with Motley Fool
Starting point is 00:00:54 analyst, Asset Charma. Asset, how are you today? I'm great, Dieter. Good to be with you. I am excited to talk to you about Meta because the market's excited. Meta had their first double-digit year-over-year revenue increase since 2021. But I think the thing that blew me away was that this company now has over 3 billion daily active people on its family of apps. I mean, wow. So could it attract more users? And do you think it's making the best use of all of that attention so far? I think it is, Deidre.
Starting point is 00:01:25 I mean, just the fact that META can continue to grow that user-based, the monthly active users, by 3%, right? Yeah. It's a good use because at this point, what you're trying to do is to drive further engagement, drive further monetization. You've got 3 billion out of what, some 8 billion people on the planet. We know that meta isn't going to be able to grow users at some amazing clip anymore. But just think about the magnitude of a few percent points increases every so often on a number like 3 billion. That's very substantial when you think about how absolute profits are generated.
Starting point is 00:02:05 And this quarter meta drove $7.8 billion to its bottom lines. It doesn't need to grow at a 15% clip. When you're thinking about its user base, just to keep that growing 1 to 2 to 3 percentage points each year and concentrate on further engagement for the monetization. Yeah, that's a very good point. One thing that stuck out to me in the report was that the ad impressions are up 34%, but the ad prices were down 16%.
Starting point is 00:02:32 So I'm looking at that. That seems like a mixed bet. not necessarily a sustainable one. We know the ad market's tough right now. Do we just kind of have to wait that out? Partly, we do. I mean, if we're METIS management, but partly we're going to make that as a choice. We're going to be a little proactive about going for that lower price impression. Why is that? It's because the growth for META's advertising isn't going to come necessarily from North America and Europe anymore. It's going to come from Asia. It's going to come from Latin America, Africa. In those regions, the pricing power isn't quite what it is in more
Starting point is 00:03:11 developed geographies. So meta and Facebook in particular are going to where they can get more ad impressions and they're going to sacrifice some profitability, some pricing power now to secure that base for advertising in the future. But you're right. I mean, DeDre, a lot of this does have to do with that poor macro environment. If things were running full steam, I think we would have seen better metrics on the pricing than we did this quarter. You know, we looked at Alphabet. They had earnings earlier this week. YouTube shorts also growing. Is short video content kind of going to be where the growth is coming from? It certainly seems like it. More and more, I think the major social media platforms have
Starting point is 00:03:54 driven down our attention spans to where we just have an appetite for short form video content. and we're more than happy to let minutes go by, half an hour go by, an hour go by without us even noticing. Even though you're right. I mean, it's taking more time to generate that ad impression on YouTube's behalf, on Meta's behalf. But the fact that we seem to stay glued longer to short-form content points to a future in which this becomes a more lucrative type of advertising as it scales. Yeah. Well, I thought the conversation around threads during the earnings call was interesting, because this is kind of an interesting thing for meta. They've got this sort of side-of-desk project, Zuckerberg was very clear. There are just a few people working on it. It's not a big deal. But then
Starting point is 00:04:44 it launched at this time, which Twitter now acts now, whatever it is, is kind of melting down. What's next? Do you think they're going to put more energy, more bodies behind the project? You know they're trying to figure out how to monetize this and get people to stick around. Yeah, I think they will, Deidra. This is really interesting because Meta has a talent for copying other social platforms. We've seen this with Instagram. We've seen this with Real. So they're good at this.
Starting point is 00:05:12 And it's natural for them to have these side-of-desk projects where they just posit, look, let's build a Twitter replica just in case there's an opportune time for us to take advantage. We have Twitter users who are in a love-hate relationship with the platform. think the platform's been degraded. It's lost its branding. It's lost what was special about it. So many Twitter users complained that Elon Musk has really ruined that platform since he took it over, yet it's hard to get away from it. After this huge spike in users going over to Threads and checking it out, Threads engagement has plummeted by 70%. Why is this? I have my own pet theory. I think neither Elon Musk nor Mark Zuckerberg really understands what made
Starting point is 00:05:58 Twitter so special. People just want content engagement. They want an easy way to send direct messages. They want to be able to control what they follow in that content stream. And you see Twitter moving away from that into an algorithmic feed. And Threads itself is so algorithmic because that's what Facebook is really good at. That's their ethos. And I think so many users went over and maybe out of this sort of revenge idea, if I could just get to something a little bit better than Mastodon or these other platforms. Maybe this is the answer. Going back to Twitter, even though they don't like the experience as much anymore.
