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The Real Estate Reality Show

At GowerCrowd, we take a realistic view of commercial real estate investing, providing pragmatic insights for passive investors who are looking for sponsors they can trust and opportunities they can invest in. You’ll find no quick fixes or easy money ideas here, no sales pitches, big egos or hype. Real estate investing for passive (accredited) investors is turning messy with vast swathes of loan maturities approaching which is going to send many sponsors into default causing their investors to lose capital. While this is nothing to be celebrated, it will also bring in a period of wealth transfer and opportunistic investments. We’re here to guide you by looking at the harsh realities of real estate investing, examining the risks and the rewards in conversations with some of the world’s top experts so you can make informed decisions. You’ll learn how to build your wealth while protecting your capital investing as a limited partner in commercial real estate investments, even and especially during an economic downturn. Each week we add new episodes that provide you with access to the foremost specialists in commercial real estate investing with a focus on discounted distressed real estate and the associated market dynamics. We provide interviews and explainer videos that dive deep into the trends driving today's real estate industry, how the economy impacts returns, how to access and invest in distressed real estate deals, and how to protect your capital by mitigating downside risks. There’s no doubt that it is a very challenging time right now for the average investor. With the impact of COVID still being felt and the era of record low interest rates behind us, commercial real estate is experiencing severe headwinds. This creates financial distress for many CRE owners who did not include contingencies in their original business plans and who now face dramatically increased debt costs, increased construction and maintenance costs due to inflation, and reduced revenues from rents as the economy slows down. Is the commercial real estate world on the cusp of a major correction? Is it 2007 or 1989 all over again? Will passive investors (limited partners) who have invested in syndications (through crowdfunding or otherwise) see losses they had not predicted? How can you access discounted real estate opportunities this time around that were only available to a select few during prior downturns? Let us help you prepare your real estate portfolio no matter what the future holds, whether it be business as usual for real estate investors or a period of wealth transfer where those less prudent during the good times, lose their assets to those who have sat on the sidelines, patiently waiting for a correction. Be among the first to know of discounted investment opportunities as the market cycle plays out by subscribing to the GowerCrowd newsletter at https://gowercrowd.com/subscribe Subscribe to our YouTube channel: ⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/gowercrowd?sub_confirmation=1 Follow Adam on Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠ https://twitter.com/GowerCrowd Join the conversation on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gowercrowd/ Follow us on Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/GowerCrowd/ *** IMPORTANT NOTICE: This audio/video content is for informational purposes only and should not be regarded as a recommendation, an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Any investment information contained herein is strictly for educational purposes and GowerCrowd makes no representations or warranties as to the accuracy of such information and accepts no liability therefor. Real estate syndication investment opportunities are speculative and involve substantial risk. You should not invest unless you can sustain the risk of loss of capital, including the risk of total loss of capital. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. GowerCrowd is not a registered broker-dealer, investment adviser or crowdfunding portal. We recommend that you consult with a financial advisor, attorney, accountant, and any other professional that can help you to understand and assess the risks associated with any investment opportunity. Unless otherwise indicated, all images, content, designs, and recordings © 2023 GowerCrowd. All rights reserved.
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Now displaying: February, 2017
Feb 28, 2017

Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.  This boilerplate disclaimer is standard wording for just about any financial investment we might make, but when it comes to buying a home, as sensible as this pithy phrase may be, it is often disregarded.  Home buyers tend to be driven by the idea that because prices went up last year, they must go up next year.  Their belief in future price rises is often driven by watching past performance of the market, and buying is motivated by a belief in anticipated future price appreciation.  Same goes for speculators who, seeing a steady upward trajectory in house prices, assume that this is also a guarantee of future increases in value.

To be sure, there are some fundamental factors that drive price increases, but without being specific about what caused last year’s price rises, how can the buyer be so sure that that prices will go up next year also?  Or the year after, or the year after that?  or, indeed, that prices won’t go down?

My guest today is professor Charles Nathanson who received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and who is currently assistant professor of finance at the Kellogg school of management at Northwestern University.  A link to his full bio is at www.nreforum.org and the papers we discussed today are An Extrapolative Model of House Price Dynamics and Speculative Dynamics of Prices and Volume.  Professor Nathanson’s research in these studies provides some fascinating – and actionable – insights into what to look for to better assess if there is still upward momentum in pricing or if you are buying at the top of a bubble.   

