The Science of Flipping - Why There Are No Great Markets, Only Great Timing | Neal Bawa

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

Most real estate educators tell you to master one market and stay in it forever. Neil Bawa thinks that is wrong and lazy. In this episode of The M.O.R.E. Show, Justin Colby sits down with Neal Bawa, known as the Mad Scientist of Multifamily, a former data scientist and tech company founder who has built a portfolio of over 4,000 apartment units across 7 states with $400 million under management and 1,150 active investors. Neil breaks down why his data-driven approach to real estate outperforms gut instinct every single time, how he sold out a 237-unit apartment syndication in four hours, why he learned never to invest in Chicago again, and how he is now using fully automated AI underwriting to evaluate deals faster than any human team can. KEY TOPICS COVERED: Why there are no great markets in America only great markets at certain points in time How Neil sold out a 237-unit apartment syndication in four hours using a nurtured email list The tax strategy that forced Neil into syndication and how it built his entire empire Why Neal left single family behind and went all-in on multifamily apartments How Neal's team uses fully automated AI underwriting to analyze deals at scale The current distressed deal opportunity in Dallas and why banks are offering concessions to buyers right now ️ Key Moments 00:01 — Introduction: Neal, the Mad Scientist of Multifamily 00:30 — $400 million under management 4,000 units across 7 states 00:53 — Portfolio breakdown: Utah, Idaho, Phoenix, Texas, Atlanta 01:30 — Why Neal jumps markets, there are no permanently great markets 01:54 — Neal's background: data scientist, tech company founder, recovering technologist 02:11 — How real estate reduced Neil's taxes during his tech company years 02:31 — 2013: selling the company, massive taxable event, and discovering syndication 03:21 — How a nurtured email list sold out 237 units in four hours 04:16 — 1,150 investors and $350 million in equity raised 04:41 — Taking investors on property tours and why it changes everything 07:00 — First property: Chicago, $12.5 million, and lessons learned the hard way 10:00 — Why Neal never invests in Chicago again 15:00 — Single family war scars and the pivot to multifamily 20:00 — The four pillars of multifamily including tax benefits 25:00 — Cost segregation, bonus depreciation, and real estate professional status 30:00 — Neil's AI market data tool fully automated underwriting explained 36:00 — The distressed deal opportunity in Dallas right now 40:00 — Buying directly from banks concessions, low interest rates, long IO periods 42:00 — Co-GP model and Deal Flow Fridays 43:00 — Where to find Neal Bawa Connect with Neil Bawa: https://multifamilyu.com About The M.O.R.E. Show: The M.O.R.E. Show is hosted by Justin Colby and is dedicated to helping real estate professionals, investors, and entrepreneurs maximize opportunity in any market. New episodes every week. Learn more: www.timeformore.com Invest with Elevest Capital: www.elevestcapital.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

So for 10 years from 2003 to 13, I invested in real estate by myself, no investors, nobody else, just me, personal money. And then in 2013, sold my company, had a massive taxable event. And my accountant said, you can't just go buy apartments with your own money. You need to do something called syndication. So you also get some of your limited partners depreciation. And that's the only way you're going to get your tax bill down. So I bought large numbers of apartment complexes. I'd been gathering real estate data since 2009 and publishing it.

So there were thousands of people on my list. And I thought that maybe, you know, I can maybe get, you know, 80% of my own money and 20% of other people's money. As it happened, the list was very nurtured over the last four or five years because I'd never asked them for anything. And the entire 237 unit apartment syndication was sold out in four hours. What is up the Moore Show family? As always, we're back with another guest talking about maximizing all of the opportunity in real estate. That's what we're here to do. Now, this guest is named the Mad.

science, mad scientist of the multifamily, he has over 400 million doors under management, but really his passion is understanding market data. And that's where he can help me, help you, and we need to be listening to Neil Bawa. How are you, friend? Well, great. Thanks for having me on the show. I'm really excited to be here. You know, we had a fun sort of early chat, and I was like, this is going to be interesting. Yeah. I love this. So not to mention, I love apartments. You have 400 million under management. Talk to us about your portfolio. Where is it?

