Together With
👋 Hello, Best Ever readers!
In today’s newsletter, churches lead construction, a rental conspiracy (allegedly), a $25.8 billion backlog, rents slide again, and much more.
Today’s edition is presented by Equity Institutional Services. IRA investors are often ready to commit. What slows raises down is friction — unclear timelines, paperwork confusion, and no repeatable workflow. Sponsors who close IRA capital efficiently set expectations early and make the custody process seamless. Is your fund IRA-ready?
▶️ TODAY at 1pm | Free Session. Most operators aren't built to survive a down market. Not because they don't work hard enough, but because the structure underneath wasn't designed for it. Justin Spillers shows GPs and operators exactly what to fix. Claim your spot.
Let’s CRE!
🏛️ Fed Holds: The Federal Reserve has held interest rates steady at Kevin Warsh's first meeting as chairman, with traders now pricing a better than 90% chance of a hike by October as core inflation has climbed to 2.9%.
⚖️ Rent Conspiracy: A proposed class-action lawsuit has accused CoStar and five major brokerages of orchestrating a hub-and-spoke conspiracy to inflate office, retail, and industrial rents, echoing the antitrust claims that drove RealPage's federal settlement last year.
🏘️ ROAD Advances: The Senate has advanced the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act on an 87-to-8 procedural vote, clearing the most sweeping federal housing bill in three decades after build-to-rent restrictions were stripped from the final text.
🚧 Data Ban: Data center moratoriums have spread to 14 states and more than 100 localities in 2026, layering fresh entitlement risk onto a sector already straining against power shortages and record AI-driven demand for space.
🗺️ Affordability Gap: The South and Midwest have extended their housing affordability lead, claiming every A and B grade in a new 50-state report, while seven fast-growing states now account for 51.2% of all residential permits.
An eight-story affordable housing tower now stands on a corner in Arlington, VA, where a 95-foot steeple anchored the block for a century. The $84.8 million redevelopment at Central United Methodist placed a sanctuary and a community kitchen on the ground floor and stacked apartments above, with the congregation covering roughly $11 million and much of the balance drawn from a fund tied to Amazon's HQ2 deal. The project took about a decade to clear.
Religious construction spending rose 17% in 2025, the fastest growth of any private nonresidential category, while offices, hospitals, factories, and retail stayed flat or declined. Many congregations used the quiet of pandemic closures to reassess what they were sitting on — well-located, underused land in markets desperate for housing.
State Laws Clearing the Path: New legislation is making it easier for houses of worship to develop their property. Virginia enacted its Faith in Housing Act in April, following California in 2023 and Florida in 2025, with Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Illinois now weighing their own bills.
Land Leases Do the Work: In the Phoenix diocese, Acanthus Senior Living plans to break ground next year on a 152-unit assisted living and memory care facility on parish land at St. Gabriel Catholic Church, leasing the site and returning 10% of profits to the parish. The builder plans four more nearby and says 70 parishes nationwide want in.
The Pipeline Is Accelerating: Affordable housing projects on religious land reached roughly 200 between 2015 and 2025, producing nearly 10,000 units, according to a Rutgers University study. Annual completions climbed from about six in 2015 to 31 in 2024, concentrated where land costs and housing shortages run highest.
The economics often run opposite to a typical ground-up deal, since many congregations care less about maximizing land value than about building a funding stream or a civic anchor. That can mean patient capital, below-market land, and a partner who already holds the local goodwill that entitlements usually take years to earn.
Interest is widening fast, with Charlotte alone moving 12 congregations through an 18-week development-readiness program after a kickoff conference there drew more than 400 people from 90 congregations.
Faith-owned parcels are surfacing as an under-shopped pipeline, often on infill sites carrying support that competitors would spend years building. Operators who can manage the entitlement complexity and structure land leases or profit-shares gain a sourcing channel few are watching, and one that new legislation keeps widening.
IRA investors are often ready to invest. What slows the process down is uncertainty around timelines, paperwork, and next steps.
