A data scientist’s process for success in multi-family real estate

Aug 15, 2022

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Neal Bawa
This podcast guesting of Neal Bawa is hosted by Roofstock of The Remote Real Estate Investor.
In today's episode, Neal shares insights about his strategy for multifamily investing, some interesting market statistics, and what he expects the future of the real estate market to look like.

Neal Bawa is a technologist who is universally known in real estate circles as the Mad Scientist of Multifamily. Besides being one of the most in-demand speakers in commercial real estate, Neal is a data guru, a process freak, and an outsourcing expert. Neal treats his $947 million-dollar portfolio as an ongoing experiment in efficiency and optimization. The Mad Scientist lives by two mantras. His first mantra is that “We can only manage what we can measure”. His second mantra is that “Data beats gut feel by a million miles”. These mantras and a dozen other disruptive beliefs drive profit for his 700+ investors.

Transcript

Before we jump into the episode, here’s a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions, and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals.

Michael:

Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode of the Remote Real Estate Investor. I’m Michael Albaum and today I’m joined by my very special guest, Neal Bawa he’s talking to us about multifamily investing syndications and some really, really interesting market statistics about looking forward to what the real estate market future holds for all of us. So let’s get into it.

Hey Neal, thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show with me today. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing some wisdom with me.

Neal:

Well, it’s exciting to be here, especially because I am a fan of your company and until five minutes ago, I didn’t know that I was doing a podcast with Roofstock. So super excited to be here.

Michael:

Awesome. Well, surprises always tend to keep people on their feet. So I’m really excited to chat with you today. So I know a little bit about your background and who you are but for anyone listening, who might not be familiar if you can give us the quick and dirty who you are, where you come from, and what is it you’re doing in real estate today?

Neal:

Absolutely. I’m a geek, a nerd, and a maverick, I come from Silicon Valley. I live in Silicon Valley, I’m a data scientist by profession with a computer science degree. I’ve had a successful tech career, which, after 17 years ended in the sale of my technology company. I got into real estate because I live in Texas Fornia and I was paying 53.7% of my gross income in taxes and so you know, I looked around and looked at lots of different avenues to save money, looked at solar panels looked at oil, and came to the conclusion that none of those were anywhere close to real estate in terms of the incredible taxation benefits. I tell people, real estate is America’s number one legitimate tax mafia. That’s really what it is. I mean, no other area has the astonishing, shocking tax benefits that real estate has. So I started doing real estate for that and started sharing a lot of my data science, you know, thought processes and ideas and it sort of just exploded from there. The first time I shared my insights on data science, I had four people in front of me. A week ago, I had 1100 listening.

Michael:

Oh my gosh, that is really, really cool. So I love chatting with data scientists with geeks and nerds as the self-proclaimed title that you gave yourself because I think it puts a process. They come from very process-oriented backgrounds, and it allows them to apply the same processes to real estate, which I’m sure we’re gonna get into in a little bit. But you’re doing some pretty amazing things in the multifamily space if I’m wrong, mistaken, right?

Neal:

I am, I am and I’m a huge fan by the way of the single-family space and often direct people to single-family, but multifamily is where I’ve been simply because of its amazing scale. So I started off in a single-family and I have now moved over to a multifamily. So currently have about 750 million in construction and various multifamily spaces such as built around and apartments have about 250 million that I’m managing that I purchased that are existing buildings, and then I dabble in other areas as well as multifamily is kind of the core foundation of my business, but I dabble in self-storage, industrial townhomes for construction and student housing as well. So I love all kinds. I love all kinds of different asset classes at different times. But I always come back to the Foundation, which is multifamily.

Michael:

Okay, now, you said a lot of amazing things with a lot of big numbers and I want to come back to that in just a minute. But I’m just curious on a personal note, can you share with our listeners, what’s the best compliment you’ve ever received?