Why that, you know, how did you get to build to that level? So I'll give you the portfolio size and then's the story. The current portfolio is about 4,000 units and units of all different kinds. They're in, you know, seven or eight different states.

There's a big cluster in Utah and southeast Idaho sort of together. And then there's two very large apartment complexes in Phoenix, are 240 unit and a 320 unit. And then we've got a bunch of them in Texas. So, you know, three sort of clusters. We have one in Atlanta as well. I do jump around a lot. So a lot of people say, you know, once you master a market stay in it, I don't believe

that at all. I think that that's wrong. That's lazy. My belief is that there are no great markets in America. There are only great markets at certain points of time and then they change, right? So Austin has both been the best and. the worst market in America in the last five years, for instance. So, you know, I tend to jump around quite a bit. You know, the second part of your question was, you know, how did I get to this

point? So I'm a recovering technologist, so computer science degree, data science is my passion and my interest, and ran a tech and healthcare education company for 14 years, 99 to 2013. And while I was doing that, you know, I was earning the big fat tech salary and I live in taxifornia so you know 50% you know taxation and so i quickly learned that real estate was a really awesome way to reduce my my taxes uh built a lot of campuses for my company that also reduced my taxes so for 10 years from 2003 to 13 i invested in real estate by myself no investors nobody else just me just you know personal money uh and then 2013 sold my company had a massive taxable event And my accountant said, you can't just go buy, you know, apartments with your own money.

You need to do something called syndication. So you also get some of your limited partners, you know, depreciation. And that's the only way you're going to get your tax bill down. So I bought large numbers of apartment complexes. I'd been gathering real estate data since 2009 and publishing it. So there were thousands of people on my list. And I thought that maybe, you know, I can maybe get, you know, 80% of my own money and 20% of other people. money. As it happened, the list was very nurtured over the last four or five years because I'd

never asked them for anything. And the entire 237 unit apartment syndication was sold out in four hours. So since then, you know, just been adding investors. A lot of them are Silicon Valley people. I'm very techy and geeky. So I have lots of followers in Silicon Valley, lots of doctors, 200 plus doctors. So very, very sort of geeky and nerdy sort of numbers driven audience that follows me. Currently about 1150 active investors, about 350 million of their equity has been invested. So how many investors? 1150. Nice.

Funny, I was just having a conversation with my team. So we walked three of our apartments in Dallas yesterday. And it was phenomenal. When you bought, you know, the investors, what I think is so cool is the investors think, okay, this is an investment. but then they see it and feel and they're like, oh, this is way better in having a stock. Like there's real business behind it. Like every property we look as an independent business.

Talk to us about that first property. How much, how much did you acquire it for? I think it was $12.5 million and it was in Chicago. And it wasn't a good experience. It wasn't a very profitable property. So I had to basically sort of learn on the job and learn a lot of things about Chicago. Now, firstly, I learned. never to invest in Chicago again.

So this gets me in trouble a lot, but, you know, I'm an immigrant. So I guess I have more of a free pass than, you know, white Americans. But I find that there are parts of America that are less ethical than other parts. And again, not a popular thing to say. I found Chicago to be a very corrupt city. I mean, there were people stealing stuff. All kinds of bad stuff was going on. Whereas I find that Idaho and Utah have an extraordinary high level of ethics.

far more than I've seen anywhere in India where I come from. So it's weird. It's uneven. And, you know, again, I get in trouble for saying this stuff. But I don't mind. I mean, you know, I'm a very blunt, straightforward person. And you can actually now, with AI, do an analysis and statistically rank each state by ethics. And you'll see remarkable differences.

