👋 Happy Sunday, Best Ever readers! It’s been a week now since we wrapped BEC X in Salt Lake City, and now that the dust has settled, we’re back with a recap for you.
In today’s newsletter, we’re highlighting some of the best talks from BEC X, including the new era of capital raising, where money is flowing, retail vs. institutional capital, the changing face of AI, and much more. Stay tuned for the full recordings, set to be released in the coming weeks.
📩 Also … Join Joe Fairless and Matt Faircloth live on Tuesday, March 3, at 11:30 am EST for a free Challenge Workshop designed for operators navigating a demanding market and looking for real answers. Bring your toughest challenges, and we'll work through them together. Register now.
⚡ Change is coming to Best Ever Conference. We're reimagining how serious operators connect with serious capital — and only 150 people will be in the room. Here's what you need to know.
Let’s CRE!
📉 CRE vs. Stocks: CRE valuations have fallen below U.S. equities for the first time in nearly 20 years, according to MetLife Investment Management, as private CRE values — which bottomed in late 2024 — are projected to post nearly 5% price growth in 2026.
🌾 Flock to Farmland: Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies have surged 45% annually to a three-year high as commodity prices collapse, opening a consolidation window for well-capitalized investors as aging operators exit and generational land transfers accelerate through the end of the decade.
🏠 Rent Creep: U.S. apartment rents have risen for three consecutive months, reaching a national average of $1,716 in February, though annual growth eased to 0.4% as supply pressures keep gains below typical seasonal averages, with Sun Belt markets continuing to post declines.
🏗️ Hidden Liabilities: Tech giants have accumulated $662 billion in off-balance-sheet data center lease commitments, according to Moody's, exceeding the combined debt of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Oracle as AI-driven expansion obscures true financial risk from investors.
🔨 False Start: Total construction starts rose 0.7% MoM in January, but three energy megaprojects accounted for nearly $20 billion of that growth — without them, starts would have been negative, with residential and nonresidential groundbreakings declining 6.4% and 15.4%, respectively.
The webinar-and-wait model is dead, and the operators still running it are feeling it. At the Best Ever Conference, moderator Matt Faircloth brought together four experienced capital raisers to break down what's actually working now: fund-to-fund structures, disciplined investor nurturing, LP community building, and a hard reset on what "closing" actually means.
Here are the key takeaways from each panelist:
The Fund-to-Fund Model: Ben Fraser, managing director at Aspen Funds, raised $50 million through fund-to-fund relationships in a single year. The model works like this: instead of bringing in individual LPs directly, an operator partners with a fund manager who raises capital from their own investor network and deploys it into the operator's fund. It solves what the co-GP structure never could — it's legally clean, the fund manager gets paid legitimately, and they retain ownership of their investor relationships. Aspen supports its fund managers with evergreen fund structures and multiple complementary offerings so managers can serve different investor profiles from a single relationship.
The Nurture Gap: Lauren Brychell, GP coach and founder of Equity Elevated Consulting, sees the same mistake constantly: operators call a lead once, maybe twice, then let it go cold. What actually converts is five to seven touch points — calls, texts, and emails in combination. And the first call isn't for pitching. "We're going to do 20% of the talking," she said. "Investors are going to do 80%."
Community as Capital: Mike Arndorfer, founder of A2Passive Coaching, built an LP investment community that grew from seven founding members to 450 — and it became one of his most consistent sources of deal flow. The key: GPs are welcome, but pitching is banned. High-trust environments, he found, produce better investors and more durable relationships than any top-of-funnel strategy.
Investor Fit over Investor Count: Gopa Dobson, chief revenue officer at MJ REIT, put it plainly: "I'm not gonna make you rich, I'm gonna keep you rich." Every panelist echoed the same idea — a yes from the wrong LP creates problems downstream. Understanding what an investor actually needs before presenting a deal isn't just good practice; it's how you avoid the conversation where someone's expecting cash flow on a deal that won't distribute for years.
The infrastructure gap between operators who have built layered capital systems and those still relying on a single channel is widening. Referrals may be the most underused lever in the room — Fraser noted that roughly 25% of Aspen's annual raise comes through them, and active referrers, he's found, often convert into fund managers themselves. The operators who figure that out first aren't just raising more capital. They're building the kind of network that compounds.
Every operator is wrestling with something right now. Deal flow. Lease-up struggles. Insurance costs. Tough LP conversations. You name it.
So we're doing something about it.
Join us Tuesday, March 3, at 11:30 am EST for a free, live working session with Joe Fairless and Matt Faircloth where serious operators bring their real challenges to the table, and we solve them together — candid, collaborative, and operator-to-operator.
Here's what to expect:
🔍 Real challenges, worked through in real time
🤝 Candid, operator-to-operator problem solving
💡 A new approach to staying connected and supported all year long
Click below to save your spot for free, and come ready to share your biggest challenge.
REGISTER NOW!
John Chang, Marcus & Millichap chief investment and analytics officer, delivered his annual economic update at the Best Ever Conference, and the message was clear: 2026 is shaping up to be a genuine buying window — but only for operators who know where to look.
Here are the key takeaways from Chang’s economic update:
The 2021 Hangover Is Clearing: Deal flow hit $360 billion that year, driving cap rates to a record low of 4.5%. Then came 525 bps in rate hikes and a 58% drop in transaction volume. That distressed inventory — particularly 2021-vintage deals — is now turning over in the Gulf Coast, Florida, and Texas.
Cap Rates at a 10-Year High: They've risen roughly 100 bps across property types. Chang noted cap rates have only increased four times in the last 35 years — and each instance was a strong buying opportunity.
Transaction Velocity Is Rising: Deal flow was up 18% in 2025, and Chang expects further growth in 2026. Historically, rising transaction activity is a leading indicator of where cap rates go next.
