👋 Hello, Best Ever readers!
In today’s newsletter, the South is a magnet, Trump’s options, the 30% warning, an RTO update, and much more.
🌟 Inside the Best Ever Inner Circle, members are completely transforming their businesses with AI. From AI-powered newsletters to underwriting workflows and deal analysis, scroll down to see how experienced operators are putting AI to work. Learn more about the Inner Circle.
Let’s CRE!
🏘️ Flat Bill: Multifamily players have tempered expectations for the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, which raises the public welfare investment cap from 15% to 20% and caps institutional single-family ownership at 350 homes, with build-to-rent exemptions.
🖊️ Trump’s Options: House Speaker Mike Johnson has vowed to send the bipartisan housing bill to Trump on Monday. Trump's options are to sign it, veto it, or do nothing and let it become law without him.
🏦 Conservatorship Clock: Rep. Scott Fitzgerald has introduced a three-bill package that would set statutory guardrails for releasing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from conservatorship, in place since 2008, while letting the enterprises buy residential construction loans.
🧓 Silver Surge: Seniors housing is forecast to lead CRE returns with double-digit NOI growth through 2028, as surging 80-plus demand and a thin construction pipeline have lifted values more than 10% over the past year.
📊 Confidence Splits: Consumer confidence has ticked up 0.6 points to 91.2 in June, but views of the labor market have soured, with the share of consumers calling jobs "hard to get" climbing to 22.5%, a five-and-a-half-year high.
America is aging in place, having fewer kids, and thinning out at both ends of the age curve — except in one region. The Northeast, Midwest, and West are all losing children. Two of the three are losing 45-to-64-year-olds. The South, meanwhile, just posted gains in all five age groups, the only region in the country to do it.
From 2020 to 2025, the South grew 6%, nearly double the nation's 3.1%. Its under-18 population rose 1.1% while the Northeast, Midwest, and West lost 4.1%, 3.9%, and 5.7%, respectively. The 45-to-64 group grew while every other region's shrank.
The growth has a specific address. The outlying counties on the edges of Southern metros grew fastest across every age group, often by wide margins. Charlotte added more residents than any U.S. city last year, yet Fort Mill, SC, 20 miles south, grew far faster in percentage terms.
Developers have been building toward that edge. Garden-style apartments, which only pencil on cheaper land outside the core, have jumped from near-zero to 25% to 30% of new multifamily construction.
Family-Driven Demand: Growth in the under-18 population points toward larger units, townhome layouts, and school-district-driven leasing — a deeper, stickier renter pool than the studio-heavy urban core.
A Glut Still Clearing: Vacancy sits in the low-to-mid teens across the most oversupplied Southern metros, and in Dallas–Fort Worth, some suburban submarkets are still offering 12-week concessions and $1,000 gift cards to sign leases.
A Shrinking Pipeline: Deliveries fell about 25% in 2025 and are projected to drop another 36% in 2026, the lightest supply year since 2014, while the Sun Belt continues to lead the nation in absorption.
The demand side still has soft spots. Hiring slowed to about 75,000 jobs a month last year, down from 166,000, and consumer delinquencies are at their highest in over a decade — both can slow household formation even where population keeps climbing.
The South isn't just adding people — it's adding them at every stage of life, and that breadth is what separates durable demand from a migration headline. As supply thins through 2026, the metro-edge submarkets where families are landing are positioned to recover pricing power first.
Everyone is talking about AI. Our members are actually putting it to work.
Over the past few weeks, the Best Ever Inner Circle has turned into an incredible place to swap AI workflows, tools, and ideas that are saving time and helping operators make better decisions.
Here's a snapshot of what's happening inside the group right now:
✅ Mark D. and his team built four AI-powered industry newsletters that automatically curate news, create content, and keep their investor community engaged with minimal human involvement. They built the workflow using Claude, GitHub, and API integrations, and even shared the process with the rest of the group.
✅ Members are using Claude to underwrite deals faster. Tim W. uploads his underwriting model, rent roll, and P&L into Claude for a first-pass analysis before diving deeper. Kyle S. is building a more advanced AI underwriting workflow, while Seth G. is using Claude to generate detailed rent comp reports from entire due diligence folders.
✅ Kevin M.'s team is testing AI underwriting software that syncs directly with Excel models, making it easier to review assumptions while keeping existing underwriting workflows intact.
And we're just getting started.
This month we're bringing in an AI guest expert for a hands-on Underwriting Masterclass focused on practical ways CRE operators can use Claude and Excel to evaluate opportunities faster, pressure-test deals, and build workflows that save hours every week.
Want to see what else members are building? Learn more about the Best Ever Inner Circle below.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE INNER CIRCLE
When acquisition financing climbs past 30% of a sector's CMBS issuance, a correction has historically followed. That signal preceded the 2008 crash, the low-rate era buildup, and the 2021 liquidity peak. Office and multifamily now sit at just 4% to 6%, with refinancings making up roughly 80% of volume.
Legacy Distress: By early 2026, 252 multifamily and office loans from the 2020 to 2022 vintages had turned delinquent or entered special servicing, totaling nearly $4.8 billion across 148 properties, with more than 50 of those loans concentrated in New York, Houston, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
Nearly 74% of U.S. rental listings were affordable to median-income households in May, the highest seasonal share on record. A 50-year high in multifamily deliveries has widened options, with apartments far more accessible than single-family rentals at 79.4% versus 47.3%.
Adjusted for working days, U.S. office attendance rose 3.7% YoY in May as return-to-office mandates spread. The gap to the May 2019 baseline narrowed to 32.4%, down from 34.9% a year earlier. San Francisco led all major markets, with per-working-day visits up 8.2%.
The top 10 U.S. metros for job creation added 217,100 positions in the year ending May 2026, according to RealPage — 56,100 more than the same group's tally a month earlier. New York led with 46,800 new jobs, while the bottom 10 markets deepened their combined losses to 224,900.
National self-storage rents fell 1.8% YoY in May, but the pace of decline eased from 1.9% in April and 2.0% in March. Monthly rates ticked up 0.8%, and only Minneapolis and Indianapolis posted positive annual growth among the top 30 metros.
When the entire world shut down in 2020, most retail investors ran for the exits. One family office wired money the other direction — and just closed the books on one of the great contrarian trades of the cycle.
This week on the Best Ever CRE Show, Jeff Rosenberg of Big V joined Ash Patel and Amanda Cruise to break down how his firm bought Class A open-air shopping centers in the $20 million to $25 million range when nobody else would trade, raising the capital entirely from friends and family after private equity passed. His guiding principle came straight from Warren Buffett: "When it's raining gold, put out a bucket, not a thimble."
A Shrinking Window: Rosenberg expected 36 months to buy before competition returned. He got 16 to 24. The centers were 70% to 85% leased at acquisition, anchored by tenants like Target, Sprouts, and Starbucks — assets he says Big V could never afford at today's cap rates.
The Payoff Structure: Last year, Big V rolled seven of those assets into a $1.2 billion fund, refinancing the portfolio with a single $706 million wire. Investors from 2019 and 2020 are earning high-single-digit cash-on-cash returns with a two-year lockup before redemptions open.
The Next Move: With institutional capital now crowding retail and compressing returns, Big V is pivoting to development — two projects underway in North Dallas — and to providing GP, LP, mezz, and pref capital to small operators buying the $1 million to $5 million strip centers where the firm got its start.
Rosenberg paid every vendor and every mortgage in full through the shutdown, no forbearances, no deferrals. The banks remembered. So did the investors who trusted him when retail was priced like it was dying.
👉 Listen to the full episode here.
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— Joe Fairless
