The Flip Side of Any Problem Is an Opportunity

Keith Weinhold and Ken McElroy discuss the impact of rising mortgage rates on the commercial real estate market.

They talk about the foreclosure of a Houston real estate investment firm, and the need for syndicators to anticipate changes in interest rates and have capital reserves in place.

The speakers predict that high-rise commercial office buildings will be the first domino to fall in the commercial real estate market.

They also discuss the potential fallout from the expiration of commercial debt and the upcoming Limitless Expo event in Scottsdale, Arizona.

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Complete transcript:

Keith Weinhold (00:00:02) - Welcome to GRE. I'm your host Keith Weinhold last year's spiking of the Fed funds rate caused banks to fail this year and last year's. Doubling of mortgage rates is causing commercial real estate to fail this year. Why is it happening? How bad is it with commercial real estate and how bad will it get? That's the topic of today's conversation with Ken McElroy on Get Rich Education.

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Speaker 2 (00:01:36) - You are listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is Get Rich Education.

Keith Weinhold (00:01:59) - Welcome to GRE from Montreal, Quebec to Monterey, California across North America and spanning 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Wein. Hold in your listening to Get Rich Education. Real estate investing is our major here. Minors are in both wealth mindset and the economics of real estate. That's what the matriculated graduates with here at G R E. You can think of an interest rate as how much it costs you to use money and to help you understand the preeminence of the cost of money. Let's you and I step back together for a second. If you go buy apples at the supermarket and Apple cost increase affects you. If you go buy a gallon of paint at Home Depot, a paint cost increase affects you. And if you go buy an acre of raw land, a land cost increase affects you. But rising interest rates mean that there was an increase in your money cost and you use money to buy those very apples paint or raw land.

Speaker 1 (00:03:04) - And now you begin to realize how interest rates touch and percolate into every single thing that you buy as a consumer or as an investor. And we know that interest rates are not currently high. Historically, yeah, you heard that right now that's not much consolation to those that are in trouble. But the Fed funds rate is about 5% and all year here the mortgage rate on an only occupied home has stayed between a range of six and 7%. Actually, mortgage rates are a little low. Their 50 year average is about seven and a half percent. Well, so then what's the problem? Well, the problem is not what are indeed historically normal rates. It's that rates rose so fast last year. You look at a graph and they climbed a wall. In fact, it's unprecedented, at least in you and i's lifetime to have them rise that fast. Just last year alone, mortgage rates spiked from 3% up to 7%. Economists estimate a 56% chance that they indeed are going to raise the Fed funds rate again. Yep. There is another meeting. Just next week, let's learn about commercial real estate deals blowing up with Ken McElroy.

Speaker 1 (00:04:28) - I'd like to welcome back longtime real estate investor influencer and multi-time bestselling real estate author and G R E podcast guest regular. Really? Hey, it's the return of Ken McElroy. How's it going Ken?

Speaker 3 (00:04:40) - Great Keith, how are you? It's good chief. Terrific. Great to see you in Arizona too recently.

Speaker 1 (00:04:45) - Yeah, that's right. We were just together in Arizona a few weeks ago, both there and everywhere across the United States, we know that residential loans are for the one to four unit space where those properties typically have long-term fixed interest rate debt, 15 to 30 years. The five plus unit department space is tied to commercial lending even though it's residential property and they often have variable rate debt for a shorter term. And commercial loans are where the trouble is in this world of higher mortgage rates. And a few months ago it made a lot of news in our world, Ken, that a Houston real estate investment firm that was at one time one of the city's largest landlords with $500 million worth of multifamily. They got foreclosed on and launched 3,200 apartments at the time. And one major reason were these floating interest rates that rose so much and rents couldn't keep up proportionately and more deals are going belly up like that. So Ken, tell us about what you are seeing out there now in regard to rising mortgage rates affecting the commercial lending market.