So, you know, I learned that Chicago may not be the best place. What I learned most of all was that I needed to get a handle on where, what were the best markets in America to invest in. And I'd been working on that from a single family perspective since 2009. So, you know, 2009 happened. You know, I'm saving lots of money because of real estate. And so I have plenty of cash. And so I was curious about real estate. I wanted to invest. But, you know, data-driven people, we like to gather data. Like we're not, you know, predisposed to just investing whatever we want. And so I go to my family parties and everyone's just bashing real estate and saying real estate is the worst thing ever. So I'm like, okay, well, you know, I'm a data

scientist. Let's make sure that these people are correct. And so what I do is I use a statistical analysis software. It's called R, just the letter R. And what I do is I mine data from all over the United States that I can find all kinds of demographic data, all kinds of real estate data, Trulia, Zillow, Redfin, Bureau of Labor Statistics, you know, census, the Federal Reserve of St. Louis. I grab the data. I stick it into this software. I have gigabytes of it. And basically, Basically, I start asking in 10 different versions of one question, right? Is this a good time to invest in real estate? The answer, which, you know, today with AI, probably take five minutes, but back then it

took me months to get to that point. The answer was, this is the best time in 50 years to invest in real estate. That's what the answer from the statistical analysis software was saying based on all the stuff that I put in. And I'm like, how is it that every time I go to a party or go to a water cooler conversation, everyone's just shitting on real estate. And my software is saying that this is the best time ever. So clearly what people think and do and what really matters are two different things.

And I'm like, I'm going to go and tell my family. So I go to the next family event, very proudly, show them all this stuff. They smile and then they ban me from all of their family parties for a year and a half because they think I'm going to infect everyone else in the family and we're all going to lose money. So for a year and a half, I'm not invited to family parties. And I get really pissed off about that. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to go find other data-driven people. So it's 2009 and this, you know, website called meetup.com has just started out.

So I go and register a data science meetup group for real estate. And the first time I do it, Justin, four people show up. But three of them are actual data scientists. I'm an amateur data scientist. Their actual data scientist, one was from Apple, one was from Google, and one was from LinkedIn. You know, this is Silicon Valley, right? So the meetup lasts until 1 o'clock. I show them all my stuff.

They get really excited. They're like, this is incredible. But here's five different things that you're not doing and five different things that you're doing wrong. And so they start correcting all the stuff that I'm doing. But as they're correcting this stuff, the conclusion is getting ever more inevitable that this is the best time in 50 years to buy real estate. And so we get obsessed with this idea of ranking cities. We're like, okay, so maybe this is the greatest time to buy real estate. But what's the greatest city in America to buy real estate?

And how many cities are there in America? And most people don't know this. There's 936 cities in America, and there's 323 metros. And all of them are listed on Wikipedia, by the way. So we go basically, we're like, how do we rank cities? And like, what is the point of ranking cities? So, you know, we just want to make more money in real estate. So how do you rank cities on the basis of making more money in real estate?

What factor matters? Is it population growth? Is it job growth? Is it income growth? Home price growth? Schools, crime. What matters? What is the 800-pound gorilla in the room?

And so we start working on it. it, we realize that the 800-pound gorilla changes from time to time. And certain things don't. Certain things are important, like population growth, job growth, income growth, and home price growth. They're always important, right? But the 800-pound gorilla tends to move from time to time, right? So in 2009, the 800-pound gorilla was the drop from peak price in 2006 to the bottom in 2009.

It actually bought them in 2010, but we didn't know that because we were in 2009. So that drop was the 800-pound gorilla. It was the biggest factor in making money. And as it turned out, of all the cities in America, 936 of them, the one that had had the biggest drop was in California. I live in California, and the drop was a city in Madeira, called Madeira, California, 144 miles away from where I live in Central Valley near Fresno. And so we jump into our cars. We go to Madeira a whole bunch of us because by now my meetup was pretty powerful. There were like 100 people showing up every time I was doing the meetup.

And they were all like, you know, techy people, right? Software programmers and folks like that. And so we start basically going to Madeira and we realize the reason was very simple. Kaufman had brought had built 5,000 homes, basically in one part of the city. And all of the people that had bought them were farm workers with undocumented incomes who had now disappeared. So an entire portion of the city was empty. Brand new, four-bedroom homes that cost $200,000 to build, available for $90,000 for anyone that could buy them.

As you can imagine, my group bought hundreds, right? So, you know, we went completely crazy and bought those. So I've been doing all this stuff in 2009 and gathering this audience. And so when I went into real estate in 2013, I still learned that, you know, single family and multifamily is not the same. And, you know, you can't just basically correlate the too easily. And so, you know, that's been the learning, right? 2013 is the first time I actually took an investor money.