Neal:

I think that the compliment and I actually use it now you already heard it today was a person that walked in and said, This is the geekiest and nerdiest presentation I’ve ever heard that was still very entertaining. So that second part was like, okay, so I can get geeky I can get nerdy but I can still kind of get it down to the level where people enjoy it and are not snoring, you know, five minutes into the presentation. So I love that comment because it’s hard to be a geek and be a nerd and still, you know have these aha moments for my audience. So I’ve worked really hard on that.

Michael:

I love it and clearly, you’re doing it well because people 1100 people are coming to listen so my hat off to you. So let’s talk about what excites you about multifamily because I think that there’s an argument to be made that the fundamentals but you talking about going back to the basics is a single family. So why do you think that it’s multifamily? Why do you make that argument?

Neal:

Because of a single family? The short answer is this single family is why I’m excited about multifamily. Okay. So, you know, you hear a few numbers all over and over again, and people say these numbers that don’t quite explain the meaning of this, right? So we say in this home, then you hear this all the time, we have a shortage of single-family homes in the US 5 million, the actual shortage is 5.1 4 million. You also hear we have a shortage of multifamily or apartments in this, you know, in the US and the actual shortage today is 600,000 units. So you notice most of the shortage is actually on the single-family side, right? 5.2 million there 600,000 on the apartment side and for both of those, the vast majority of the shortage, not all of it, but the vast majority came from the fact that the US actually didn’t really build anything single-family or multifamily between 2011 in 2015. So we used to build, you know, I don’t know, eight 700,000 800,000 a million units and then all of a sudden, 1112 1314 15, we built less than half of that creating this massive supply-demand gap. It was enormous and that’s why that has led to rental growth being you know, to AX what it used to be in the previous 30 years, we’ve also seen massive growth in prices on the multifamily side where, you know, we used to buy, you know, properties at, you know, $40,000 a door, and now we’re buying the same properties at $250,000 adoor. So it’s just an incredible, massive increase there in Parador prices, a lot of it really comes back down to the fact that we are absolutely unable and I haven’t seen any evidence to the contrary, we are absolutely unable to build starter homes in the United States, we actually don’t have a shortage of single family. It’s a very common misconception. We don’t have a shortage of single-family, we have a shortage of starter homes and when I talk about starter homes, I mean anything that is in a reasonably reasonable Metro, I’m not talking about San Francisco Bay area, but let’s say the the something in Phoenix, right? Being able to build a nice three to four-bedroom home that’s brand new for about $275,000 has become categorically impossible today. Okay, for I’ll give you an example of this, as you know, multifamily scales a lot better because when you’re building 100 units, you get all these economies of scale, blah, blah, blah, okay, my cost of construction in New Braunfels, which, by the way, is not a major metro, you’ve probably never even heard of it. It’s in the corridor between Austin and San Antonio and so you one could say Austin and San Antonio are both, you know, secondary markets, not primary like San Francisco or Los Angeles, and in so and this, so this market must be like a tertiary market because it’s in between my cost of construction for townhomes, not single-family is well over 300,000 units. That’s what my cost as a builder is, right?

So you understand what’s happened since March 2020. Construction costs in the US have gone up by 34%. That’s basically about 27 or 28 months, they’re up 34% and the problem was there before COVID. So before COVID, even in the face of outstanding and insane amounts of demand. We were only able to build enough single-family enough multifamily housing just to keep up with demand. So remember what I said 11, 12, 13, 14,15 those five years, we underbuilt massively, and then 1617 1819 20, those five years we built okay, we did find we stayed up with demand. But we didn’t make any dent in the single-family shortage. We didn’t make any dent in the multifamily shortage, those numbers stayed the same because we were just building enough. And that was before this once-in-a-century 34% increase in construction cost. That was before that increase. Today, construction cost has gone up. So but people who think that home prices will drop 20% simply have no understanding of the fact that there is it’s impossible to supply a product. If home prices dropped by even 10 or 15%. Most builders will either go out of business or simply pivot to build the rent. So they’ll stop building anything for the market and what that will do is make the shortage worse, which means that there’s even worse it’s going to make it much worse, right? Because we absolutely have to build 500,000 units a year just to keep up with this year’s demand. Forget about the shortage from before, right, we still want to keep up with the demand for this particular year. So we can keep the shortage from getting worse.