Here are my takeaways from Professor Nathanson’s research.   In order to understand what is going on with recent house price increases, we need to know what prior buyers believed when they bought their houses.  If they bought under the assumption that prices were going to rise, then their decision may have been irrational and so, possibly, pushed up prices disproportionately to market fundamentals.  One way to measure this is to assess what proportion of those increases were driven by house flippers.  Brokers should be able to give a sense of this in their own geographical areas.  If they are reporting a preponderance of such activity, this might be indicative of being in the later stages in the cycle. 

 Also compelling is the idea that transactional volume alone is a precursor to where pricing is likely to go.   Finding data for transactional volume should not be too difficult, and if one sees a tailing off of volume, it may be the first sign that pricing is also about to stop rising and may be on the way down.  Professor Nathanson was reluctant to come to this conclusion without further research, but, again, as a metric to watch for it seems to me that it has some utility.

If you have enjoyed this podcast please tell your friends and colleagues and point them to our podcast page www.nreforum.org/podcasts where they can find the links to subscribe.  Again, thank you for listening today. 

Feb 21, 2017

This is the abstract taken from a study conducted by Professor Christopher Palmer and his colleagues entitled, 'Housing Market Spillovers:  Evidence from the End of Rent Control in Cambridge, Massachusetts'.  As follows:

'We measure the capitalization of housing market externalities into residential housing values by studying the unanticipated elimination of stringent rent controls in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1995.  Pooling data on the universe of assessed values and transacted prices of Cambridge residential properties between 1988 and 2005, we find that rent decontrol generated substantial, robust price appreciation at decontrolled units and nearby never-controlled units, accounting for a quarter of the $7.8 billion in Cambridge residential property appreciation during this period.  The majority of this contribution stems from induced appreciation of never-controlled properties.  Residential investment explains only a small fraction of the total'.

The following is a (slightly edited) transcript of the podcast with Professor Palmer discussing the impact on both rent controlled and never-rent-controlled housing when rent control is eliminated from a housing market.  The short story is that all house prices benefit from the removal of rent control – so the implication is that if you live in a rent controlled market and own the home you live in, your property value could be lower than it should be simply because there are rent controlled properties around you.  Dr. Gower first asked Professor Palmer about the background to the rent control study. 

Professor Palmer:  Well, I’ll give you some back story that is a curiosity and kind of an interesting story.  I grew up right outside of Cambridge and the summer after my freshman year of college, I got a job as a research assistant for an MIT researcher who is trying to understand a little bit about the aftermath of rent control.  My first job academic research was driving around Cambridge trying to figure out if the renovations that I had in my database that were purportedly done in response to end of rent control were actually plausibly connected to rent control.

A couple of times I found a building that had been multifamily and they put in a gas station on the ground floor and it was listed as a $2 million renovation.  Not surprisingly we dropped that from our database because we were able to ascertain that a gas station on the ground floor is not plausibly a causal effect of the end of rent control, but something that would have probably happened anyway and to call this a renovation boom as an effect of the end of rent control was not right.

That was my first foray into rent control and studying its aftermath in Cambridge.  And Cambridge provides an incredible laboratory to study rent control. Let me tell you a little bit of the details behind how Cambridge instituted rent control, and what their rent control regime was like.  One thing that is very interesting for communities that have rent control in the United States right now is it seems like a policy that comes but never goes away, and so it’s interesting as a case study that rent control actually ended at one point in Cambridge.

Like many communities in the United States, Cambridge and the Boston area had various regimes of rent control, a lot of them coming from the post war housing boom.  The intuition was that law makers were saying, look, it’s so hard for people to find an apartment that’s affordable in this city, let’s cap the rents.  A lot of the legislation when you read it says we’re enabling our rent control regulation to address the housing shortage.

That ends up from an economist perspective being exactly backwards.  You have a shortage so you are going to put a price ceiling on it and so there are now even more people that want to live there and fewer people that want to provide housing.  It ends up being a somewhat backward policy so every freshman in college taking Econ 101 learns that price ceiling and rent control is the most iconic example of reducing the quantity and quality of available housing.

 There are more people that want to buy, that want to rent a unit because the rent is now below what market is, so you have more people that are interested in buying this great deal. Then you have fewer landlords who are interested in providing their units, and also fewer landlords who are interested in fixing up their units to market standards.

That had been the traditional analysis and what we took advantage of is in 1994 the entire state of Massachusetts voted as to whether rent control should be legal per se; or allowed in the state of Massachusetts. Now this is a very curious thing to do because only three towns Boston, Brookline, Cambridge had any rent control to speak of. For years the landlords in Cambridge would put on the local ballot that they wanted to get rid of rent control. Not surprisingly Cambridge is predominantly renters with approximately a 60/40 split, or even more, with renters to owner occupants.