Rent Growth — A Tale of Two Markets: National average rent growth is projected at 1.8% — essentially flat — but the range is enormous. Chicago and Cleveland pushed 7% last year. Austin and Dallas went negative, with Class C taking the hardest hit as Class A concessions cascade down the quality ladder.
The Supply Wave Is Receding: Multifamily starts are down 70% from peak. Units under construction are down 50%. The overhang is still present in high-development markets, but the pipeline is thinning.
Lending Is Thawing: The Mortgage Bankers Association forecasts 27% lending volume growth in 2026. Institutional capital raised for CRE is rising — one major fund Chang cited is targeting $100 million per month in new inflows.
The window is open. Whether it stays open depends on how quickly capital moves to meet it — and Chang's read is that the smart money is already there.
After 10 incredible years together at Best Ever Conference, we're evolving to better serve what the Best Ever community needs most right now: real capital connections.
BEC XI is not another conference—it's a curated experience where serious operators meet serious money. Be one of only 150 GPs in an intentionally small room with 50+ Fund Managers and LPs actively deploying over $100M in capital.
Every seat is hand-selected. Every conversation matters.
✅ Guaranteed access to 50+ LPs and Fund Managers ready to invest
✅ Hand-selected participants and over $100 million in capital ready to deploy
✅ All GPs get a table at the expo networking event
Date and location coming soon. Buy now risk-free—100% refund if the details don't work for you once announced.
Click below to register as a GP. If you are an LP or Fund Manager, click here to apply.
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Every CRE operator faces the same fundamental question heading into the next cycle: Where is the capital actually going to come from? Retail investors are more accessible than ever, but institutions still write the checks that move markets. At the Best Ever Conference, moderator Ben Lapidus staged a formal debate to settle the argument — and let the audience decide.
The Motion: The next five years of real estate scale will be financed primarily from retail capital. Two investors argued for, two argued against, and a live audience poll determined the winner.
The Case For Retail Capital
Bo Parfet, managing principal at DLP Capital: The institutions aren't as stable as they look, Parfet argued. He shared a firsthand account of a student housing deal where an institutional partner forced a sale during the GFC because other parts of their portfolio were on fire. Retail investors stepped in, bought out the institution at par, and held through the recovery. The assumption that retail investors are emotional and institutions are stable, he said, doesn't always hold up in practice.
Mounang Desai, managing partner of Malabar Hill Capital: The math is overwhelming, Desai argued. U.S. households control $150 trillion in net worth, with $18 trillion sitting in cash. If just 1% of that moves into private real estate over the next five years, that's $1.5 trillion — and technology, he said, has finally made that capital accessible, organized, and directable in ways it never was before.
The Case Against Retail Capital
Kyle Barnas, VP of capital markets at Fromley Development: Scale has a specific definition, Barnas argued — the ability to deploy large amounts of capital quickly, with certainty, in transactions that move pricing and absorb supply. By that definition, retail capital doesn't qualify. The entire retail real estate ecosystem combined for only a few billion in transactions last year, he noted, while Blackstone alone routinely deploys many multiples of that annually.
Dirk Bak, president of SDQ Ltd: Retail capital is structurally fragmented, Bak argued. It's raised deal by deal, slows precisely when volatility rises, and arrives after opportunities have already been validated — not before. "It's friends who show up to help you move," he said, "after all the heavy furniture's already in the truck."
The audience started 46% against retail, 29% for, with 26% undecided. By the end, the against team had climbed to 66%. The real takeaway for operators in the room: Retail and institutional capital aren't in competition — they serve different deals at different sizes. The smart play is knowing which one fits yours.
Spencer Burton has spent 25 years in CRE — brokerage, development, institutional private equity — and he's now an accidental tech founder. At the Best Ever Conference, he didn't just talk about AI. He demonstrated it live, queuing up four real tasks at the start of his session — a rent roll, a T12, two OM fit checks, and a Chipotle lease abstraction — and delegating them to an AI coworker while he presented. By the time he walked offstage, roughly 80 minutes of work had been done.
His core argument: most CRE operators are stuck in a 2022 ChatGPT mindset — using AI to read and write things — while the technology has quietly moved into something far more powerful.
The 20-Minute Rule: AI performs at approximately 80% accuracy on tasks under 20 minutes — useful enough to act on. Tasks over 20 minutes drop to around 50% accuracy, meaning you'll spend more time fixing errors than the task would have taken. The play isn't delegating one long task. It's chaining multiple short ones simultaneously.
1900 vs. 1913: Burton used two photos of 5th Avenue in New York — a sea of horse-and-buggies with one automobile in 1900, and a sea of automobiles with one horse-and-buggy just 13 years later — to place CRE at roughly 1905. The Model T has arrived. The question isn't whether AI will transform the industry. It's whether you're buying in now or waiting.
The CTO Story: Burton's chief technology officer resisted AI coding agents for two years. Six weeks before the conference, he called on a Saturday to say he'd finished a month's worth of product roadmap in a single morning using Claude Code. "I didn't sleep last night," he told Burton. What changed wasn't the technology's capability — it was the moment his CTO stopped resisting and started orchestrating.
Five Action Items: Experiment personally — build something on Replit for around $20. Nominate an AI champion in your organization to track what's changing. Audit your daily work over 90 days to identify high-volume repetitive tasks. Automate one thing first, measure the impact, then add more. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
The 40% of CRE knowledge work that is highly repetitive — parsing rent rolls, abstracting leases, reviewing OMs, summarizing PCRs — is delegable today. Operators who reclaim that time and redirect it toward judgment-intensive work will compound an advantage that widens as the technology improves. The ones who wait, Burton suggested, will find their competitors already moved in.
🙏 Thanks for reading!
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— Joe Fairless