You know, otherwise, that number that 5.2 million number will go to 5.5 million and 6 million and 7 million so we’ll keep getting worse and every time it gets worse rents rise prices right? So there’s a cushion under home prices and most people wonder mentally failed to understand the mathematics here. If your cost of construction goes up 34% how are you going to deal with prices going down if developers don’t make enough homes, the only homes available in the market are the existing homes, right? So will competition on them will increase and haven’t you been reading already in the last three months that permits in the US have dropped to 30% because as the US economy goes closer into a recession, it’s inevitable at this point that we’ll go into recession, builders are very skittish, their construction costs are at an all-time high and so they’re backing off. They’re saying, You know what, I’m not going to take the risk of building 10,000 homes, I’ll build five. So if everybody drops their permits by 30, or 40%, you’re digging now a new hole for the construction that would have afforded for the delivery that would have happened next year and the year after. So now we’re digging a hole in 2023, deliveries and 2024 deliveries. How do you reconcile that with a 20% drop in prices? The mathematics, the fact that people actually keep saying this with a straight face is mind-boggling to a data scientist.

Michael:

Yeah, I love that because you like everything you just said, I don’t know, if you’re watching the video, you saw my jaw on the floor, I’m gonna have to pick it back up here. But it just people feel like it feels because prices are so high and toppling, then interest rates are so high, but everything you’ve just said, I mean, factually, and mathematically makes so much sense and so how should people be listening? How should our listeners be thinking and reconciling? Okay, well, interest rates have gone so high, so fast. So the purchasing power has been drastically reduced. How should you be thinking about like, what’s going to happen next?

Neal:

So the first thing you should do is study the past because the past gives you some wonderful examples of what happens when these sorts of things happen, right? So I’m gonna give you some benchmarks that will really blow you away, right? So in 1982, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates so fast, and so many times that mortgage rates went to 18%. As we’re recording this, mortgage rates are at 5.3%. So when I say this in front of an audience, I was teaching in Seattle, and there were 500 people listening. So just, you know, for shits and giggles, I basically went down to the stage and I stuck the mic in people’s faces and I said, So if interest rates were at 18%, would you buy a single-family home? No. Okay. Do you think anybody else bought a single-family home? No. What do you think prices went down? Why the answers were 20 to 50%? Well, history tells us that in 1982, when interest rates to buy new homes were 18%. Home prices declined by 10% for one quarter, bounced up by 10%, the following quarter, and actually ended the 1982 recession higher than the beginning of the recession. study history. It tells you how sticky real estate is. Now, everyone, the biggest reason why people feel that prices are about to fall off a cliff is 2008. There’s no other reason because if you look at the data from the last 61 years, all you notice is home prices are extraordinarily sticky when interest rates go up, because interest rates haven’t gone up once or twice, or three times. Nine times in the last 61 years, the Federal Reserve has hiked rates to kill inflation, nine times, right? Eight times the economy went into a recession, how many times you’d have real estate prices go down? Once 2008 because 2008 was not a recession. 2008 was the largest single evidence of large-scale fraud in American history. Millions of brokers and 1000s of bank banks committed large-scale fraud on about 20 million Americans. That’s what caused those home prices to fall. I see no evidence of fraud at this point. If I if anything, underwriting standards are pretty darn robust. The people have trouble…

Michael:

getting a mortgage is such a pain.

Neal:

Right? So when you look at this, and you say, so every everything that you’re doing is based on what you saw in 2008. But you’re not comparing the US economy today to 2008, right? So let’s go back to looking at 2007 and comparing it to today’s economy. So you want home prices to drop by 20%? Okay, fine. Question is, have you looked at how many jobs the economy created in 2007, and have you compared that to today’s jobs, right? So in the last three months, people are saying we’re in a recession, and maybe we can talk about that, in the last three months, the US created 500,000 400,400 1000 jobs. That’s 1.3 million jobs in the last three months, we actually struggled to create that many jobs in most regular years. So in three months, we created 1.3 million jobs and of course, before you know anybody says, hey, the quality of the jobs is very low. They’re part-time no, they’re not. Please go back and look at a shockingly high percentage of those are full-time jobs and then people are like, Yeah, but people are not getting paid enough.