The renters are going to be in favor of rent control and, as Cambridge is also known affectionately as the people republics of Cambridge, [you can tell that it is] a fairly progressive place they are going not surprisingly vote in favor of the little guy, the tenant. Every time they put it on the ballot rent control would resoundingly lose. 

But the landlords in Cambridge and in Boston and Brookline got smart in the early 1990.  They rebranded themselves as a small property owners association.  When they did that it was less about taking money from the evil absente corporate landlord and giving it to the little guy tenant that deserves to live here because he or she is a public school teacher or somebody that works at city hall or an artist; someone that we think is important to the kind of community character that we have.

Their rebranding transferred [the approach] from the big buy to little guy and they said, look these small property landlords that own five or six units; this is their livelihood, and they take good care of [their properties] and this is also their inheritance for their kids.  They are as deserving as the tenants, and just as important a part of the community as the tenants are.

So that was one thing that was affective, but also putting it on the state wide ballot was a curious move that ended up paying off. Then you had people in kind of the tony suburbs of Boston and also rural western Massachusetts voting on whether Boston should be allowed to have rent controls. It was a fascinating election and the landlords ended up winning 51% to 49% with Cambridge voting overwhelmingly to keep rent control, but being overruled by people who were relatively unaffected by rent control.

 That provides us this natural experiment where all of a sudden January 1st, 1995, rent control is gone in Cambridge and we can see what happens, and, it being the modern era, we have got unit level data on assessed values and renovations.  We have data on when a house is sold, how much it was sold for, what the dollar per square foot was – the composition of these various homes.  We can compare and contrast neighborhoods across Cambridge and we can answer a couple of fundamental questions that everyone always believed about rent control such as does it keep down rent, does it create a shortage, does it reduce the quantity of housing, the quality of housing?  But then we are able to go one step further and address the question that was fascinating that no one ever had really been able to get a handle on which is, what’s the effect of rent control on the neighborhood?  If I’m an owner occupant and live next door to a building that’s rent controlled, am I affected in some way.  [Here we can] get at what economists call externality – the externality mechanism.

That was a very interesting piece of the study.  We are able to ask, what’s the effect on you, as an owner occupant, of living near rent control.  The punch line is that after the end of rent control there is a lot of residential turn over.  There are a lot of renovations and [increases in] property values.  [Prices] are increasing everywhere in the late 90s in the Boston, and especially in Cambridge, and we have this excess return for property in Cambridge not only amongst stock that was now capitalizing a much higher future rent stream, but also for never rent controlled properties.  Owner occupied properties, single family houses, condos, things like this that had not been rent controlled [we saw that they also] appreciated a lot.  Over the course of next 10-years there is an extra $2 billion of property value that’s created in Cambridge, and most of that is actually coming from stuff that had never been rent controlled, but appreciated in response to an improving neighborhood.

There are two sides to this, of course.  If you are a tenant advocate and affordability advocate you can say, look, there is proof here that when we get rid of rent control property values go up, rents go up, things becomes less affordable – and that is absolutely the case.  I think a flip side argument was to look at how much value was unlocked to owners, to people that wanted to move in and now could move in because there wasn’t as much of a shortage it was easier to find a unit in Cambridge that meant that you are bidding up rents, you are bidding up property values.

But there are people that would have been willing to pay more than what other people were paying to live in Cambridge and now have the opportunity to do so, kicking off a bit of a renaissance in Cambridge.  And you know, other work since then has shown that crime went down in these areas as well as the people that move in start to take extra precautions.  The people that move in seem like they are more likely to call the police when something sketchy happens or install a private security system and things like this that change a little bit the character of some of those neighborhoods. That’s the rent control study in a nut shell. It’s been fascinating to work on and also to think about how it applies to other rent control initiatives that have been on the ballot across the country in recent years.

Dr. Gower:  It is fascinating. Did you look at demographics as well and how the demographics in Cambridge changed?

Prof. Palmer: One of the things that was interesting as we [have] presented this, [is that] somebody would say, well you know I can tell you signs of the character changing is that my favorite dive bar, my favorite pub is now a yoga studio.  We looked at the business composition as well; are we seeing more whole foods and fewer bodegas? Are we seeing more coffee shops and fewer dive bars?

We also looked at demographics to see what’s the age mix up, what’s the racial ethnic mix up, and one of things we see is we do see some more students moving into the area.  They would be living in other communities but for the end of rate control it seems like.  And we do see fewer families with kids living there to some extent. We also see fewer retirees living there.  [This is because it] became advantageous if you were retired and you were living in a rent controlled apartment that was three bed rooms and you raised your family there, that now you are “over housed.” As your rent began to increase there was an incentive for you to find a more advantageous situation for you and then turn that over to some other family or to some other group of roommates. But to be honest the demographic changes we saw were not as dramatic as what we were seeing in the housing market.