Speaker 3 (00:05:45) - Well, it's true. Obviously we all know that the Fed raise rates 10 times, so they were obviously fighting inflation. So if you bid around this business enough to know, know, you should have known that the Fed usually increases rates when inflation goes high. And so it is one of the tools that they use to kind of tampering 'em down inflation because that, no, the Fed is more concerned about inflation than interest rates because you obviously inflation affects everyone. So yeah, if you're in the real estate space, you might feel like you're being picked on. But the truth is, it's not surprising to anybody who's been around that they use this interest rate increases as a mechanism to lower inflation or the masses. So some of those mistakes that were made, I think it was Arbor, you have to go back to the experience of the syndicator. They elected not to buy interest rate caps and have other kinds of protections around those assets. And unfortunately, you know, some of those investors that invested in those assets, those were things that maybe weren't very clear to them. Uh, we're not exactly sure of all the details, but what's gonna happen next Keith, is we're going to start to see there's gonna be a big division of the experience versus the inexperience, I would guess

Speaker 1 (00:07:08) - A divergency, yes, of course that Fed has that dual mandate of full employment and stable prices since they're still doing pretty well on the employment. They want to get stable prices and the way to get a handle on that is to continue to raise rates. And when the Fed raise rates essentially from zero to five in just about a year, things are going to break. And we're talking about right now what is breaking first in the real estate space. And you mentioned a syndicator, when one buys an apartment building, oftentimes they get what's called a value add project, this renovation stage. And during that time they often have this variable interest rate debt. So often we are talking about apartment syndicators here, sponsors that put the deal together and what the syndicator essentially does is buy the apartment, renovate it, raise the rent, and then they cash it out to investors by either selling it or refinancing it at a higher value. And right here, these are the people that we're talking about that are in trouble due to their rates being jacked up.

Speaker 3 (00:08:07) - That's exactly right. I think you always have to anticipate a change in interest rates, whether they're up or they're down. And I think a lot of times people just always believe that they would stay as is. And I think that was obviously a flaw in their thinking and a flaw in their strategy. The other one of course is capital reserves. You know, cash, you have to have all these things in place. It looked to me from the article, the articles and the, and the different pictures and and things I've seen that they may have run into the problems on the management side as well. And you know, so there's a number of issues that I could see potentially that affected them. And I actually am hearing others kind of stories around this Keith as well. The first domino really to fall I think is gonna be some of these highrise commercial office buildings.

Speaker 3 (00:09:01) - That would be my guess because in a very different scenario where a lot of the folks that own those and maybe were in those, a lot of those tenants are deciding that they don't want their people to come back. Maybe they're doing a work from home model or the people that work for them decide that they don't wanna be back or whatever scenarios there are. There's definitely a lot of vacancies. I was looking today, you know, we're looking at pretty high uh, vacancies in la we're looking at very high vacancies in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, New York. When I'm talking about high, I'm talking about unprecedented. We're talking about 30, 40% in many cases and in some cases even more so we know that if you have a vacancy that high, you're definitely not paying the debt. And so there's all kinds of these big landlords that are actually defaulting on their loans of those commercial office buildings.

Speaker 1 (00:10:01) - Now we're talking about vacancy in the office space there and we think really in our residential world, of course people think of you as a multi-family guy, but you also are in, you know, self stores in some other spaces. But we just think about the crux of the problem and how that's centered on residential. Maybe you can just talk to us, Ken, about exactly the details of the problem or maybe you have an example from a case study and just what that, that structure looks like for those in trouble.

Speaker 3 (00:10:29) - Why would I be concerned about it? Is, is probably a really good question. And the reason is is because don't forget, we all go to banks for stuff. So if it's an auto loan, a residential loan, a commercial loan or a business loan, it's still a financial institution and it's all connected even though we might only be going for one piece of that. And so as the commercial paper starts to default and starts to make its way into these large regional, smaller community banks, then what's going to happen is the underwriting criteria is going, they're gonna pull back because they don't care. They just know that they're taking water in the boat and they're in trouble. So, so that's why I look at it, you know, obviously, but you have to look at the real estate, the landscape completely, and you realize that, you know, while you might be just doing one piece of that, there are lot and these banks are connected out in the community in many, many, many ways, right?