These are standard objections, right people are not studying the radar. No wage inflation is very high in the US right now work has the upper hand. Wait, inflation is at 5.1%. Most years, it’s one and a half percent. What does that mean? People are good people who have existing jobs are getting big raises and then there are 11 million open jobs in the United States. This is the first time in US history that we’ve been at 3.5% unemployment and still have 11 million jobs open. So the economy is producing jobs at two and a half times. It usually does in a normal marketplace. How do you factor that in with home prices falling 20%? It’s a highly desired asset that people want. Now, it’s absolutely likely that home prices will fall. But the big question is, will they fall on a nationwide basis and the answer is that there is no data to support that. markets that are red, hot, and white-hot, some of those markets that I invest in are Phoenix, Boise, Las Vegas, and Austin, these are markets that are at risk of a 10% correction, and maybe some markets might even get a 15% correction. But the US is a combined 330 markets. When you look at those 330 markets, the chances that we will see a 1% overall price reduction is still low and most people are talking about 10 to 20% based on what data?

Michael:

Ah, I love it. I love it. Neal, this is super, super insightful. So kind of thinking about the feeling part of the emotional part and the people talking about the 20% correction. There are those who have said that the Zillow or the kind of red fins give estimates of value or rentability. It’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy if I’m an investor and I go on Zillow and see hey, this was only valued at 100k by Zillow, but it listed at 120 I just wanna be paying 100k. Is there some risk of that with public sentiment that prices should be falling with the Zillow effect that’s not trademarked?

Neal:

Let’s call it the Zillow effect and actually, it’s a very important thing to talk about because if you know, the question really is, is there a risk that there’s a 100% chance that the Zillow effect will drag home prices down? Here’s the catch, though. The Zillow effect is both ways, right? So we’ve also seen the Zillow effect when prices go up. So you’re gonna see a short-term curve downwards as the market adjusts and then when it adjusts, a whole bunch of people is like, home prices are 10% down, this is my chance to get in and it’s not just, it’s not just the individual investors anymore. America is fundamentally different in 2022 than it was in 2008. There is one single company called BlackRock, I think is Blackrock or Blackstone, but maybe I’m confused about that, it has now launched a $50 billion fund, just to buy homes during a dip and their definition of a dip is 7%. So the moment they see home prices falling 7%, they’re gonna come in, and there isn’t, it’s not a billion dollar fund. It’s not a $2 billion fund, it’s $50 billion, just Google it, right? So just Google a $50 billion home-buying fund. Now, that’s one company, but there are at least two dozen of them. So real estate now is an institutional asset class that rivals stock markets, and for people who invest at a big scale in the stock market, their dip is 5% 7% 10%. So you’ll get that dip and they’ll come in and they’ll, you know, scoop up a bunch of these properties and then at some point, people will realize this market isn’t going to crash 10%, they’re going to be like, Yeah, but it’s seven or 8%, or 12%, down in my area. Let me grab some properties and then you’re going to see that correction and now all of a sudden, your backup as before you know it, this is normal, right? The market that we’ve had for the last 10 years where prices only go up. That’s bizarre, that’s abnormal. That’s never happened before in US history. What we’ve seen before is prices go up. But they don’t always go up in a straight line, they go up, they’re just a little bit, they go down for three or four months, then they go back up, and the overall direction is upward. in markets like this. The Zillow effect is necessary, right?

