Ep 64 - Neal Bawa (audio) Part 2
[00:00:00] Neal Bawa: I believe the smartest investors are institutional investors. It's patient money. They will often sit on the sideline for years. They'll do a lot of math. They don't jump in easily. And institutional money right now is saying, if I buy a property today, the last thing I want to do is get a fixed rate. Now, if an indicator is buying a property and he tries to buy it or she tries to buy it with a floating rate, your investors are going to cut your cojones off, right? As far as they're concerned that's your, you're not even an indicator if you do that but have you seen what institutional capital is saying? Institutional capital says everything that we buy right now has to be bridge debt.
[00:00:39] Tim Little: Hello everyone. And welcome to the journey to multifamily millions. I'm your host founder and CEO of ZANA Investments, Tim Little. And on today's show, we have with us. The one and only Neal Bawa. Neal is the CEO and founder at UGRO and Grocapitus commercial real estate investment companies that use cutting-edge real estate analytics technology to source and acquire or build large commercial properties across the US. He has a current portfolio of over 4, 800 units with an assets under management value of over $1 billion. Now you are lucky enough to be listening to part two of this episode because there were just so many nuggets jam-packed into his recording that I couldn't fit it all into one episode. So now let's get into part two of our interview with Neal Bawa.
[00:02:17] Neal Bawa: So Again, the market will start to improve over the next 9 to 12 months, but it's a slow improvement process. I don't think 2025 is the year for real estate. I think it's a recovery year. things will get better every month in 2025. I really think it's 2026 and possibly 2027 when you start to see some good trends in real estate. I never think we're going to see what happens in 2021 again. That was a bizarre data point that was tied to a bizarre event called COVID and we will never see it again.
[00:02:49] Tim Little: Yeah, no, I 100% agree with you. It was a total anomaly. This shows everything off, which goes to your earlier point that you need to look at historical data because if you throw the anomaly in there, it's just going to mess everything up during an anomaly.
[00:03:02] Neal Bawa: Numbers don't make sense. And in fact, many high-quality people who look at data actually remove anomalous data, right? When they're looking at a trend, they remove the anomaly and then the trend makes sense to them. it's a recovery year. things will get better every month in 2025. I really think it's 2026 and possibly 2027 when you start to see some good trends in real estate. I never think we're going to see what happens in 2021 again. That was a bizarre data point that was tied to a bizarre event called COVID and we will never see it again.
[00:03:37] Tim Little: Yeah, no, I 100% agree with you. It was a total anomaly. which shows everything off, which goes to your earlier point that you need to look at historical data because if you throw the anomaly in there, it's just going to mess everything up
[00:03:50] Neal Bawa: during an anomaly. Numbers don't make sense. And in fact, many high-quality people who look at data actually remove anomalous data, right? When they're looking at a trend, they remove the anomaly and then the trend makes sense to them.
[00:04:05] Tim Little: No, I 100% agree on that. And Yeah, it'll be interesting to see because a lot of people think that, as soon as the Fed flips a switch, then the change happens. Inflation and that's not how it works as a lot of these things are lagging and they take time to actually take effect. And that's the inherent danger with what you're talking about with the Fed moving too far, too fast is that he doesn't give enough time for the markets to adjust to it before instituting another one and adding another weight to your analogy on the chest of the economy.
[00:04:39] Neal Bawa: What the Fed does is very difficult. I just want to say this. What they do is incredibly difficult because interest rates take nine months to impact the economy fully. So if you cut the rate by a certain amount, it takes nine months for that to wind its way into the economy. So the Fed is very data-driven but is unfortunately forced to always be reading tea leaves because of this nine-month forward curve.
[00:05:01] Tim Little: No and I'll go back to the cliched saying, Warren Buffett says to be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy. And I think some of us realize that there's a huge opportunity right now with where multifamily is at. We're just not exactly sure how to capitalize on it. How can multifamily syndicators best take advantage of this current environment?
[00:05:25] Neal Bawa: Talk to your investors. I think the number one thing that you should be doing today is tripling the amount of conversations you're having with investors because they're all speculators right now. They're all scared and you can turn them back into investors.