Starting point is 00:06:34 But to answer your question, yeah, I think META is studying this. They're going to spend a lot more time and allocate some more serious capital to pulling users away on a more permanent basis. Yeah, I think so. I'm certainly on my own journey with that because I've loved Twitter. I've been on Twitter like 15 years, but I'm looking for the alternative. Threads doesn't feel like it yet, but if they start changing, it to make it a little bit more like Twitter, maybe people stick around.
Starting point is 00:07:00 Totally. This is such a, you lost that love and feeling type of environment for users of Twitter. Yeah, absolutely. Well, this was supposed to be Mark Zuckerberg's year of efficiency. So he talked about that on the earnings call. He said he still wants to run the company lean. He's trying to determine what the appropriate CAPEX is for AI. And this was reminiscent of things I heard from other companies from Microsoft, Alphabet, that, okay, we need to spend money right now. They sort of seem to be like telling investors, we need to spend money right now, but maybe don't expect results anytime soon. It seems like with Reality Lab, they're like, they talked about the long time horizon for expecting results. Are they just trying to make us feel better
Starting point is 00:07:43 about how much money is flying out the door? Well, I think whenever meta management talks about AI, investors warm to the idea that they are investing so much and allocating so much towards CAPEX, because that's something we can understand a little bit more easily. You need high-tech talent to develop things like Lambda 2, which is an open-source competitor to OpenAI and ChatGPT. You need lots of server space to be able to deliver those instances of interaction with large language models. All this makes sense to Wall Street analysts, to retail investors. Where we all start to get a little word is, this huge investment into the Metaverse, into the things that don't have this tangible investment
Starting point is 00:08:31 return. Now, along the way, we do see meta starting to develop technologies that could circle back to its advertising business. Developing headsets with eye-tracking movements could be something that yields a lot more precise advertising in the future and more pricing power for meta, more advertising have. So, there are some indications that maybe all of this investment will have a purpose. But as long as Zuckerberg keeps talking about the Metaverse, investors don't want to hear it. Talk AI and CapEx, the billions are okay.
Starting point is 00:09:06 Right? That's what I noticed is that the company made sure they were talking about AI and Metaverse almost kind of like at the same time. But I feel like if Zuckerberg had to only choose one, I used to think it was going to be the Metaverse. Now, I don't know. do you think? If he had to choose one or the other, which way is he going? Is he going the way his heart wants or going the way the people who are invested in the company want to go? Well, I think that Zuckerberg is still going to follow his heart. He still wants to create a world, despite what Meta says, we don't need to be the ultimate destination in the Metaverse. I think they still want to do that. I think the idea of controlling the way you
Starting point is 00:09:46 reach the world, which is the headsets and the world itself, is a way to be a way to, to monetize users for their lifetime, to keep them as lifetime customers. And that vision is still one that really intrigues Mark Zuckerberg. Along the way, though, the investment in AI, which they haven't stinted on. I mean, meta invests quite a bit in artificial intelligence. It invests quite a bit in Gen AI. I think he can rationalize that to himself that those two worlds converge, right? because to deliver the best possible Metaverse experience, you need generative AI.
Starting point is 00:10:22 You need generative AI across multiple modalities. So text to creating a world, speech to creating a world. Maybe I'm trying to meet you in the Metaverse, Deidre, and I'm like, I'm tired of this hangout. Let's meet on the patio of this great cafe in Europe, because you like outdoor cafes in Europe, and so do I. So boom, there we are in that environment. So this is some of the type of future you can. envision where the two worlds collide. And I think it makes it easier for Zuckerberg to say,
Starting point is 00:10:52 I'm going to keep on this pet project because everything I invest in AI has an outcome in my metaverse world. I'm not sure that's the best outcome necessarily for meta shareholders. I still remain a little bit skeptical of where this business is going in the long term. But for now, the creds that it develops in AI, whether for the metaverse or simply to further their ultimate value driver, which is advertising revenue, you know, that's going to be something they'll continue for a while. Yeah, what you talked about reminded me of the video that Zuckerberg did where he was surfing and all of that stuff and trying to sell the Metaverse.