I’m telling people number one, a dip in market prices is incredibly healthy. I’ve got my fingers and toes crossed that it happens. I’ve got my fingers and toes crossed that the US economy goes into a recession and most people would beat me up for that. It’s like, why would you have your fingers and toes crossed for that? The short answer is when we have this much money floating around. If we do not occasionally adjust the economic cycle, we always end up in a bubble and bubbles when they burst of this size, create trillions of dollars in losses and can drag us into a 2008-type recession but if you look at history, and again, I keep going back to this, the Fed has raised and income interest rates nine times and eight of those the US economy went into a recession, right? Only one of those eight was a destructive event in 2008. All other seven events were in the economic cycle, reset or adjustment and when you actually look at the effect of that recession over a three-year timeframe, the net effect was zero, the cyclically adjusted, some of the bad companies fell out some of the bad developers fell out some of the bad money in the marketplace fell out and in the if you look at the long term trend, that that bumped down that six-month recession had no real impact on the economy 2008 I can’t say that, right. So once again, there’s one time when we’ve seen total destruction happen, and that was because we perpetrated large-scale fraud on American millions of Americans, and using that as our benchmark to make all decisions in the future simply means we’re ignoring 61 years of history.

Michael:

Which seemingly is easy to do for a lot of people.

Neal:

But for most people, it seems right. So I’m kind of looking at this going, this doesn’t make any sense. Do you not realize that we just produced 1.3 million jobs in the last three months and isn’t that the best way for the company, companies are saying we’re worried about a recession, they’re issuing earnings, you know, forward-looking, and they’re saying your earnings might reduce, and then they go off and hire 500,000 people in a month, right. So I mean, it’s lip service for the stock market, it’s lip service, for their, you know, phone calls with their investors. But they’re not doing what they’re saying they’re going to do, which is reduce hiring, reduce hiring is half a million. Now normal months tend to be about 200,000 reduce hiring should be 100,000 new people being hired or 50,000, not 500,000.

Michael:

Yeah, yeah. It’s so interesting, Neal. So how do you take the data and use it when you’re investing?

Neal:

So one of the things that I do, and I’ll kind of give you a little story on this on how I got started, so right, so I’m a data scientist. So right around 2009. I am, you know, looking at the real estate market, and everything looks incredible for me, of course, everyone else is telling me this is the worst real estate market of all time. So I go and tell my family, we should be buying all kinds of real estate today. Just buy everything in the marketplace, you know, with every last dime you have and then my family basically decides that I’m so stupid that they don’t want me attending family events in case I infect other people with my horrible ideas. So I’m excommunicated from the family because they like this guy is going to infect other people and we’re going to lose millions of dollars. So I’m like, okay, I’m gonna prove these people wrong. So I go and get gathered the best of my data science information and  I mined the Zillow website, I mined the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, along with a Ukrainian hacker who was pretty good at mining. So we, you know, gather all this data together, we put it in a statistical software called R and we look at every city in America and up at the top is an unknown city, a town called Madera, California, mid-era, it’s 20 minutes from Fresno, right?

Nobody’s ever heard of Madera, California. I know Madera, right and so Michael, what my data is telling me is, Madera, California is by far fallen way more than it should have, because, from Peak 2005, it had already fallen in 2009 by 73%. So prices had fallen by 73%. But most markets fell by 30 and 40%. You know, some markets didn’t even fall that much like Dallas only fell by 11%. So I’m looking at this falling 73%. I’m like, statistically speaking, this is the greatest market of all time. So I drive a jump into my car, I drive 144 miles to Madera, and I go there, and I see all these very beautiful Kaufman and Broad homes. They’re like, gorgeous, like, they’re brand new, right? Nobody’s clearly nobody’s ever lived in them. So I go to a broker in Madera, and I say, hey, what’s happening here? I mean, these homes are gorgeous, right? Why doesn’t anybody want to buy them the answer is, well, Kaufman and Broad basically sold these two farmworkers, none of them had documented income. They’ve all left, so half the city’s empty and I’m like, so. So what does it cost to make these beautiful five-bedroom homes today? So it’s like, yeah, if you were doing new construction would cost 250,000? So I’m like, but I’m, what are they available for? Oh, you can buy these for 90,000 any day, you know, they’re all available for 90,000. You can buy as many as you like and I’m like, why in God’s name? Would I not buy these for 90,000? He says, Neal only for one reason, one reason only one reason. You can’t rent them. There are too many empty homes in Madera, so you can’t rent them.