Dr. Gower:  Very interesting. What about from a municipal perspective was there any impact on tax revenues as a result of the increase in properties values and slight demographic shift?

Prof. Palmer:  There was absolutely.  As property values go up, Cambridge is able to capture a lot of that revenue and they are able to capture it in two ways. One, even if they kept their property tax rate the same they are able to have much higher evaluations; they are bringing in a lot more revenue. But, two. that actually allowed them to lower property tax rates, so that the effective rate was not growing nearly as high for cash constrained owners and so that was a benefit to the resident in two ways.  One, there is higher revenue intake, but also they are able to lower tax rates.  Cambridge has a split property tax system with commercial, industrial, and residential tax – the different rates also gave them some extra flexibility.  But that’s allowed Cambridge to enjoy much lower property tax rates historically and certainly that gap was accelerated in the aftermath of rent control relative to surrounding communities from a municipal perspective.  [Additionally], the Cambridge police department [reported that] they have been excited about what they see as improvements in criminal activity in Cambridge. There are definitely some wins for the town’s fiscal health and the town as a whole.

Dr. Gower:  What are the implications, then, for other people in other parts of the country that are either facing rent control that they don’t want to see, or lobbying for rent control?

Prof. Palmer:  Rent control is a very touchy issue because it’s so instinctual to see people that you care about that seem like they are an important part of your community being priced out because they can’t afford their rent any further.  You would like some kind of quick fix for that and you would like to favor the people that are living here now. The people that we are attached to, the proverbial artist or public school teachers or municipal workers, working class people.

Often people are motivated by seeing their kids trying to get into an apartment and wanting to live in the community where they grew up and having a hard time doing that. There is this very sensible sympathy and knee jerk reaction that says, well let’s just try to cap rents.  One of the problems with that is it’s a Band-Aid on a gushing wound in a lot of cities that have an affordability crisis.  Take the Bay area, for example, it’s taken us decades to get to the affordability crises that we have now in many Bay area communities. It’s just not feasible that we’re going to be able to undo a crisis that’s 30-year in the making with a quick fix.

So there are all these unintended consequences from doing rent control.  It’s also a little bit too blunt of a policy in that it targets a lot of the wrong people. The statistics are that in San Francisco for example one in four renters in rent stabilized apartments are making more than six figures. So they are making more than a $100k and that’s because rent control, as an economist would say, is not means tested. It’s not a program where you have to submit your tax returns and show that you don’t have the means to be able to afford market rates, and therefore you are deserving [of], and qualifying for this affordable housing.  Instead it just limits the rent growth for everyone and that gets some of the people that really need it and some of the people that don’t need it, and it also misses some of the people that do need it.

There are just a variety of leaks through the rent control system and problems with it.  That said, it is something and lot of people would [rather] do something than nothing.  If it has some unintended consequences and some side effects they still see it as being able to benefit a tangible number of people.  In a lot of communities the solution, if you don’t want to be priced out of your area, is to lock in your rent by getting a fixed rate mortgage and buying a home. In a community like San Francisco or many parts of Los Angeles or New York or some of areas of Seattle – a lot of our most expensive places – being an owner occupant is just not feasible because of the difficulty of coming up with not only a down payment on very expensive house prices, but being able to afford that regular mortgage payment.  So then that leads people to be lifelong renters and lifelong renters are very susceptible to changes in rent.

Any way those are some of the issues that I think people think about in communities across the country when they are thinking about affordable housing policy.

The link to the original rent control study is here:  Housing Market Spillovers: Evidence from the End of Rent Control in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Feb 16, 2017

My guest today is Professor Glenn Mueller. With 35 years of real estate industry experience, including 26 years of research, Glenn Mueller is a professor for the Burns School of Real Estate and Construction Management at Denver University, one of the oldest and largest programs in the country. Mueller’s research experience includes real estate market-cycle analysis, real estate securities analysis, real estate capital markets, portfolio and diversification analysis, seniors housing analysis and both public and private market-investment strategies. He is also the real estate investment strategist at Dividend Capital Group, www.dividendcapital.com, where he provides real estate market-cycle research and investment strategy for Dividend Capital’s Real Estate Securities, Private Real Estate Investment, Private REIT and Real Estate Debt groups. He is also the co-editor of the Journal of Real Estate Portfolio Management.

