Busy Building Buildings. Mostly Personal Opinions
Joined March 2013
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All bullshit aside, if you only ever read one of my tweets, let it be this.
I’m not a mental health expert or anything, but candidly, I have a family member that deals with depression and it’s taught me one thing above all else.
No matter how great your life is in any given moment, you cant expect to be at your happiest 24/7/365.
You’ve gotta come down from the highs every now and then to see just how good they were in the moment.
But just because you aren’t at your happiest right now doesn’t mean you’ll be at the bottom forever.
Heard multiple times in the past week that “the past 5 years have been the most challenging years in commercial real estate in close to a century”.
Given these have been my only 5 years, i’m curious what truth there is to that.
Cool custom home in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of Houston.
Paul Barabash Grocery & Meats turned custom home/compound.
My thoughts:
1. Damn, thats sweet
2. Owner must be in real estate or family of the former grocer
Office crashed before multifamily because an unemployed single-parent has more borrowing power than a small-business relative to their income.
Can’t pay apartment rent? Debit card, 2,3,4+ credit cards, personal loan, then hard money.
Can’t pay your office lease? Too bad.
Dinner with an exec/friend at a large national property management company tonight. This person oversees ~150k apartments; access to an insane amount of data.
Current multifamily market in most of the country is worse than S&L, .com bust, or the GFC. Worst they’ve seen.
Class A mostly fine, decent rent growth. However:
- credit scores at class A have gone down meaningfully over the past 3 years.
- more people are paying rent via credit card.
- average bank account balance noticeably lower than even 2 years ago
- class A tenants stretched thin, living beyond their means. 20k comes in, 20k goes out every month.
- starting to see these renters move down a tier
Class B:
- simply too many apartments, we built too much new stuff. Ripple effect is enormous.
- fewer renters tomorrow than today. Same store foot traffic noticeably down year over year. Some markets down 40-50%
- considering dropping rents below $700 a month on some 1beds in major southern markets.
Class C:
- looking at degrading NOI. Rents aren’t growing for a long time, but expenses keep creeping up
- more renters are one missed paycheck away from disaster than they can remember seeing in decades
- tenants aren’t paying rent because they simply don’t have it
- wage growth has not kept up
Lenders:
- some major investment funds, household names, haven’t paid their mortgages in 2-3 years. Banks won’t foreclose because “X is a big client.” Mexican standoff.
- a roof leak gets ignored, becomes water damage, then mold, then a down building. Buildings are rapidly deteriorating as some owners choose cash preservation over funding losses.
- number of pre-foreclosure and REO deals is the highest as a % of total units they can recall.
- data providers know it’s bad, but they’re paid to sell optimism to owners/lenders. So every forecast is “it will probably get a little better next year maybe” and that gets regurgitated at investment committees all over.
I asked “how do you think this ends?”
“Not sure. My gut says slowly then suddenly, and things will get really bad. Been doing this 40 years, you can feel it in the air. But, there’s a chance it’s just a decade of tolerable pain. I’m praying for that.”
Bailey retweeted
Sears is a very interesting case study in retail real estate.
When Sears and Kmart combined in 2005, they had about 3,500 stores and $55B in annual revenue.
But Sears spent years underinvesting in its stores while competitors like Walmart, or Target continued improving theirs. Eventually, the real estate Sears occupied became part of the story itself.
We have a great example here in Houston.
Sears was the original anchor at Memorial City Mall when it opened in 1964. When the store closed in 2018, it left behind roughly 209,000 SF.
Now,The former Sears site is being redeveloped, with plans for a 27 acre mixed use district featuring retail, restaurants, office, multifamily and public space.
That’s what makes these old department store boxes so interesting. Sears left behind 200,000+ SF, but that same space gave MetroNational the opportunity to rethink an entire section of the mall.
Retail changes, but real estate can always be repurposed.
Update: they ran out of food. All food.
Gotta go back tomorrow after they re-stock to get my order filled.
Asking thoughtful questions is maybe the best way to make yourself stand out.
In a 1-on-1 convo, I asked a board member why he so willingly was giving me his time.
Could tell he hadn’t expected to be asked that but gave a really thoughtful answer.
What info, advice, event, etc. pushed you over the edge and gave you the confidence to write your first large equity check?
5 years ago I got offered an internship the day before classes got out and cold-called strip mall owners for 3 months, spending more in gas money than I made just for the experience.
4 years ago I interviewed for a development role but was advised that the competing offer I had in capital markets would be better experience.
3 years ago I got laid off from that capital markets role.
2 years ago I was living in a new city, 1,000 miles from home in a new job I didn’t love.
1 year ago I finally got into a mixed-use development role.
1 month from now we break ground on the first project I’ve been a part of.
Excited to see where things are in another years’ time.
Are there metrics on how much of US employment is made up of things like DoorDash or Uber?
Essentially the jobs that only serve to provide convenience for others.
Life is all about getting to ‘3rd and manageable’.
Not every play is a score. Just get ahead of the sticks and bring up 3rd and manageable.
I still find it hard to believe that my time and experience is incredibly valuable, but having been in their shoes before, i’ll always give a high school or college kid time if they ask for it.
It’s refreshing to speak to someone with nothing but time and ambition.
There’s an innovation ecosystem in Houston that not everybody knows about.
Founders, VCs, academics, corporates, and everyone in between.
All solving real problems.
Prior to being in it, I hadn’t imagined that there’d be an intersection between commercial real estate, academia, and VC/start-ups.
But i’m now right in the middle of that intersection and it’s an interesting place to be.
A few years ago I had a good thing going here on X but I took a long hiatus.
A lot has changed since then so I think I’m gonna take a stab at slowly giving updates on what I’ve been doing and picking back up the CRE and SMB discourse.