So you basically would have to buy these homes and then keep paying your mortgage in the hope that the market comes back someday. I’m like, I have to find a solution to this. There has to be a solution. So I jumped in my car again, I drive another 20 miles to Fresno, which is the big city, right and I go there, and I talked to a broker and I say, I want you to sell me an ugly property. He’s like, Neal, no, no, no, no, I’ll send you a brand new one. I’ve got plenty of them. None. I said no, I want a 30-year-old ugly property in Fresno and he says, okay, well, these, you know, sells me a property. I buy it in cash. It’s $110,000 on Summerfield, right? I take that property, I put pictures up on the web, and I go to my Ukrainian team and I say I want to In an avalanche of leads, rental leads for this one property and they’re like, why? I mean, it’s a pretty decent rental market in Fresno. Why do you want that many leads, I’m like, trust me, just give me like 5000 leads for this one property and they’re like, okay, so the guy is sort of goes to back to his Hacking Team, and he hacks a bunch of sites, and he writes a bunch of scripts, and all of a sudden that property is like on the web 300 times in 26 different places and so is just listing it continuously using his engine and before I know it, the phone’s just ringing off the hook, I’m, you know, my mailbox is filling up with leads? So I hired a person in the Philippines, this lady on a full-time basis, and I say, call every one of these people and tell them this property is rented. But I have nine brand new properties 20 miles away in Madera and I will give you $50 amazon gift cards if you just drive there and attend an open house $50, no questions asked. We’ll just give you an Amazon or gas card and so she starts making phone calls. She was pretty good at her job. She’d been in a call center and you know, half the people swore at her because they would they were like, yeah, but this is not pressed No, this is Madera and it’s like, well, this property is rented, I, you know, I’ve got these options and she would keep sending pictures to them by text, right, because people weren’t reading, reading their emails, she would keep texting pictures of these beautiful properties and before I knew it, people were attending those open houses, I already had to deal with the banks where the moment I got a rent contract signed, I would pay cash for the property the next morning. Well, before I knew it, 11 properties were rented and then I turned around and repeated my success with my family, and all of a sudden, I was making massive amounts of cash flow on these brand new homes, that now, of course, they’re all you know, $400,000 each.

But even back then, I was making so much money every single day on properties that I knew had to come back. It’s all about the cost of construction. You don’t hear about this on podcasts if it costs $250,000 to build something, and it’s available for $100,000. Buy it because construction costs have never gone down in human history. They’ve only gone up and they’ve gone shockingly, up in the last two years. But even before that, they’ve never really gone down. Nobody was able to reduce construction costs during the 2009 downturn. They simply didn’t build anything, right? But did anybody get a reduction in construction costs? That’s not possible. Most of our construction material doesn’t even come from the US or I mean, our steel comes from places like China, right? You can’t get a discount simply because your economy is in a recession. So it’s all about construction costs. So once I had proven this algorithm, I decided I’m going to tell the world about it. But that’s another story. So that’s really how I got started in single-family and then I wrote algorithms, again and again, and published them. As I said, the first time I had people that were for people listening to me last week, I had 1100 people listening to me, it’s really about those algorithms. The only thing that’s changed and this is the answer to your question, sorry, long-winded but the answer to your question is, but what I found was, when I spend this, use the same algorithm for a single family that it has everything that I can possibly imagine except scale, I can never grow to a billion dollar portfolio, I can maybe grow to 10 million or 50 million, and a lot of people have. But if I apply the exact same data with multifamily, I have an 18-month crystal ball and I’ll explain what that means and I was getting the same exact results. But because I was buying 200 units or building 300 units at a time, I was able to hit my goal of a billion-dollar portfolio and I did it in I don’t know that from 2014 to 2021, right? So seven years, I was able to hit a billion dollars. You just can’t do that on the single-family side. Otherwise, a single-family is pretty awesome.