Messaging, messaging, and messaging are the three ways in which you can basically take advantage. And I want to give you one data point to share with your investors, okay? I believe the smartest investors are institutional investors. It's patient money. They will often sit on the sideline for years. They'll do a lot of math. They don't jump in easily. And institutional money right now is saying, if I buy a property today, the last thing I want to do is get a fixed rate. Now, if an indicator is buying a property and he tries to buy it or she tries to buy it with a floating rate, your investors are going to cut your cojones off, right? As far as they're concerned that's your, you're not even an indicator if you do that. But have you seen what institutional capital is saying? Institutional capital says everything that we buy right now has to be bridge debt. Why? Because their belief is that this is the highest interest rate that you're going to get in this environment. Therefore, The risk of rates rising is not zero, right? They're real, but the risk of rates, the chances of rates dropping are far in excess. Of the chances of rates going up. Just statistically speaking, I'd say there's a nine to 90% chance that in the next two years, rates will go down and a very small chance that they will go up from here, right? They might drop and then go up when those sorts of things happen, but there's going to be a time frame within this time where rates will go down. And when rates go down, maybe it'll happen 18 months from today. Maybe it'll happen 12 months from today. Who knows? I don't know. Then that institutional partner wants to basically refinance, not the property, just the loan. They just want to refinance that loan and maybe they'll go to bridge or maybe they'll go to fix it. They don't care. So you have to understand that institutional partners are today doing the exact same thing. Opposite of what every syndicator in America is telling their investors. We're all bragging about our fixed-rate loans. We're all bragging about our assumptions and assumptions are fine. I think assumption is one of those unique things that makes a lot of sense. But if you're getting brand new fixed-rate debt on a property you're doing the exact opposite of what Warren Buffett told you because you're scared your investors are scared. So you're putting fixed debt on it and you're putting fixed debt on it at the peak of a cycle.
[00:08:05] Tim Little: Yeah. And so that's the catch-22, right? We need to do a fixed rate because people will look at us as crazy if we try to bridge debt now. And I think there's always the option to refi down the road with the assumption that rates will be lower in year two. On the whole, if we bought something like that. And because if we tried to do the bridge debt to your point, like it, it would be nigh impossible, to get investors into our deal. And for good reason based on what's happened, but then it goes back to your point of, they're judging based. off of the past 24 months versus the bigger picture.
[00:08:43] Neal Bawa: Again, doing the right things is hard to do in both boom times and in depressed times. In boom times, the right thing to do. And institutional investors did it to sit by the sidelines and not engage in a distressed time. And I'm not saying multifamily is distressed, but it's certainly depressing to a certain level. If prices have dropped by 22%. The opposite is to buy as many as you can and to use a floating rate. I'm not suggesting that today in August bridge is the best solution. Because bridge rates are very high. They're extremely elevated. And so even if you somehow found investors that would agree, just that the rates don't make sense. My argument is that's not gonna that's going to change in the next six months. And even in the next six months, people are going to keep buying fixed-rate debt because they haven't convinced their investors. But six months, nine months from now, nine months for sure bridge that will make a lot of sense. And I think that most people won't do it because they don't want to tell their investors. This is a bet that we're making that we're at the top of the cycle. So I think the bridge will make its way back in the next nine months. And I think the biggest reason will be that the bridge really needs the Fed to cut by one time, one time, even if it's a single quarter-point cut for bridge debt to become more reasonably priced. So as soon as bridge debt becomes reasonably priced, I'm going to go for it. And if I'm doing a 40-slide presentation for my investors, 15 slides are just going to be about why bridge debt.
[00:10:16] Tim Little: Yeah, which will probably be warranted given the skepticism. What I'm seeing right now is this awkward transition period between buyers and sellers. Buyers are like, Hey, this is the reality of the market. You need to drop your price by 20%. And sellers are like but no, because, I put this much money into it and it should be valued at this much. And we're like, we don't care. This is reality. You have to accept that. And so there's this tug of war that I've seen happening as we're putting in letters of intent, LOIs, and we're underwriting deals like a million, 2 million less than what their starting price is. And it's. It's hard for us to meet in the middle. Are you seeing some of that too?
[00:11:04] Neal Bawa: Sure. And it doesn't bother me at all. So here's my feedback. Two years ago, if properties were at 3. 75 caps and we were 2 million away from the best and final. Today properties are at 5. 25 cap.
That's a 150 basis point difference, and that's what the market is bearing right now. Almost every deal that I'm seeing is somewhere between five for assumptions 5. 25. If there's no assumption to 5. 5, if it's a 300-unit property, that's the range that I'm seeing in most markets. And today we're half a million dollars off or 750, 000 off.
So our situation has changed radically from 18 months ago, where We were at 3. 75 cap and 2 million gaps to 5. 25 gap, cap, and three-quarters of a million gap. So it's changed in our favor. It's not perfect. There's still a gap between buyers and sellers, but despite that gap existing, keep in mind, that we've gone from under four caps for the whole market, especially on the value-added side to over five caps.