Starting point is 00:11:32 I'm not sure people bought that. But, you know, one of the things that he's talked about so much is the lower cost point of the Quest 3, which is going to come out this fall. It's around $500. He sort of positioned it a little bit versus. a higher-priced device, which I'm assuming is the Apple Vision Pro. And I was wondering if people are so excited about the Apple Day, but they don't want to pay, I think it's going to be, what, $3,500 or we don't really know yet, but a lot.
Starting point is 00:11:59 Does that create an opportunity for people to maybe choose the cheaper device just to get a taste of what the future might be? Yeah, I think it's an astute observation on your part, Deidra. I think that will happen. It's not going to move the needle for meta-earnings, but it will help. further the idea that it's okay to wear a headset. And as they become more refined, I actually think we'll see a weird progression where businesses will have more of an uptake of these headset devices. And that adoption will, at some point in the, let's not call it near future,
Starting point is 00:12:35 but at some point in the future, will drive more consumer adoption. So there is a great business case for collaboration using augmented reality already meta. and Microsoft have been collaborating to make that more and more normalized in the coming years. So as for the consumer, both on the business side and the consumer side, sure, it creates some economic principle where I want to try the technology out. I ain't paying $3,500. Let me try $500. I could spend that.
Starting point is 00:13:05 Yeah, and I don't think businesses want to pay that either. Let's switch over and talk a little Chipotle. The earnings came out pretty decent. I mean, the market didn't love this, but comparable restaurants sales up 7.4%. But the thing I'm fascinated by is how they're streamlining their back end, because they added 47 restaurants this quarter. 40 of them have the Chipotle. That's their cute name for basically a drive-through. But they're adding, they're really thinking about how to streamline.
Starting point is 00:13:34 They're adding in more robotic assistance. They already had the chip maker now. They've got a machine that's prepping avocados for guacamole, really thinking about how Chipotle and other companies like Starbucks, deal with this digital orders. Is the fast food of the future just going to be even faster? Yeah, sure, it'll be faster. Everything that goes around comes around, though, D-Dedrae. It's the 1970s all over again. In the 50s, we had this new experiential way to eat out. That was the McDonald's chain. By the 1970s, people didn't want to go inside of McDonald's, but they really liked drive the drive-through. And then we had years later, fast, cash
Starting point is 00:14:15 which you and I are students of this business, the fast casual business. It was all about the experience. Chipotle's early iterations, even though they learned how to make burritos using McDonald's ideas of throughput, it was on the experience. It was on the sustainable ingredients. The same you have with Starbucks. Starbucks really went high-end into the roastery concept, trying to make sure that they could convert customers. Now, everyone's going to Going back to where we were in the previous time, which was all about convenience, I think they got a big lift from the pandemic, where we all just wanted to quickly get our food and bring it back home.
Starting point is 00:14:59 But throughput is more and more going to be a key word that we hear. Just as we have, it's cyclical. Every few years, we have this sway between people wanting to go and enjoy things in a new way, and then wanting that same thing. in a more convenient fashion. This is playing into the trends in robotics, especially co-bots, so robots, which are merely an arm that's smart and can help you pack or develop something. And some techniques that have been more breakthrough techniques with grills in the commercial space. All this comes together, I think, for another wave of building out a lot of high capacity.
Starting point is 00:15:39 For something that's essentially just getting a product a little bit faster to a consumer. I'm waiting, I don't know, and I don't see it yet, I'm waiting for that next wave that wants to bring us back into a totally new fast dining experience. Yeah, it's interesting. I think what they're, you mentioned like with the, with the avocados, like it'll cut the avocados, but you still have the person who has to mash up and make the guacamole. So there is this interesting thing of how do you make sure that the person still feels like they're being having a connection with another person watching someone assemble the burrito while a lot of the other stuff happens kind of behind the scenes.