Michael:

Neal, I love it. I absolutely love it. What happens then I want to hear about your 18-month crystal ball. But what happens when things switch where the cost of new construction is cheaper than buying something that’s existing?

Neal:

My business is in trouble. We’re all in trouble. But so I obsess over that greatly. I go to all the conferences where I see new real estate technology coming out. I go to the modular conferences, I go to the 3d printing conferences. I look at what Amazon is selling online in terms of you know, kits I look at. I look at everything and I can tell you with complete confidence that in the next five to seven years, there is no technology that will drop the cost of construction in the US. The first technology that I think will make an impact right around the 2030 timeframe is 3d printing. Modular is a laughable technology in the US. less than point 1% of homes in the US are made through modular and the total volume of modular factories in the US is under 5000 units. We need a million. So unless Congress decides to put $150 billion towards building ala carte factories, there’s no volume and because of a company called KATERA, a very famous company K A T E R A going out and losing $2 billion of investor money. Nobody in the right white mind wants to build a modular factory modular completely, you know, not useful. 3d printing, yes. But remember, 3d printing only works in edge-case scenarios, because the property looks odd because of all that concrete that you have to basically put on. So I think it’ll work in subsidized housing for the first 10 years. So let’s say 2030 to 2040. It’ll be in subsidized housing by the end of 2040. I think 3d printing will completely change all math around construction and we’ll do a full reset of real estate. So luckily, I’ll be gone long before them.

Michael:

I would say, well, hopefully, this podcast is still in existence, we’ll have to have you back on in 2040. To talk about it. Yep, so give us some insight into your 18-month crystal ball because that’s something I’ve never heard before.

Neal:

Yeah. So I love you know, again, going back to Statistics, right? So when we’re crunching numbers or big data with our teams, one of the things we realized is when a market starts to see home prices going upwards. Okay, so its home prices are screaming upwards, right in a certain market. What we noticed was between 12 and 18 months later rents in that market exploded. Okay, between 12 and 18 months later, but not immediately and you might say, why not? Well, the short answer is, what happens is that there’s a bunch of people in that market that are looking at home prices going up, and everybody wants to be on that train when it’s going upwards. So they jump in, they buy these homes, and then that makes more people want to jump in and buy those homes, because they’re friends, you know, their homes are worth a lot more and so you see this upward momentum and then finally, the market hits a critical point where most people that are looking to buy a new home in that marketplace, their income doesn’t allow them to qualify, not most substantial portion of those people, right, so you get to maybe a quarter of all the people in market X can no longer qualify based on their income, right and the moment that happens, those people, they realize that their dream of homeownership is gone forever and then they don’t want to go live in an apartment, what they’d want to do basically is they either wanted to go live in a class A apartments, so it’s amenitized, with pools and gyms, and all those kinds of things or they want to go live in a built to rent community, which I’m building lots of, which essentially is the same as a single family home, but it’s for rent.

But it’s better than a single-family home because you’ve still got the pool and the jacuzzi and, and the dog park and the park, right, because it’s 200 single-family homes in one community, it’s just that you’re renting that home instead of buying it. So now you have a massive increase in demand for those kinds of assets because people realize I simply cannot buy anymore unless I get a huge salary increase. I’m going to be renting, then those people who want to rent the best property they can find. At the very high end, they’re going to be doing built around a single-family rental below that they’re going to be doing built around. Below that they’re going to be doing class multifamily below that they’re going to be doing Class B and Class C multifamily. So all of these rental markets see a massive boost. So this crystal ball works for every market, we’ve never actually found an exception to this rule with some weirdo exceptions in rent control markets where rents simply can’t rise. So as long as the market is not rent-controlled, we have never seen an exception, the crystal ball works. The only part of it that is a little fuzzy is sometimes we see rents going up as soon as 12 months after the explosive growth of home prices and sometimes it takes 18 months.