So buyers are adjusting for sure. Sellers are adjusting for sure. They just are not adjusting at the same speed that we would like them to make. But isn't it moving in a positive direction? Yeah,
[00:12:21] Tim Little: exactly. I was about to say, I'm starting to see it shift as well. Hopefully, we're at that. Inflection point because even on a deal that we put an offer in on, and like I said, we were like 2 million off. So we told the broker, but at the same time, we're like, Hey, we just can't make it worth work for anything that wouldn't insult your seller. But then, a couple of weeks later, they came back and they're like, Hey, they're ready to meet the market. So they're ready to accept the reality of their situation. That's probably going to be happening more and more as we go.
[00:12:54] Neal Bawa: It's happening to more and more of them. And so the numbers are becoming more rational. Here's the thing. If anybody expects that for an asset class as privileged as multifamily, and I'll explain why multifamily is privileged more than any other asset class with a gap of, 2 million, that's down to what I think is 750, 000. To think that at any point in the next 12 months, that's going to drop to zero. Not going to happen. Again, should I be getting a 26% discount today? Yes. What am I getting? 22 to take it? Hell yeah. That's really the message that I want to give people is that there are only two kinds of markets that exist. Unbalanced for buyers and still unbalanced for buyers. That's, those are the two kinds of markets that exist. There's a third kind of market that happens very rarely, and it's called capitulation. And it happened in 2008 and 2009 when the market was completely unbalanced for sellers. That is a very rare occurrence. And despite offices in the United States being down 48%, they still haven't seen a capitulation. Multifamily is only down 22%. So we're very far from capitulation. At capitulation, sellers are like, I just have to sell it for whatever the Goddamn it's worth whatever people will pay me for not what it's worth. Whatever people will pay me for. That's an extremely rare occurrence I do not expect it to happen at this point in time and we'll talk about why that isn't supposed to happen So markets are either unbalanced for buyers or severely unbalanced for buyers There is no balance and if you're going to wait for balance forever, you're just not going to buy anything.
[00:14:24] Tim Little: Yep. And I know some are in that situation. I think you talked about the multifamily being down, by 22%. I think it's important to put it into context for listeners. That is in an aggregate, right? Or an average, whereas you have some markets that are still performing very well, whereas others got hit much harder, say, Austin or other markets like that, they grew really fast. Like way faster than some of their neighbors but others have maintained. Yeah,
[00:14:57] Neal Bawa: It's an aggregate score. It's also aggregated across different kinds of properties. So class A properties, for example, have actually been hit harder, which I didn't anticipate. I, normally people during bad times run towards class A properties. But they've actually been hit harder this time around. So that was interesting to watch. So their cap rates have swung a lot. Whereas class B has done fairly well and C's have also swung a fair bit. So B turned out to be the best from a cap rate swing perspective. So that was interesting to me. So there are markets that are 12, 13%. And they shouldn't be by the way that those markets are overpriced, but they're performing so They didn't go up as much so they're not going down as much And so those markets have are beginning to become overvalued where you have markets that were crazy boomtowns like Austin or phoenix, right? where prices are now going down by 25, 26, 27 percent. And large properties in some of those markets are now going down by 28 percent. When large, 250 units plus. It's a property that's, let's say, on sale today for 40 million, right? 35, 40 million. Almost nobody can raise that kind of equity today. So you're getting an extra quarter or 0. 375 bump in your cap rate. And that's a substantial saving for the investors that are buying those properties. If you can raise that kind of money, fewer and fewer people are buying those properties. I expect that by the end of this year, A 300-unit property will have dropped more than 30% from its peak, right? But a 150-unit property might only drop 20%.
[00:17:06] Tim Little: Yeah, so it still hurts, but it's doable.
[00:17:10] Neal Bawa: Yeah, I think the industry has to adapt. We were the kings of the world, and now we're not. We're just regular Joes.
[00:17:17] Tim Little: Yeah, and I think everybody who writes talks about being conservative. And, I see articles saying, oh now they can't presume, 7% increases or 8% increases. And I was like, none of us were ever putting that into our underwriting. We may hope for it, but most of the time it was more like. 3% rent bumps, every year and part of that whole, promise over deliver mentality, right? We're going to be conservative in the underwriting, but we're hoping we'll get 20% IR. We're only going to tell the investors we expect, say, 16 whatever. But I don't think there were a whole lot of them. syndicator sponsors, whatever you want to call them out there who were throwing these crazy numbers into their underwriting, just assuming this irrational exuberance would last forever.