Speaker 1 (00:11:30) - Yeah, that's it right there. Maybe people, some don't think about just a complete seizure and a reluctance to want to extend loans at all if they have enough on their books that are in trouble,

Speaker 3 (00:11:40) - Right? So that's why I'm looking at it from the multi-family standpoint as well, because we're already seeing underwriting criteria or in other words, banks are saying we're gonna give you less 50% loan to value, 55% loan to value. So why would that be? The reason is is that you know, they're looking at their, just like you would be and and all your personal assets that you have, stocks, bonds, gold real estate, whatever it is, business, each one is performing differently. A bank looks at it exactly the same way. So if something's happening over here that's negative, it's affecting over here and it's shining a light on the whole thing. And so we're already seeing a tougher underwriting. And what that means is that means that you're gonna have to come up with more money for down payments. And of course the banks are gonna be very cautious about any kind of lending if it's on a single family, if it's on a multi-family, if it's on a residential or retail or industrial or office buildings or self storage or whatever it might be. It we're all connected. And so that's what I think is gonna be hitting us is we're gonna be in a debt and a credit crisis here in the next 18 months.

Speaker 1 (00:12:54) - So there could be downward pressure on loan to value ratios, your bank wanting you to put more skin in the game so that they are less exposed and you are more exposed there. So we're talking about maybe new purchases oftentimes in that discussion. What about those that have a loan? Maybe the interest rate has gone higher, they want to refinance it. You know, a lot of times we talk about cash out refinances is something that we want to do when equity accumulates, but could this be an environment for cash in refinances with a lot of these commercial loans?

Speaker 3 (00:13:29) - Yeah, so we've done a couple cash in personally. Yeah. So what does that mean entirely? So what happens is, well let's say you had a load at three and now of course they're over five. Well our rate caps hit us at five, but we still don't forget, we went from three to five. So that little bit of piece was expensive for us even though we had a cap though, recap is simply just an insurance policy on the original purchase, that's all. So we're like okay, that cost us about 20 grand a month on this one property as an example,

Speaker 1 (00:13:59) - The rate cap below

Speaker 3 (00:14:00) - The rate cap below the rate cap purchase was less, but the three to 5% that increase in the mortgage payment was about 20,000 a month. Okay, so call it 250,000 for the year for one asset. So you're like, uh oh. I went from having great cash flow to having a lot less cash flow because my rate went out now it hit the cap. Well I was protected but it still went up 2%. So we started to take a look at what would it cost for us to fix this rate and it was uh, about a million bucks for a cash in. So we did it, we said let's do a million dollar cash in, fix the rate because I'm also afraid of future rate increases. So that $1 million that we put in to fix the rate at 5.2%, we know it's a four year payback or 250,000 times four is a four year payback.

Speaker 3 (00:14:52) - So it's a four year loan. But really what we're doing is we're hedging the entire time and of course we have that cashflow coming out each and every month. And the beauty of that E as you know, is what you do is you hedge the upside. You can always re refinance on the doubt. And all I was trying to do was protect that thing from when the recap expired, what's usually caps for two or three years, let's say. I didn't wanna be in a position where it was, you know, six or seven or something. So that's why we did it. We were just protecting against the future. And these are the kinds of things that you can do if you've been in the room before, you know what I mean? You, if you have the experience and and you see these kinds of things happening, you could take action to help yourself and help your investors. And that is clear that the arbor had not set up their loans that way. They had not set up their cash that way and they perhaps weren't looking at some of those things critically like that.

Speaker 1 (00:15:49) - Anna and I were each active real estate investors through the global financial crisis. So we know a crisis well, we see what each crisis is a little different when we talk about hedging ourselves against the crisis. Can you talk about rate caps, which is basically this insurance that one can buy to put a cap on how high their rates can go. If you go ahead and buy a property to 3% interest rate and you have a 2% rate cap, that means your cap cannot exceed 5%. So therefore if rates go up to 7%, you're kind of in the money.

Speaker 3 (00:16:19) - That's exactly right. And so it's clear to me that they didn't buy those cap, by the way, they're not the only one. There are others. And so if you shine the light on the multifamily industry, there's a fair amount of people that didn't do that either, not just them. And also there's other people that don't have the cash perhaps like the million dollars that we used to do a cash in. And so they're going out to their investors to try to preserve the asset. The crazy thing about it, as you know is we're still very under supply and on a housing stamp. Yeah, the fundamentals of the apartments are actually good though we're still seeing a a little bit moderate red growth and we're hitting theis and the occupancies are good. The apartment industry is not in any kind of crisis. The one thing that's changed is the cost of debt has got up a lot.