Sponsors who raise IRA capital efficiently typically focus on three things:
Setting expectations early
Using a repeatable workflow
Providing a clean custody and administrative experience
When investors understand the process and feel supported, fundraising conversations can move more efficiently and with less friction.
Capital raising is not only about strategy and performance. Operational readiness also plays a role in the investor experience.
Is your fund IRA-ready?
DOWNLOAD THE FREE CAPITAL RAISE GUIDE
Construction input costs climbed 9.6% YoY in May, rising more than twice as fast as overall consumer inflation. Copper wire and cable led the surge with a 24.2% annual jump, and contractors have largely been unable to pass those rising material and fuel costs along to project owners.
The national median asking rent for properties with up to two bedrooms slipped to $1,686 in May, the 34th straight month of YoY declines. Prices have fallen $78 from their 2022 peak but remain $248 above 2019 levels, as years of multifamily deliveries continue to weigh on rents.
Deferred maintenance on federal buildings has ballooned to $25.8 billion, a backlog one congressional advisory panel warns could ultimately top $50 billion. The mounting repair bill is stalling the push to sell off underutilized government property, even as federal office vacancy climbed past 70% nationally last year.
Slow Going: Federal repair projects now take an average of 435 days to clear Congress before work can even be bid out.
Vacancy for small-bay industrial properties stands at just 6.4%, far below the 10.9% rate across the broader logistics market, as historically limited construction has kept the segment tight. Demand for newer space larger than 500,000 SF has also firmed in recent quarters, pulling vacancy lower as large occupiers return.
Most operators aren't built to survive a down market. Not because they don't work hard enough. Because the structure underneath their operation was never designed to hold up when things get difficult.
TODAY at 1 pm ET, we're hosting a free session on vertical integration with Justin Spillers, co-founder of Real Estate Alpha, who has paid every investor on time for 10 consecutive years across 850+ units.
You'll walk away knowing:
📌 Why vertical integration is the only structure that keeps investors paid when markets turn ugly
📌 The one operational question that separates resilient operations from vulnerable ones
📌 The red flags most operators overlook when building their own structure
📌 How to secure a 15-19% effective yield from a 12% fixed return without taking on additional risk
Can’t make it live? Register anyway, and we’ll send you the replay.
REGISTER HERE
Every capital raiser carries a set of instincts about investor behavior — when the next check lands, who writes it, how large it gets. Richard McGirr had those instincts too. What he lacked was proof, until he pointed AI at his own CRM.
This week on the Best Ever CRE Show, Richard broke down how he mined roughly $40 million in raises across a few hundred investments and 166-plus investors to build a repeat-investor playbook — analysis that once would have required a six-figure data hire.
Using an MCP connector linking his CRM to a standard AI subscription, he ran it himself, and the patterns changed how Richard treats every first check.
The 66% Rule: Repeat investors supply about 66% of capital raised, month after month, with almost no fluctuation. That consistency makes a first check worth winning at nearly any cost, since the data shows it rarely turns out to be the last.
The 90-Day Window: Roughly a third of investors reinvest within 60 to 120 days of their first check, clustered most heavily around the 60-to-90-day mark. Miss it, and the odds fade — investors who go eight months to a year without a second commitment rarely make one at all.
Bigger Checks, Bigger Tails: The AI's first pass flagged small checks as the top multipliers. Richard's correction: larger first checks predict far larger total follow-on dollars, with less effort than grinding a series of small commitments toward the same sum.
The data surfaced one more quirk worth watching. Investors tend to cluster at either one investment or three-plus, rarely stopping at two, so once that second check clears, a third becomes far more likely. That single fact now anchors the playbook, which concentrates on engineering the second commitment inside the window where it's most likely to land.
👉 Listen to Richard’s full episode here.
🙏 Thanks for reading!
Stay in the loop with us! If you received this newsletter from someone else, subscribe here. You can also find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.
Have a Best Ever day!
— Joe Fairless