[00:18:11] Neal Bawa: I think everyone was irrational to some level. So I think it was 100% of syndicators that were rational, but not your point as well made in that they weren't irrational to the level that people are talking about today. The point is, when you get good press, you're magical. When you get bad press, everything that you do, good or bad. is bad, right? So you're going to get bad press for the next six months as roughly a thousand properties go back to the bank in the United States. There are 2500 properties according to the yardie matrix that are bleeding, right? So their DSCR is below one. And I expect that half or more than half of those would go back to the bank in the next 18 months and the rest would make it by. A very elaborate process of kicking the can down the road to 2025, where, dropping cap rates, dropping interest rates, and rising loan values help some of those properties get sold. Investors would still lose money in those properties that sell in 2020, and 2025, but they might lose 10 cents on the dollar instead of 50 cents on the dollar or a hundred cents on the dollar.
[00:19:18] Tim Little: Do you think there's going to be a culling of the field as it were? syndicators. And the way I think about that is, Hey, everybody wants to be an indicator when it's easy and everybody's making money. But as soon as you start to have tough conversations with your investors, it gets more challenging to find deals that pencil and you have to put a little more work into it. And sometimes a lot more work into it. Do you think that field is going to get much smaller over the next year or two? Thank you.
[00:19:48] Neal Bawa: Absolutely. I taught at the big conference, the best-ever conference in Salt Lake City with a session called crisis boot camp, how to save your property with best practices of cash calls and rescue equity. And. In that presentation, I said 40% of syndicators in the United States that exist at the beginning of 2023 will be out of business by the time 2025 comes out. So in these two years, I expect that we'll call basically 40%, two out of five syndicators. And the biggest reason for them is not what you said. The biggest reason is not going to be that they're investors. Are not going to give them any biggest reason if they are not going to make enough money to stay in because a significant portion of these in the last two or three years were able to leave full-time jobs or to somehow manage these two activities together because there was so much money.
There was so much. Profit that profit doesn't exist anymore, right? And it's not going to come until 2026 or 2027. So a vast majority of these people simply can't stick it out that long.
[00:20:56] Tim Little: No, that's a really interesting point that I hadn't really thought of. In the grand scheme of things, obviously having transitioned into doing real estate full time I'm living it. The idea that. So many people come into this, maybe they started out as a passive investor, whatever the case may be, and they want to go active and they're going to leave their job as a doctor or a dentist, in two years and just live as an indicator that reality will not exist based on what you're saying compared to what they were able to make the past couple of
[00:21:31] Neal Bawa: years. Absolutely. I think that many of the doctors, the lawyers, and the technologists will go back to their day jobs. And many of the real estate agents will go back to their day jobs. And many of the young folks will go back to their day jobs. So it's there. The culling is by age and also by their ability to make more money in their own respective fields. Those groups are the ones that are going to
[00:21:51] Tim Little: vanishes quickly. Yeah, that does make a lot of sense, especially when, for those who aren't familiar with the compensation aspect of syndicators, there's, a chunk up front, the acquisition fee, but most of the big money comes at the end, which could be three years, five years, seven years down the road when you exit.
[00:22:13] Neal Bawa: It's not three or five anymore. It's seven, right? So the three or five probably, yeah, exactly. It's the three or five, that get wiped out when you're doing it using fixed debt, that makes no sense at all. People that I know in the industry that are really seasoned. They're still buying nothing. I've jumped in, but I'm the first of that batch of that season to say, let me jump back in. I have a friend, his name's Brian Burke. He's been doing this for a while and he's still not, I think I will sit out for another six months. I'm not in a hurry, right? These are people that are seasoned. They're making tens of millions of dollars from money that they've sold in the last few years and they're like, chill.
[00:22:52] Tim Little: Yeah, no I understand the sentiment. So I would be remiss, given your background, if I didn't ask you more. tech question. And like a lot of people, I went down the AI rabbit hole when chat GPT blew up a few months ago. And I know that's a subject that you're very interested in given your background. I'm curious, have you started using AI in any practical way in your real estate business?
[00:23:18] Neal Bawa: I think the first way which we instantly glommed to was anything in marketing.