Speaker 1 (00:17:14) - Why don't we talk about that some more and just how bad is it going to get Ken, maybe through the perspective of just how much commercial debt is about to expire.

Speaker 3 (00:17:24) - If you google this, you'll see that there's about 1.4 trillion expiring by the end of 2024. So that's a lot . And so what has to happen is, Keith, let's say you all bought something. Well actually there's already examples. If you Google, there's an office tower that was appraised and valued at 250,000,002 years ago and it just traded at 70 as an example. Wow. So there's a big, big haircut there, right? So first of all, all the equity on that original deal gone wipe down and then the that 70, all that does is cover part of probably the debt. So some bank somewhere took it in the shorts, you know, on that deal. And so that is a good segue to say what happens is anything that was purchased, let's say in uh, call it one to three years ago, is subject to massive valuation change.

Speaker 3 (00:18:23) - And if they have a situation where they're trying to do a cash out refi and they're not going to be able to, if they have a situation where they're going to sell, they're not going to be able to because the value of that asset is probably 20 to 30% less than it was just two years ago. So what's going to happen is if they can wait, they might be able to wait it out. If rates go down like everybody's hoping it will, or cap rates go back down like everybody's hoping it will, then you're going to be fine. The issue is going to be the maturities and when they hit,

Speaker 1 (00:19:01) - There's a 20 to 30% loss in value as we know at a 75% loan to value loan. Yes, that is a complete wipe out of the equity. Ken, when we think this through, of course apartments have debt that someone is holding onto and apartments also have equity that someone else is holding onto and equity could be held by. It's not just investors in a syndication, it's also a pension fund or a family office. And if these go under, we have to think about those ramifications of course, but we think about equity that's held by LPs limited partners, which are those individuals that invest in a syndication. What do you think that LPs should do? What kind of situation are they in? I mean are syndicators communicating with their LPs and letting them know things like, hey, there just isn't gonna be a distribution this quarter and I don't know about next quarter either or, how's that communication been?

Speaker 3 (00:19:52) - So it's hard to know. Obviously if you read the article about Arbor, there was not much and a lot of the investors were surprised. It's interesting though, cuz if you really dial into it, there's no way that they were making distributions for a long time as the things were defaulting. So there must have not been distributions on those assets for some time. That would be obviously a red flag. So I think that some syndicators are probably communicating very, very well. But in this particular case, that wasn't happening because of what some of the people were saying in the article that had invested with them.

Speaker 1 (00:20:31) - And when you're talking about Arbor, you're talking about that group in Houston that I brought yeah, up earlier. That's really become sort of like the poster child for what's coming can often that might make one think like the LP that invests in someone else's syndication that might make a savvy investor wonder, well gosh, I wonder if there's going to be a contagion effect. Even if a syndicator shows me a deal and that one particular deal looks really good, does that syndicator have other deals behind him that are blowing up and could affect this good deal that looks good in front of me right now. So what are your thoughts about any sort of contagion effect that way? Are you seeing any of that out there?

Speaker 3 (00:21:08) - It's certainly possible. I know that a lot of it's gonna be based around the debt itself. So if somebody got a deal like we did like two years ago or one year ago that put fixed rate debt on it, not a problem. So you have to take a look at the maturity of the debt. There's a lot of people that have bought properties that where they assumed alone in the commercial space you can assume something, people are still doing deals, you know, so if you could step into somebody else's loan at three, three and a half percent, let's say you're not gonna have a default issue, you're not gonna have a debt issue where the debt's gonna go up while you bought something, it's fixed. And that was kind of the whole point. As you know, I've been telling people to get in fixed straight debt for two years. If you go back and look at my videos, I probably said it a hundred times, getting fixed straight debt, getting fixed straight debt, getting fixed straight debt because you have to know what your debt payment is month to month to month for a long period of time. You don't want a fluctuating variable number. And so the people who didn't do that, the people that in my opinion were inexperienced and didn't by caps, this is the result of that.

Speaker 1 (00:22:23) - We've been talking a lot about problems here. Of course the flip side of any problem is an opportunity. You are an excellent opportunist. You just talked about situations where apartment values could be down 20 or 30%. So are you seeing opportunity, especially with respect to apartment buildings and what's going on coming ahead?