So that crystal ball makes my life so much simpler because crystal balls are so hard to find actual crystal balls and reliably work so hard to find. So I just look at these markets that are seeing these massive increases in home prices and I go buy multifamily there, I have a business plan to rehab that multifamily and do value ads with it and do or maybe I’m doing new construction. So either way, I have a business plan. But that’s my plan A but what I’ve found so far is in every instance that I’ve done this plan B has worked better, which is simply the market just went exp has explosive rent growth. So I didn’t actually end up implementing my business plan. I simply ended up selling my property in 18 to 24 months and making my investors a lot of money. I mean, I don’t know of anybody else in the US that uses Core Data Science, not just numbers, but core data science to do what we do. We’ve had 37% IRR 47% annualized returns for our investors by simply using the crystal ball over and over again, over and over again. I mean, I can tell you what those cities are local like today, and I guarantee you’ve not heard of many of those cities.

Michael:

Neal, I love it. What would you say have seen massive price appreciation? What is that mean I think massive could mean different things to different people. So is there a percentage that you say, hey, you know what we crossed this threshold, that’s the city that I want to invest in?

Neal:

Oh, absolutely. The short answer is multifamily. It’s only about 25- 30% increase in prices. So one of the things that most people don’t understand is, you don’t need prices to double your profits, because you use leverage. So let’s say somebody buys a $10 million building, and $3 million of that is equity, right or down payment, and 7 million of that is a loan. Now, let’s say this building goes from $10 million to $13 million, right? So you’ve it’s only gone up 30%. So if you sell it for 13%, and you return that $3 million in equity, right, there’s $3 million in profit, plus all the rents you got for two years while you were holding it. So you’ve doubled people’s money in two years or three years, right, even though the property’s only gone up 30%. So that’s very important to realize, 25 to 30% increase, usually doubled investor money in during the whole time, and recently, those hold times have been very short, two years, two and a half years. So essentially, that means 45-50%, annualized returns. Now in normal times, it takes about five years to get to that point. So you’re, you’re doubling investor equity in five years, but that’s still 20% annualized returns and I think that’s pretty awesome because the investors are doing nothing, they attend a quarterly webinar, and they read a monthly update, and if they, if they like you, they don’t even do that. They are just sort of deleting your emails when they come to cash flow, right? As long as their cash flow checks are coming in. They’re not reading anything you’re sending them.

Michael:

They’re not complaining. That’s it, that’s it. Neal, this has been so much fun. Where can people learn more about you and continue the conversation, and what’s the best way for them to get in touch?

Neal:

So I’m lucky enough that I’m the only Neal Bawa on the World Wide Web. So simply type in any URL, bawl, and hit enter into Google. There are a couple of 100 podcasts that I’ve been on. They’re geeky and nerdy, like this one too. But and if you’re interested in my metrics, if you want to figure out what is that next unknown city that is going to have explosive growth, type in Neal space Bawa space, location, magic into the web, and you will see a 45-minute course that walks you through that process. So you can find those cities yourself. Or you can simply be lazy and go to my website multifamilyu.com and find location magic they are sometimes we call it real estate secrets, same webinar, go in there and there’s a list of those cities. You know, and I believe a lot of them are tertiary markets, but a lot of them are actually 35 minutes away from some kind of primary or secondary market, I find that the primary market secondary markets are really too expensive and are at much greater risk today of price drops. So like I wouldn’t go out and in buy a property in Austin. But I’ve surrounded Austin with seven different properties because I find it to be the hottest city in America for the next 10 years. I’m just not interested in paying what I have to pay what I would have to pay in Austin. So I’ve literally surrounded Austin in all four directions with my portfolio.

Michael:

Super clever. I can’t wait to see how that works out. Neal, thank you so much for taking the time and coming on sharing with us. Really appreciate it and I’m sure we’ll be chatting again soon.

Neal:

Thanks for having me on the show.

Michael:

Okay, everyone, that was our show a big thank you to Neal for coming on. Tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of meat and potatoes there to go digest and really think about because Neal kind of flipped the script on what a lot of people have been saying for a long time. So as always, if you enjoyed the episode, definitely we would love to hear ratings, and feedbacks review from all of you, and we look forward to seeing the next one. Happy investing…