At the Dividend Capital Group, professor Mueller, produces a 54 city report examining the cyclical performance of the five major real estate food groups; office, retail, industrial, residential, and hospitality.  In my conversation with Professor Mueller he discusses why he is bullish about real estate industry growth in the US over the next few years and why his experience analyzing industry cycles over the last nearly 30 years, leads him to believe that the industry will enjoy considerable stimulus with the incoming administration that could lead to an extension of the current cycle.  In fact, he talks about predictions for the next recession being pushed out from 2019/2020, to 2021/2022. 

In 1990’s when at Prudential as a research analyst, at a time when the markets were headed down during the savings and loan crisis, they wanted Mueller to monitor what was going on and predict where the market might be going in the future.   In this work, he uncovered two types of cycles.  One is the local demand-and-supply cycle.  This led him to cover 54 different MSAs concurrently, together with their localized industries, so for Detroit the automotive industry, and for New York the financial industry for example.  Employment drives the need for space, and as supply varies, where as developing new office buildings is going to be different from city to city, so it is the interaction between these two things drives occupancy levels and rents.  The Cycle Report that Prof. Mueller started in 1992 deals with this phenomena.  The second cycle is the capital cycle flowing to real estate which used to be national in nature but is now global – and this is what drives prices.  The two should work together but do not always.

The way in which government can impact the real estate cycle is by influencing economic growth through stimulus actions, whether that be through lowering taxes, creating new jobs, making life easier for businesses to conduct business etc.  Professor Mueller notes that, “this is the first time in a very, very long time, and only the fifth time in history, that we have had a completely coordinated business friendly government where all three branches of our government are interested and focused on the same thing which is business growth”.  Consequently, the potential for economic stimulus is high.  Exactly this may take place is difficult to predict yet, though infrastructure projects are likely to move forward, reduction in regulations, and making our tax system more competitive with those of overseas will all contribute to boosting the real estate industry.  A lot of economists expected a recession in 2019, 2020, but now projections are pushing that out to 2021, 2022.  Indeed, US economic cycles typically never last longer than 10 years but we could be in one that is going to last as long as 14 or 15 years.

The impact on individual cities may be influenced depending on which industries are strengthened within those cities.  Manufacturing, for example, if it can be repatriated to the US, could have a big impact on those cities with a strong manufacturing base – though this would be a very long term change, and we cannot expect to see much in the short term.

Professor Mueller’s MSA study utilizes data primarily from Costar where they look at new demand that has been created in the marketplace on a quarterly basis.   They look at how much new office, retail, industrial, residential, and hospitality space has been rented, as well as at new supply in the prior quarter.  From this they are able to determine occupancy rates in each city, and compare that to prior quarters.  This leads, in turn, to rent growth analytics determining whether or not rents have risen or fallen in the quarter. 

Using this data, Prof. Mueller determines long term averages and then uses that to generate predictive analyses of where the individual city and industry is in its natural growth cycle, and where it is headed.  Is the individual city’s market in recovery, expansion, hyper-supply, or recession, on an asset class basis – office, retail, industrial, residential, hospitality.  Download the Q4 2016 Cycle Monitor Report here. Prof. Mueller also does a predictive report on a subscription basis that looks out one year.  Please email us at info@nreforum.org if you would like to know more about these predictive models. That said, one can reasonably assume that as the general US economy moves forward, so will the real estate markets in the individual MSAs.

As far as the current cycle, we saw the bottom of the market in 2009, recovered all lost jobs by the first quarter 2014, and since then to now we have been in the growth phase.   We continue to grow and add new jobs so we continue to be in the expansion phase of the cycle.  Even if the growth rate slows down – not go negative, but decelerate – we could still be looking at expansion.  We have seen slower economic recovery and growth in this cycle than we have in previous cycles, and consequently we are seeing a longer cycle than previous ones.  Layer on to this the additional stimuli that this government is going to bring, then what normally would be a 10 year cycle, could end up being, as noted, a 14 or 15 year cycle this time around.  This would keep the real estate cycle going in the same direction, unless we start to overbuild – which we have, in a minor way, been doing for apartment buildings.

If you have liked this episode of the National Real Estate Forum podcasts, please leave us a review on iTunes or whatever syndication network you heard it on.

Feb 9, 2017

I am Doctor Adam Gower, and this is the in-depth podcast about advancing the real estate industry, by bringing together academia and real estate professionals to define the future of the industry, and not be driven by it.

The Forum's podcasts are where you will hear academic insights and shared industry experiences that will provide you interesting and innovative perspectives and tools to improve your real estate knowledge, hone your skills, and enable you and your business to thrive.

 

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