So our marketing department, basically, we are holding weekly meetings on how you did things before and how have you changed those things now. Before chat GPT, after chat GPT, the world changes. I made a little bit of a joke in my AI presentation, 3, 000 people watched it, by the way, you can watch it at multifamilyu.com. I'm oral, my, my mind, artificial intelligence is so unique and so different from any other technology that man has ever known that the date that chats GPT came out November 30th, 2022 is almost like BC and AD before Christ. After Christ. That's how insane the release of chat GPT is. And this is not obvious at this point in time. If you take the personal computer, the smartphone, and the Internet and mix them up together in a bottle and then make that bottle 1000 times larger, you're looking at artificial intelligence. So because AI uses all of those ingredients as free ingredients, AI gets the Internet. the smartphone and the personal computer for free. It also gets cloud computing, which is actually bigger than all of these as a free enabler. So it basically sits on all of these. And that means that the personal computer, which took a decade and a half to go vertical on its exponential curve and the smartphone, which took four or five years to go on vertical AI can go vertical in a year. So the vertical portion of the curve is much more accessible to artificial intelligence. So it changes everything. It changes humanity. It changes everything that we do. It changes every rule that we've created in the last hundred years and is going to either change or be utterly destroyed. No other thing that we've ever done will come close to this. Yeah. And I think,
[00:25:13] Tim Little: I think People understand that to some extent, it's just with all the press and hype and everything that was coming out, people got overwhelmed at a certain point. They're like, okay, so what do I do with it? Other than, telling it to, to make me a workout routine or give me recipes for something. They don't know how to actively use it. And maybe that'll become more clear as the technology and maybe it'll be the opposite, right? It'll become so infused in the things that we do in our day-to-day lives that we won't even recognize it as AI. It'll just be, it'll naturally be in the things that we're doing.
[00:25:52] Neal Bawa: It's a platform technology, right? But I think what people struggle with is that, are there going to be all these new tools? The answer is sure there, there are going to be plenty of new tools, right? Maybe chat GPT is an example of a tool. So it is mid-journey, but actually, The vast majority of the existing tools that we use, including Zoom and Slack and Outlook and a million other tools are going to become a lot more intelligent and that's I that's 99% of me rather than completely new things.
And some of those completely new things will be extraordinarily wild and will change our world in ways that. are even hard to imagine. So since I can't imagine it, I won't go there. But I think the change that you'll see almost immediately, meaning the next three years is going to be in all of the tools that we currently use. They will become radically intelligent very quickly.
[00:26:41] Tim Little: Yeah. I think that makes sense. So we do have to transition to the turbo round now. All right. So I'm going to ask you three questions that I ask every guest, and I just ask you for a quick, honest answer. All right. First, what is one red flag that every investor should look out for?
[00:27:00] Neal Bawa: an indicator that has fallen in love with the metro and doesn't acknowledge that every metro is both great, good, okay, bad, and horrible, depending upon the point in the cycle.
[00:27:13] Tim Little: Okay. What is one red? Oh, I'm sorry. What is a myth about this business that you would like to set straight?
[00:27:21] Neal Bawa: That multifamily is great at all points in all points of the cycle. It may be the greatest asset class. It doesn't mean that you should be buying it at all points. This is, that's just Kool-Aid.
[00:27:32] Tim Little: Yep. Do your own due diligence, and make sure you know what you're investing in as should always be the rule. And finally, what does success look like to you?
[00:27:41] Neal Bawa: Having my mind at peace more than anything else, having my mind at peace is success for me. I think that most people who are rich have their minds less at peace than when they were working a day job they may not like that day job and they might like what they're doing now, but if they lost their peace, then what did they gain?
[00:28:04] Tim Little: Yeah, I think that's so true. And it's based on evidence, right? There's so much statistical evidence that shows that even people who are considered wealthy aren't necessarily. Happier that has to come from somewhere else. All right. Hey Neal, this has been awesome I know I had a lot of fun But two got a lot of value out of the things that we were talking about a lot of really interesting points So I know the audience will appreciate it as well Please tell the listeners how they can get ahold of you And if there's anything else that you'd like to share with them
[00:28:37] Neal Bawa: If you're watching behind me is a logo called multifamily university.If you go to multifamily followed by the letterU.com, multifamilyU.com. We do 12 data-driven webinars each year. Sometimes it will do 16 and about 25, 000 people sign up for these webinars. They're free. They're always meant to be free. There's no upsell. We don't have an educational product that anyone ever gets charged a buck on. It's a community, a bunch of people that get together and talk about interesting stuff. Some of it is multifamily. Some of it doesn't have anything to do with real estate. So join that community and through that community. several times a year, you'll see projects from us that you might be interested in jumping on. I always tell people, if you want to invest with me right now, don't just take your time. You should be taking nine to 12 months to be in an investor's ecosystem before you put money in with them.
[00:29:29] Tim Little: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I will attest to the value that those webinars bring because I'm one of those 25, 000 people who have been watching them for the past couple of years. So kudos on that. I definitely appreciate all the free educational content that you're putting out there. Sounds good. All right. Again, we'll have all your information in the show notes, Neal. I appreciate you coming on and I certainly look forward to continuing to see you do big things on your journey to multifamily millions.
[00:30:01] Neal Bawa: Awesome. Thanks so much for having me on, Tim. Thanks. Thank you.