Pause you for a second. Yeah. hundreds of $90,000 single family assets. Do you still have them? And what, if any, do you have any war scars of like, oof, we should have just done apartments or any story around the single family versus now what you know around apartments? So the first thing, the first war scar is that I stopped, right?

So are my group bought hundreds because some of them were much richer than I was, you know, people from Apple and LinkedIn and Facebook that had stock, right? What's that? Indicated, you created a, a, fund and then you all went out. No, there was no fund. There was just a bunch of people. I mean, that liked each other. There was no fund. There was no offering. This was a

real estate group that was like a Wikipedia of real estate data science. People were just going in and out and people would come in. They'd be like, what about this city? And so we'd basically say, okay, well, let's rank this city today. And you know, you would rank Greenville, South Carolina or Grand Rapids, Michigan,

or Provo, Utah, right? It was just an interest-based group. Nobody monetized it. And we actually didn't allow monetization. I was running a tech company, Justin, right? I had no interest in monetizing it real estate group at that point of time. I was just interested in, hey, we're doing some cool stuff, and we want to know if you should challenge us, maybe we're wrong, and then that way we get, you know, better data and better ideas. So nobody's monetizing. I bought 15 of them. So my biggest, biggest, you know,

challenge and the mistake that I made was after 15, they started getting a little bit more expensive. I was buying it 90,000, then 100, than 110. Then when they got to 120, I thought they were too expensive. Well, they're all a half million dollars now. So that was just a, you know, horrendous mistake. And then, you know, no, I mean, back in 2009, I didn't understand multifamily.

I mean, I bought my first multifamily in 2011, so I didn't really get it until then. you know, how multifamily scales and single family doesn't. But back then we were buying them so cheap that, you know, I've never regretted any of them. I still own 12 of them. And the only reason I own them is my wife has fallen in love with them and won't let them go. And, you know, I'd rather not get divorced. So I hold on to them.

And they all make great, great amounts of money. So, you know, there's no reason. And the other thing is I've depreciated them so much in the last 16 years that if I sell them, I actually lose money, right? Because I have to pay all that depreciation. back. So at this point, it doesn't make sense to sell them, you know, having depreciated all of them to such an extent. But I don't buy single family anymore. I love multifamily. I like building multifamily. So now I build townhomes. I just finished building 92 townhomes in one state, uh, 54 in another state. And I'm building another 75 town homes in my favorite market in America, which is Idaho Falls.

Okay. Now, what made you leave the single family and fall in love with multifamily? Well, as I mentioned, my 2013 multi-million dollar tax event meant that by that time, you know, multifamily or single-family was more expensive. And how could I spend so much money so quickly anyway, right? The only way to do that when you have a lot of, you know, money to deploy is multifamily. But as I learn more about multifamily, I've come not to want to go back into single family again. And I'll give you three reasons for that. Number one is obviously, and most people, you know, in your podcast know this, you know, scale, right?

I love the fact that every multifamily that I have, I have these employees. They're technically not my employees. They technically work for the property management company, but I can hire them, fire them. They're under my control, right? So these people, these five people, usually there's a property manager, a leasing agent, a lead maintenance, a porter or sort of junior maintenance, and often a second leasing agent cook for a bigger properties. But, you know, that properties are 200 plus units.

these people, they only work at my property, right? And so my maintenance person in Atlanta, I pay this maintenance person $27 an hour. And he's pretty experienced. He's been with my property for about four or five years. 27 bucks an hour. This guy is doing like full turns for me, right? So he's doing basic stuff like painting and stuff like that.

But he actually has become good enough so that he's doing, you know, laminate, like we are ripping out carpet and putting laminated. And I'm doing this for $27 an hour, right? If I was to basically hire a company to come in and do it, I would be paying the equivalent of $150 to $175 an hour. Can't get that. Sort of efficiency in single family. And the fact that everything is in one place is incredible. Whenever stuff gets cheap, these days I use AI a lot. So I have over, you know, 600 AI agents running. And one of my favorite agencies that's running is that I now have an inventory of all. of the appliances and all of the air conditioning packages and all of my properties. So now I have this agent running and it's running on Craigslist and it's running on offer

up and Facebook and it knows where each of my properties are. So if a brand new boxed unit of the same kind as my property appears, I immediately send the maintenance person and all of this is done by AI, you know, a text message goes from my AI to that person. I'm reviewing the text message, but you know, AI is going back and forth. my AI is actually just called Claude, so not very inventive. Right. So it basically says, hey, this is Claude on behalf of Neal.