Speaker 3 (00:22:43) - We looked at four deals on Tuesday, we've been in opera on one of 'em. So to your point, if somebody's sitting on some assets and they need cash for ones that aren't doing well, for example, they might sell a couple of the good assets. And what's a good asset? A good asset would be something that's highly occupied and is stable and has fixed rate debt and it's something that you can easily underwrite, easily buy, and you know it's gonna be like clipping a coupon moving forward. That would be what I would call a good asset purchase. And those are definitely hitting the market. So I mean, you think about your own portfolio, you know, at any given time you're looking at the winners and you're looking at the losers, sometimes you have to sell a winner to pay for some of the losers. So we're starting to see some good assets hit the market.

Speaker 3 (00:23:32) - That might be great. They help somebody that's um, in a situation that might need cash for something else. So that is exactly what does happen. That is what's happening. So we're gonna be all over those issues and try to snap up some of these really, really nice assets. Another really good opportunity is going to be on brand new class A apartments that are just now being completed. So you know, as you know on a new construction deal, you do not get fixed straight debt because there's no asset. It doesn't exist. So you have a land, you have to build it until it's considered in service, which means you have all the occupancy certificates and it's blessed and the city says, okay, it's all ready to move it. That's in service. And until that point you can't put fixed rate debt on anything. So there's going to be this many opportunities on assets that are under construction that are in trouble because of these high interest rates. People that come in with all cash, for example, are going to be able to buy some of those properties. What I would guess at under replacement costs, it's going be a very exciting time moving forward for buying perhaps real trophy assets or assets up that people have already done a lot of work on or under what they're worth.

Speaker 1 (00:24:51) - That could be a good niche to exploit. You're listening to get Resu education. We're talking with Ken McElroy about trouble in the commercial lending market and how that affects real estate. Warren, we come back. I'm your host Keith WeHo with J W B Real Estate Capital. Jacksonville Real Estate has outperformed the stock market by 44% over the last 20 years. It's proven to be a more stable asset, especially during recessions. Their vertically integrated strategy has led to 79% more home price appreciation compared to the average Jacksonville investor. Since 2013, JWB is ready to help your money, make money, and to make it easy for everyday investors, get started@jwbrealestate.com slash gre. That's jwb real estate.com/gre. GRE listeners can't stop talking about their service from Ridge Lending Group and MLS four 2056. They've provided our tribe with more loans than anyone. They're truly a top lender for beginners and veterans. It's where I go to get my own loans for single family rental property up to four plexes. So start your pre-qualification and you can chat with President Chaley Ridge personally. They'll even deliver your custom plan for growing your real estate portfolio. start@ridgelendinggroup.com. This is peak prosperity's. Chris Martinson, listen to Get Rich Education with Keith Wein old and don't quit your daydream.

Speaker 1 (00:26:33) - Welcome back to Get Education. We're talking with Ken McElroy, longtime influencer and very successful author, A great influencer in the real estate space. And can you hit mentioned some other sectors outside of the residential and the apartment space earlier, and we look at potential problems or opportunities outside of residential and we think about what's happening to office space. You touched on that earlier, that's probably about the worst real estate sector I can imagine in their high vacancy rates, hotels and retail and warehouses, which actually think about one sector as doing pretty good since the pandemic and online shopping really lifted the warehouse sector. But do you really have any other thoughts about those sectors, how commercial loans affect them or any good opportunities in those outside of residential?

Speaker 3 (00:27:24) - As everyone knows, you know, when you buy a home, they look at your FCO score, right? They look at your credit and they look at you or me as the person paying that home as they should. When you move to the commercial side, they look to the asset. So they're very, very different. One's an individual. Another one is the actual asset. So as these asset values go down, as interest rates go up, I think that anything that's going to need any kind of a loan and the next year or two is going to have a problem from an asset value standpoint. Because what we were all used to in the last 10 years were these value add. So you'd buy something and then you would improve it and it would be worth more money at the credit and debt markets were stable, you know, so you could go, uh, you had a very calculated model where you can go put new debt on there and scoop that out and do a cash out refi that's gone right now because the values are down and of course the cash out refi option is off the table.