Starting point is 00:16:15 I think that's very important, actually, Deidre. And for me, as a consumer, I don't speak for everyone, of course. I like to see the human element. I don't like to order something and go pick it up off a shelf, which is always an option. If you're doing something fast, casual, or going to, you know, something like a Starbucks chain. I love to go in and chat with people a bit, but finding that balance is a challenge for for matchment of these companies. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I was chatting earlier this week with Jason Moser when Domino's earnings
Starting point is 00:16:46 came out, and we talked a little bit about how they were retooling their loyalty program. Chipotle's loyalty program is huge. $35 billion in the program. They scaled it back a little bit last year. Then they added new things earlier this year. Now they're experimenting with some personalization, some fun incentives. How do you think about loyalty programs when looking at retail or restaurant businesses as an investor? Is that a, is that a a number you look at? Totally. I mean, I think they're very important. The reason is we don't have an equivalent in the restaurant world, the retail restaurant world, with what we have in the software world, like a recurring subscription-based business. I think Taco Bell tried to a subscription
Starting point is 00:17:28 a couple of years ago. It didn't work out that well. But what we do have are these loyalty programs, and those enable companies that manage them well to play with their throughput. If you see, that you're not making your numbers in a given month. You've covered your fixed cost base. Now, the rest is incremental profit. This is how the month falls out in the restaurant industry. Those last few days are where all that incremental profit comes in. You can incentivize people to go into the store on the fly. Management can sit behind a dashboard and throw out an offer. And with AI, with generative AI, you can make it very personalized. So to me, the companies that have this, they have an extra bit of value driver, an extra way
Starting point is 00:18:11 to make sales, and they can really manage how and when customers come into their restaurants. Those that are building loyalty programs, I always assign a little bit higher value. If I'm looking at the value thesis, or trying to dream out the cash flows over a five or 10-year period. So important to me, what about you? You study this industry so much. Do you think they're only so good? I know there's a big counter argument that they can be more intensive than it's worth to run them.
Starting point is 00:18:40 What are your thoughts? I think they can be more intensive, but I think they're also extremely powerful. What you just said about being able to push, be able to push the consumer where you want to go. I think that's important. I think about companies like Alta Beauty, which is another favorite of mine, and they're able to push sales where they want them to go. And that is really, really important.
Starting point is 00:18:59 I think we're going to see, especially right now, as we're looking to maybe a consumer that feels a little bit less spending than they have in the past six months, loyalty programs, and the price incentives become even more important, especially with Chipotle, where they've raised prices recently. Totally. All right. So I gotta know, are you a burrito guy or a bowl guy? It might not surprise you to know that any given morning, I can be a bowl guy or a burrito guy. Part of this is middle age, Deidre. You know, you're thinking I've had too many burritos as of late. I got to switch to a bowl. But sometimes you just want to be healthy.
Starting point is 00:19:38 the way it's presented in a bowl is very enticing. Yourself. Burrito all the way. Thanks for your time today, Asset. Same. Great to be with you, D.J. High prices and low availability of single-family homes have set the table for multifamily demand. Matt Frankel interviews Willie Walker, CEO of Walker and Don Lop, one of the biggest multifamily property financing companies on the current state of commercial real estate. So let's get right to it. I'll start with this one. We've all seen plenty of headlines about a real estate crisis that's about to happen, especially in commercial real estate. Is this kind of a broad thing that you're worried about, or do you think this is more just focused on offices and the property types that are really suffering right now?
Starting point is 00:20:35 So I think it's important, Matt, to keep in mind that, if you will, clarifying comment you just made, which is that people say commercial, but inside of commercial real estate, there are really five different asset classes, and each one has strengths and weaknesses right now. So inside of commercial real estate, if you think about the amount of debt that's outstanding in the commercial real estate industry, the number is about $4.4 trillion of debt that's outstanding. And most people are concerned about the debt side of things, not the equity side of things, because most commercial real estate equity owners are either private equity funds or high net worth individuals. The public markets really don't have big equity positions
Starting point is 00:21:16 other than possibly owning a reet. And we can talk about that in a moment if you'd like to. But as it relates to the exposure to the market, it's really on the debt side. 4.4 trillion of debt outstanding on commercial real estate broadly. Half of that is on apartment buildings. So 2.2 trillion is on apartment buildings. We're one of the largest lenders on apartment buildings in the United States. And the apartment sector has held up extremely strong.
Starting point is 00:21:42 People are still living in apartment buildings across the country. People are still paying their rent. at 3.5, 3.6% unemployment in the United States. And so the apartment sector is doing very well, and the fundamentals of apartment buildings are still very strong. Now, in the other 2.2 trillion of debt outstanding, you have office buildings, which are struggling to say the least. You have retail. You have hospitality. You have industrial. Now, industrial has held up the strongest of almost all commercial real estate asset classes. That's the distribution facilities that Amazon and other e-commerce companies, as well as Target and others used to distribute their goods.