There's this unit. It's exactly the same as our unit. It's in a box, right? And it's selling for one third of the price that it normally is, right? So inform the property manager, take cash from her, go pick this unit up, and put it back into your maintenance shed. Sometimes I have these 44 containers that I put at properties. And now I've saved a third or two thirds of the cost of that air conditioner. So whenever an air conditioner bust, as it will, it's a 200-unit property.

It's inevitable. Every week, you know, there's going to be something wrong with some air conditioning during summer months. I have a, you know, a $1,500 in an air conditioner instead of $4,500. How do you do that with single-family scale? Yeah, it's huge economies scale, right? Here's the second part of it. And I'll be very blunt about this and, again, will get me in trouble. Single family is not an investment.

And I'll tell you why. in the last three years, interest rates have doubled. And because as interest rates have gone up, the prices of multifamily have gone down. They've gone down by about 25 to 30%. Why? Because multifamily is a business. And the end goal of the business is to generate cash flow today. Well, as the mortgage goes up, the cash flow goes down.

Therefore, people pay less for the property. That's normal. That's a business. If you're buying a Taco Bell and you have less customers, you're going to pay less for that Taco Bell, right? A Taco Bell across the street in downtown might have five times the price because they have five times of customers. That's a business. Multi-family is a business.

You buy it based on its income and its cash flow. Now, with single family over the last three and a half years, if you look at charts of single family nationwide, there's no price reduction. Now, there's no price increase either, but there's no price reduction. That makes no sense. The average mortgage in the United States is up $1,300 or about $4,000. 50%, well, more like 60%. So the mortgage is up 60% and the prices are not down even 1%.

That's because single family is largely an emotional purchase. And because most single family is being purchased for people who want to live in it, right? That's what controls the price. A smaller percentage of them are investment homes and that doesn't control the price. So anyone that's buying a single family home in the United States today is buying

an overpriced piece of real estate because the price is controlled by all of the people that want to live there. And people will pay to buy single family to live there even at 18%. In the 1980s, more people were buying single families than they are buying today at 6.5%. And they were buying at 18 percent. Right? So people buying single family, that's an emotional decision. And any investor is now dragged into that emotional decision and is forced to pay. pay more. I don't want to be part of that process. So I buy multifamily. And third? I can't forget. I must have. I forgot third. No, I know, no idea what it was. Well, actually, yes, yes. I'll tell you this. Here's the third one. You bought it the first time.

The, the third one is simply this. The quality of data that is available in the multifamily space is massively greater than the single family space for one obvious reason. When I buy a multi-family, family property or I buy a bunch of them, I can afford to pay, you know, $20,000 or $30,000 for a subscription, whether it's Real Page or Yardy or Kostar, right? An individual investor can't afford to pay $25 or $30,000. He wants to pay, you know, $29 a month or $39 a month, which is common. And so some of those subscriptions are pretty okay. But how can they possibly afford to reach the scale of a co-star with 2,000 employees just focused on gathering data from every U.S. Metro, right? So, CoStar is over 2,000 people making phone calls.

Like, I get a CoStar phone call at least once a week, twice a week. I've tried to get my number off, but they always call, right? Oh, you have so-and-so property. I'm just calling to check on the status. Do you still own it? Blah, blah, blah. I get these calls all the time, right? And Coastar also owns Apartments.com, which has 400 million rental data points per year.

And that's flowing into Co-Star. So whoever it gets a co-star subscription benefits from that. The quality of data available is at least an order of magnitude higher for multifamily as it is for single family simply because single family investors can't afford to pay $30,000 for a subscription. And that is a huge deal for me because I'm handling other people's money. Absolutely. And you have to say the fourth is tax benefits.