Speaker 3 (00:28:30) - So th those are the real problems that people face moving forward. So that could be all kinds of things. It could be retail, it could be industrial, it could be multi-family cuz everything is impacted even though we've had high cracy and red growth in some of those areas. If you're a seller that has a 3% loan and you're trying to sell it to somebody like us who's a buyer, we're probably at six or seven. We're looking at cash flow very differently than they are when our debt costs are almost double. So we're not gonna be able to pay that price. And so that's what the debt, rising debt costs have done. If the income, any expenses are the same, but the debt costs are double, then we as buyers can't afford to pay that. So therefore the prices that we're we can afford to pay are gonna be a lot less. And so that's actually what's happening

Speaker 1 (00:29:26) - And what we think of as perhaps ground zero for problems in the real estate market. I think office first comes to mind, you've talked about office vacancy rates in many American cities being really high earlier, it was a particularly noteworthy stat that was released not long ago that in New York City they have 26 Empire State buildings worth of empty office space. So we talk about all this open office space with more of the work from anywhere crowd and this dearth of residential housing. You know, can you experience, do you learn about very many office buildings being viable for tear down and conversion into residential? Or is that not feasible very

Speaker 3 (00:30:07) - Often? Yeah, so that's the million dollar question. What are we gonna do with these big, big office buildings? And think about this, Keith, let's say it's a 50 story building, which is a very common building all over the place and it's got 20 or 30% occupancy. My guess is, you know, what do you do? Like you have to wait until it's a hundred percent vacant, obviously before you can even do something. So what's going to happen is the banks are actually gonna be taking these back, the banks are gonna be managing these and they're gonna have to figure that out. And the only way to take down an office building is if it's a hundred percent vacant. And even then it might not be worth it because let's don't forget, you step into the shoes on day one of the property taxes of the utilities of the insurance, regardless if it's full or not in order to maintain it.

Speaker 3 (00:30:59) - So there's an operating cost that exists whether there are people in it or not. And so you have to be careful that you're not catching a falling knife. You know, like, I mean if somebody said to me, I'll give you this vacant office building or a dollar, I probably wouldn't take it because unless I had some kind of a solution for the, uh, on the income side. So I'm not saying I wouldn't, but you have to have a solution on the income side to cover your operating expenses. Otherwise you're just gonna be writing checks just like the person before you

Speaker 1 (00:31:34) - That is so well explained on the difficulty of making a conversion feasible from office to residential. Well, if you're like me, you read a lot of Ken McElroy's books like the ABCs of Property Management, the ABCs of Real Estate Investing. Can I read the Return to Orchard Canyon on a beach in India a little over three years ago? Actually, I love that more recent book from you and you have a great live in-person event coming up really soon where the audience can come to see you at a bunch of other speakers. It's a fantastic event. It's a second year, you're doing it, it comes up really soon here in Scottsdale. Tell us about it.

Speaker 3 (00:32:15) - Thank you. It's, I cannot be more excited, especially what's happening right now. It's called Limitless and uh, it's at limitless expo.com. So it's just limitless expo.com. But kicking off the very first day is Joseph Wang, who wrote a book called Central Banking 1 0 1 and he is good. He used to work in New York for the Fed and is going to talk specifically about what's the Fed going to do in the second half of the year in 2024 based on all the things that he did on the open markets desk for the Fed. So that's gonna be very exciting. We've got Chris Martinson as well talking right after him, got kiosaki. We have a whole bunch of people around entrepreneurship and um, kind of side hustle stuff just to try to figure out what the heck is happening and what could we be doing to protect ourself moving forward.

Speaker 3 (00:33:11) - So this is really, this year in particular is a not to miss year because these are things that all of us are trying to figure out. I don't have a crystal ball just like anyone does, and I'm studying like crazy to try to figure out what's happening next. We've got 45 speakers all coming to try to help us understand what we can do next. Chris boss, who's, uh, wrote the book, never Split the Difference. If you guys haven't read that book, you need to read that book. He's the hostage negotiator in the world and he works for the FBI and Harvard. And, and his talk is going to be how to negotiate during troubled times because these are going to be real things, Keith, real things that are happening. You know, when there's a debt maturity or a loan coming up or you have problems with your limited partners or, or whatever it might be, this is the room you wanna be and that's the talk you want to hear. Chris is gonna be there, I'm gonna do a podcast with him. He is gonna do a book signing, so it's really fun. It's gonna be Thursday, uh, the 15th, the 16th or the 17th of June. And uh, it's right in Scottdale, Arizona.