Starting point is 00:22:22 Industrial has done extremely well. Retail and hospitality have both rebounded very strongly since the pandemic and are both. They're obviously pockets of weakness, but very strong. We're back on the hospitality side at revenue per available room, Rev PAR, that is not quite back to pre-pandemic levels, but occupants of the levels are back to pre-pandemic levels, and Rep Par is getting darn close to where it was pre-pandemic. And then the laggard of all this is office.
Starting point is 00:22:53 And so the big concern is what happens with the future of office and are we going to have defaults on office loans that come back into the banking system that then cause some banks to have very significant problems? And as we've focused and looked at very, very significantly, commercial real estate exposure on bank balance sheets is an earnings issue. It's not a solvency issue. So after the blowup of SBB and Signature Bank and First Republic, a lot of people have been concerned that commercial real estate loans would come back and cause another bank to go out of business. If you look at it in isolation, Matt, so not, clearly in the great financial crisis, it wasn't just problems with
Starting point is 00:23:39 commercial real estate loans. It was problems with credit card debt. It was problems with C&I loans. It was across the entire loan book. But if you look at it just in a commercial real estate exposure standpoint, even the most heavily concentrated banks with a lot of commercial real estate exposure, like a Wells Fargo, like a bank OZK, it's an earnings issue for them. It's not a solvency. They both have plenty of tier one capital to survive whatever the real estate market will throw them as it relates to overall exposure to commercial real estate loans. So that's a pretty long-winded way of saying, I think it's important. for people look at this on an asset class basis, not just say commercial real estate has problems.
Starting point is 00:24:18 And then as you dive in a little bit deeper, it's really an earnings issue with some of the banks. It's not really a solvency issue. So far, we've talked about what's coming down in the next few years. So let's talk about so far because the interest rate spike has already happened for the most part. Hopefully, hopefully we're done with the interest rate spike. So how specifically have rising interest rates affected multifamily housing so far? Because people like me, we see how it's affecting residential real estate. A lot of would-be home sellers are staying on the sidelines, for example. A lot of buyers are getting priced out of the market, things like that. So what are we seeing in multifamily? Is it the same thing? A couple things.
Starting point is 00:25:00 First of all, I think it's really important, as you point out, Matt, to realize that whether the Fed does another interest rate hike or two more interest rate hikes, the worst is clearly behind us. Okay, so we've already raised 500 basis points. If it ends up being 525 or 550 basis points, 90% of the raise is behind us. Okay, so that's good in the sense that for commercial real estate and transaction volumes, you need rate stabilization to then allow cap rates to adjust to where rates are. And then you get transaction volume happening again. But when there's a disparity, if you will, between what the cost of capital is and where
Starting point is 00:25:38 valuations are, that's when the market freezes. for people to say, well, I don't know what my financing cost is going to be, and I don't really know what value is, so I can't transact. So one of the things that's important is to get to that rate stabilization, so cap rates can adjust and then you can start getting deal flow again. As it relates to your comment on single family versus multifamily, there are a couple things to keep in mind. Somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of homeowners in the United States of America locked in a very cheap 30-year fixed-rate mortgage in 2021 and 2022. So the numbers are 40 to 50 percent of single-family homeowners have a single-family mortgage
Starting point is 00:26:18 of between 3 and 4 percent as far as the coupon rate. They've locked in for 30 years. They have absolutely no problem with that. There's no default risk with those loans. And those people are benefiting from an extra on a medium home price. They're benefiting from somewhere to between 5,000 and 7,000. dollars a year that they typically would have had to pay for their mortgage that they can put in their back pocket. That's then in the Disney world, that's buying the, to go back to a movie
Starting point is 00:26:45 that you and I probably remember trading places where they use, they talk about the GI Joe, buying the GI Joe with the Kung Fu grip. I'm probably dating myself a little bit on that one, that. Anyway, that extra cash flow makes it so that those people don't want to sell those homes. Because if they sell the home, they've got to go put a new mortgage on it at today's rates. So that inventory of single-family homes isn't coming on the market, which means that really the only homes that an individual can go buy are new homes coming on being built by Linar and the other big single-family home builders. In Linar's last quarter, Matt, their average home price was $456,000. That is not affordable to most renters. So what it means is that the cost of single family housing is staying high, and people who typically would graduate, if you will, from being in a rental property to being in a single family home, can't make the jump, which means that they are going to remain renters.