Yes, though I have to say that over time, I suppose single family has similar benefits. But I think the usable tax benefits in multifamily are much higher, especially today, right? We're doing this in 2026. We have, you know, the big, beautiful bill and it's amazing bonus depreciation benefits. It's radically difficult to do that for a single family home to do, you know, bonus depreciation for single family. Can be done theoretically, but I don't know of anybody that's actually doing it because of the costs associated with that. When I buy a $30 million property, it only costs me $7,000 to do bonus. depreciation through a third-party process called cost segregation.

And now I can offer a massive amount of depreciation or paper losses to my investors at the same time that I'm giving them cash flow. So I have a number of properties that are distributing cash flow to investors. And at the same time, they have negative, you know, K-1s coming from me, again, paper losses. They will get recaptured at sale. But if I keep the property for five years, you're saving money now, right? You're not paying taxes on it now. you'll maybe be paying that in the future.

But if you 1031 from, you know, when my property sells into my next property, then you won't have to do that either, right? Your depreciation will get recaptured, but you'll have 1031 benefits going forward. So I think the overall tax efficiency of multifamily is significantly greater than single family, you know, in general. You know, now that I think it has been known that if you have reps status, real estate professional status, and or active participation in short-term rentals, which is a business, you'll actually be able to allocate a lot of that tax right off to your active income.

So when you are a data scientist, you were making, you know, whatever, 100 grand a year. We know that's not the real number. And you were able to say, okay, well, I got a $60,000 bonus depreciation because of this cost egg on this apartment. I can go take 60 or 70 grand and put it towards my 100 grand income. Now, that has been in question recently. Have you heard of this? I have, but here's what I'll say, you know, have conversations with AI on what are some of the things that you can do to safeguard yourself.

These were much more, you know, problematic things to do in the past. But let's just say with AI, they become a little bit easier. So I'll just leave that as a tip for somebody that's, that's, you know, looking at this. But I know that Congress is looking to tighten some of these rules. And, you know, and at some point, this may sort of loophole may go. It certainly is a loophole. And it may go away at some point, but it still works at this point, as far as I know. And I just had a conversation yesterday with a tax attorney who, well, you know, if you're taking active write-offs, then you could be looked at as a GP.

And then if the GP gets sued for one, two or three reasons, then you could be lumped in with the GP lawsuit, even though you're an LP. And I'm like, just a- I don't believe that at all. I have never seen a U.S. judge lump an LP who has never made a decision, never sat in a meeting, in with a GP. I do not believe that such a lawsuit exists where someone that was a limited partner was ever lumped in with a general partner

for the purposes of a lawsuit. In most cases, even some of the GPs that are smaller GPs that are under 20% can't be lumped in. That's what I hear. The judges even throw out the small GPs saying, look, these people are small partners. It doesn't matter.

So they throw them out. Anybody over 20% is a real GP. But as an LP, you don't have any general partnership ownership. So I don't believe that. I think that that is a CPA pointing out a situation that is either some extraordinary one-off or has not interpreted the law correctly. Yeah, I think as lawyers in general want to show that they're providing value. And when there's not really much value to provide because it's pretty clear in the world, they're like, well, technically, I don't know. You're reaching to try to find your value.

Anyways, because I'm the same way. Listen, you have a high income earner, get into apartments because if you have rep status or, and by the way, rep status is 750 hours a year in working in real estate, real estate professional status. I have that. Neil has that, but you may not. So the way to get there is you can get active participation, buy a short-term rental. It doesn't really matter if it makes money.

you get your 100 hours of active participation. You get the same thing as rep status without needing the 750. So just a sidebar there. Now, let's talk about your passion project, data, right? You're a data engineer. This is your thing. You have a massive portfolio of apartments. I think it speaks to where you and I land.

We love apartments. It is the best business model out there. That being said, data. Talk to us about the data you're building currently and what's on your radar. I have never been as excited, you know, going to work every day as I am today. And I'll just share, you know, exact examples of that way. That's a really cool thing to say. Yeah.