Speaker 1 (00:34:21) - Janice Prager will be there as well. And yeah, it seems like you just keep adding speakers. Okay, I wanna talk to you. Last month it was 40 speakers, now it's 45. So you, you have a buffet that you can sample there as an audience?

Speaker 3 (00:34:34) - We do. I can't wait to meet Dennis Prager. I, I've been to his compasses in la I, I'm a big fan of, you know, his messaging and, and what he, he has a billion downloads last year, A billion with a B. That's incredible. So he's getting to be there. I just think it's like the who's who, right? It's tweet thought

Speaker 1 (00:34:52) - 100%. You can get started@limitlessexpo.com. Can I and our audience have benefited from your knowledge for years? Thanks so much for coming back onto the show.

Speaker 3 (00:35:02) - Yeah, my pleasure. Always great to be on

Speaker 1 (00:35:10) - Most of those speakers at the Limitless event. Were guests here on G R E, so you'll probably find a lot of residents there, including Chris Voss who was the FBI's lead hostage negotiator. He was on the show with us here twice you'll remember. And yeah, you'll remember that pretty fondly because it was entertaining the first time Chris was here back in episode 331, how the World's Best negotiator and I, Chris Voss did a mock face off in negotiating the purchase of a fourplex building. But getting back to imploding apartment syndications, they aren't just blowing up deals and blowing up investors, but also blowing up banks when the borrower cannot repay the loan. And banks have to take back apartment buildings and office buildings unlike, which is actually pretty unusual in a way that they need to take back apartment buildings. I mean, everyone understands how the work from anywhere movement created, the office space decline, but there is quite a demand for all residential types, single family homes and condos and trailers and apartments.

Speaker 1 (00:36:17) - But it's those resetting rates that blow up apartments despite the demand for people to wanna live there. So what this does, it makes banks more conservative with lower rent values being delivered, lower rent to value ratios also coming on the way. I would expect more of that ratcheting down. And for more people wanting to refi from a variable rate to a fixed rate, you know those syndicators they have got to put cash in in order to meet that lower loan to value ceiling will well capitalize syndicators. They can do that and others can't. Syndicators might very well be asking for capital calls from their investors then for their investors to help fund that cash in refi to keep those deals alive. The timeline for when you should expect a lot of this activity are from the peak 2021 and early 2022 deals that had short-term debt on them.

Speaker 1 (00:37:17) - They are going to face resetting rates late this year and into 2024. You probably noticed that just beyond the halfway point in the chat with Ken. I pivoted from talking about problems to discussing opportunity and the opportunity being that others might sell a good apartment deal because they need the cash to get out of that deal so that they can go take those funds and perform a cash in refi and shore up one of their other deals and get that other deal into fixed rate debt. Most modern offices, you know, they simply cannot be adapted over to residential uses due to their wide and deep floor plates that restrict natural lighting to only the perimeters. And because of the overhauls required to run mechanical and electrical and plumbing to individual residential units in the rare office building where conversions are possible, that sort of thing is wildly encouraged by everyone, developers and brokers and all kinds of governmental bodies.

Speaker 1 (00:38:19) - In fact, there was recently a sale of a 150,000 square foot office building in Orange, California oranges between Anaheim and Santa Ana. It's sold for 22 and a half million dollars and it's planning to be converted from office to residential. But yeah, multi-family conversions like that, they just aren't common. And the full story about that from LoopNet is in the show notes for you today. We've been discussing the difference between one to four unit properties and five plus unit multi-family apartments today. The difference in lending is really what makes all the difference. So those larger apartments bought with variable rate debt, say one to three years ago, they are problematic where the one to four unit space instead stays shielded with long-term fixed interest rate debt. Next week here on the show, you're gonna meet our new investment coach at GRE Marketplace. You have heard this person on the show before. I'll introduce you next week. Yes, we're adding a second one to keep up with demand for you. Until then, I'm your host Keith Wein. Hold, don't quit, it's your daydream.

Speaker 4 (00:39:31) - Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial, or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests on their own information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of Get Rich Education LLC exclusively.

Speaker 1 (00:39:59) - The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building. Get rich education.com.