Starting point is 00:27:48 And so as a result of that, given the price dynamics right now, what it means is that typical churn that you would get from people who say, hey, I just got married, I've been living in an apartment, I want to move out to a detached single family. home and start a family, aren't able to make that jump right now, given the price disparity between renting and buying. And there are many people, including us, who think that that higher cost of entry into single-family housing stays that way for quite some time, which means that multifamily stays well-occupied, which means that today we're seeing rents across the country are pretty much flat. There's some sub-markets where rents are still growing, some that have negative rent growth on them. But basically across the country right now in Q3 of 2023, rents and multifamily are flat. A year ago, we're going up at exorbitant rates. Right now,
Starting point is 00:28:42 they're flat. Many people are saying, we'll get rent growth back into the multifamily sector in 24 and 25 as you don't have people moving into single family because of a lack of supply and the cost of entry. And therefore, you've got more demand for the product than you actually have product. Therefore, rents start to move again. And you touched on something there that kind of the housing shortage is another big issue that is a problem right now. Depending on what estimate you're looking at, we need another four to seven million homes in the U.S., depending on your source. And it's dramatically, you know, leaning toward the lower end of the income spectrum when it comes to the housing shortage. There's no easy solution, but I know affordable housing is, you know, near and dear to your heart at
Starting point is 00:29:27 Walker and Dunlop. That was a big party. one of your recent acquisitions. So what do you see as the kind of the solution, both in the long-term and short-term sense? So to the numbers, the numbers that I look at, on the single-family side, we're about three million single-family homes shy. On the multifamily side, we're somewhere between half a million and three-quarters of a million. So you're somewhere between three-and-a-half and four million homes short of meeting the pent-up demand for housing. So you're spot-on and your numbers there, Matt, as it relates to what the need is. The fear is rent control. And the reason I say that is because rent control has not solved any housing problem in any city or state
Starting point is 00:30:12 across the country since people came up with the idea of rent control. The only thing that has ever brought the cost of housing down has been new supply. And so it's a supply issue, not a control issue, if you will. And, you know, one of the interesting things is in many municipalities, for instance, Boston, Massachusetts, the mayor has done two things simultaneously, one that I view as being very positive, one that I view is being very negative. On the negative side, the mayor has tried to push through rent control. It likely doesn't get through the legislature and will not get through, but she is trying to push a rent control measure in Boston right now to try and freeze rent increases. I don't think that that's good public policy. They need more supply of rental
Starting point is 00:30:54 housing. On the supply side, the mayor has proposed that there be a new tax policy put into place for people who want to convert office buildings into multifamily properties, so residential. And that's a very interesting proposal. It only came out yesterday. And the idea is to give a tax deferral for 30 years of 75% of the taxes that an owner would pay on a residential property if they convert an office building into a residential property. Now, there's some other pieces to that map that are, first of all, there's an environmental standard that they think is going to add about 2% to the overall conversion cost. And then they also want 20% of the units in those buildings to be rent controlled.
Starting point is 00:31:38 And that's up from the mayor's original proposal at 13%. The question in all of that is, does the math work to convert those office buildings to residential, given a 75% abatement on taxes for a 30-year period? and then also with the environmental standards as well as the affordable housing restrictions on 20% of the units. Time will tell. Gensler did a study in supposedly there are 90 office buildings in Boston that are, if you will, qualify for this, that are kind of ripe for conversion given floor plan, the ability to convert to residential. We'll see how many owners actually go down that path. But at the end of the day, what is really needed is supply of more affordable housing.
Starting point is 00:32:20 That's the reason we bought Alliant, as you rightfully point out, a year and a half ago. We're one of the largest owners and developers of affordable housing in the United States. And the final piece I'd say to it is Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and HUD, all parts of the U.S. federal government are very focused on promoting and financing affordable housing. And so although all three of them will do market rate housing, the real focus that Fannie, Freddie, and HUD have and their regulators have, is to focus on putting their dollars into affordable housing properties. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Deidre Willard. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.

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