And look, I've not always been as excited going into work as I am today. So and the interesting thing is it's not because of data. It's because of the data that that I can use with AI. So before, I had access to data. But what I didn't have is incredibly intelligent agents that could take that data and on an ongoing basis benefit from it. So I'll give you an example, and this is a real example. So I used Clard to build a software. And the software, what it does is it calls and leaves voicemails for my.

own properties. So, you know, Claude knows what properties I own, right? So it knows what the phone numbers are. It knows what the, the, the web addresses are. So what the software does is it uses fictional names to call to, to, you know, fill out forms at all of my properties, right? So fill out John, so and so, right, John Snow, some fictional name, right? And then it, and it's using some, uh, Gmail addresses that it creates itself. So it creates Gmail mailboxes itself and monitors those Gmail mailboxes. And then what it does is makes a phone call to that property. And if the agent picks up, it hangs up. And if the agent doesn't pick up, then it leaves a voicemail, right? And this is a real agent. I use a third-party service called Retel, R-E-T-E-L-L.I-O, and I pay, you know, about $0.4 cents a call or $7 a call, something like that. And then it also has the ability through retail.io to monitor text messages.

So what is the purpose of this? for the longest time I have wanted to have a way of secret shopping my own properties where I don't need to pay, you know, third party services, thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to do it because they can't do it often enough. And they, you know, if you do it once in a year, the improvement is not there at the property. But now all of my property owners know that I am secret shopping them using my own software. So what this offer is doing basically is, it's checking to see how much time does it take. After it fills the form out or leaves a voicemail or, you know, at the property, how much time does it take for the property to send an email, a text message and a return phone call? And how many of each of those three attempts does the property make? And what is the quality of each of those attempts? So if they send me a text message, it ranks the quality of that text message on a scale of one to ten. It ranks the quality of the email that they send out on a scale of one to ten. and then it ranks the voicemails that they leave, right?

Because it doesn't pick up the phone when they're calling back. It knows that they're going to call back. And so it basically has a voicemail and they leave a voicemail. How many voicemails? How many text messages? How many emails? And what is the quality of each of those for all of my properties? And then it has a gorgeous dashboard that we have built.

So when we do our Monday morning meetings with our property, guess what we do? We show them that dashboard and we show them where they're ranked versus my other 11 properties. So now they're looking. looking at it saying, holy crap, we are ranked lowest for text messages. We don't even send emails. And they're like, emails don't work. And I'm like, why do you care? Why do you care? If one out of a hundred emails works, why do you care? You're not sending them out manually. You have a property management software. You just needed to go and configure those templates and it would send this stuff out automatically, right? You're just not doing using your property

management software, which I'm paying for, by the way, right, properly. So imagine this is not this is not something I had the ability to do a year ago because I couldn't give a task like this to Claude and have it, you know, conveniently do this task and update this dashboard on a weekly basis. And in about a month, I will have Claude good enough so that it will actually make the phone call to my property. And if the property manager picks up, it won't hang up. It will continue the call, right? And most of my property managers will not be able to figure out that they're, talking to an AI. I've gotten it to that point. It's almost there. There's a few clues that it hands out so that people can, you know, get to that point. But one of the things that I've done is I

no longer have it call as a sort of white American or African American. I have it call as a immigrant, like a Filipino or a Spanish person. And then the English is a little more broken. And it's actually harder to tell that it's AI. Ah, that's smart. Yeah. Right. So we're we're almost getting ready to roll that out, because that is the last part of my secret shopping. So imagine now I don't have to pay for Elliott or anybody else for secret shopping, right? My, I am secret shopping my own properties. I'm ranking it in real time. So this isn't about data because I already had that data.

This is about using the data in a way that I'm creating competition amongst my properties. Nobody wants to be at the bottom. No one. Well, and then you this, I mean, this is, is this going to be out for public consumption at some point? No. Look, I'm not in the software business. As far as I'm concerned, you know, the software business is commoditized through the use of AI. My company, we have 11 employees that build apps now and increasing over time as we learn more.

And we build roughly five apps a week. So the software business is highly commoditized and we'll get more commoditized as more people realize that building apps is actually fairly, well, it's not trivial. To build good apps is still difficult, but you don't have to be a programmer. So no, it's private for us. We build apps constantly for ourselves. Okay. Are you bringing anything to market? Because I know you got some good stuff.

What was it? Two weeks ago or wherever you were showing me some stuff. Is that coming to market? So the one of the things that I'm bringing to market is I've wanted for the longest time to share data for all U.S. markets. This was too difficult to do for me. I've done it, but it was too difficult for me to do continuously. So once again, I'm able to use AI. now as a back in.

One AI assigned on every Saturday morning to basically go out and gather data from about 39, 40 different public sources, put it together, clean it up, get rid of a bunch of junk because the government data is not clean. Once it's clean, it basically is put it into an app. And this app is something I've wanted to build for a long time, and I finally have it. And it'll be in the app store in about three weeks. It's called AI Market Magic AI.

Market Magic AI. And it basically ranks any market. in the U.S., any zip code in the U.S. in terms of both real estate factors and demographic factors. So demographic is, you know, stuff like population growth and job growth and stuff like that. And then real estate factors are stuff like supply. Like, you know, is there too much supply coming into this market? Is there, you know, what are the home prices in this market? What is the cost to build in this market? Stuff like that. And then basically ranks a market and gives you that ranking. So once again, not selling it, giving it away, but, you know, I want a bigger database

of people that are data driven. So essentially, people give me their email address and phone number, and I give them my app. Yeah. And then you can go buy more apartments. I think so, yes. Every, every, you know, 500 people in my database is at least an investor. Maybe 250 people in my database is an investor. What it, now, what do you think in terms of the apartments to get back to the apartments, Do you see now is not the time to sell. We just acquired four properties this year. We're typically buying them directly from the banks because there's some of those bad actors that didn't adjust for the interest rate hikes. Do you see, when do you see the horizon where it will be a good time to sell?

There's going to be the two-year horizon and the five-year horizon. So one of the things that I'm able to do now is if you gather enough data from different vendors, Realtz, RealPage, Yardee, co-star, you can actually calculate, and this used to be almost impossible to do, even somebody like me that knows statistical analysis software was not able to do it. I can tell you now when the most likely maximum occupancy in the U.S. is going to be. So we're doing this mid-20206. So in, and this varies market by market, by the way. So I'll give you the generic one and I'll give you some examples.

So the third quarter of 2028 is the point at which the U.S. multifamily market is likely to reach occupancy of well over 97%. So somewhere between 97 and 98% in the third quarter, possibly the fourth quarter of 28. Now at that point, the occupancy won't go up any further. There's two reasons for that. Number one is that you'll start to see some more supply come in in 2020. And so the occupancy, occupancy will stay where they are. The second reason is you'll be raising rent so fast that some people simply won't be able to afford it. At some point, you hit equilibrium because you're raising rent so fast. So in my mind, the fourth quarter of 2028 would be a great time to sell because if you're raising rents in the first and second quarter of 2028 and then the third quarter, you've really raised rents very quickly because you've hit that 97% national number, then,

you sell as you're raising grants because your last three months of rents also called T3. This is something that you teach, right? Your T3, your last three months of rent growth is what people are going to use to underwrite when they're paying a price for your property. So Q4 of 2028 in my mind is that window where you sell for maximum efficiency. I love that. That's huge. Neil, you are impressive to say the least.

Thank you. There's a lot of people out there that are the good. gurus and you're just a guy that sticks to the data. It makes data-driven decisions and you've done incredibly well. So I hope to have you on here again shortly. I think a lot of people are going to want to know and learn from your wisdom and things that you're doing. And I appreciate the free app that you're bringing about the AI market research.

I think that's huge for all of us. And so Neil, I appreciate where can everyone maybe find you or where would you like to have everyone go? multi-family u.com slash club is and that's multifamily followed by the letter you you stands for university.com slash club is our completely free community. There is no upsell. There's no education platform. We're not looking to build an educational platform. We simply like to do six webinars a year for free. We talk about two topics. One is real estate and the second one is AI. So there's usually three webinars a year about various interesting things in AI.

and three a year about real estate. And we also published a massive, massive library of data. So that's published on multifamilyu.com slash club. So check it out. Completely free. I appreciate you, Neil. If this was pretty cool and you think a couple people need to hear about this, share this with the least to your friends.

Give us a five-star review. I would greatly appreciate it. Neil, you've been a blessing. We'll see you on another episode.