Overcoming Potential Commercial Real Estate Challenges

Overview

I’ll bet most people don’t think about commercial real estate investing when they hear Taylor Swift sing “I knew you were trouble when you walked in,” but I do. I’m always ready for potential trouble. While some people might think that makes me a pessimist, I just think of it as being prepared.

Survival is to be paranoid about what might happen tomorrow and optimistic about what will happen in the long term. We believe in the resilience of the long-term prospects for the U.S. economy, and yet we recognize there could be short term consequences from something unknowable that catches everyone off guard or something predictable such as a recession. Our commercial real estate investments are tethered to the long-term success of the United States. On that long term journey, there will be lots of detours, lane closures and speed bumps. How do we give ourselves a margin of safety to navigate this?

We look at the world probabilistically, which means we see everything as a possibility. Every day there’s another story about the next problem coming. I can’t tell you which of those stories will be correct, but we constantly recalibrate the relative odds of which one is more likely to happen. Then we look for common themes in terms of their impact on our business and how our business is positioned to survive those common impacts.

The U.S. is coming off an all-time high in money supply growth to a substantial change in direction. But we need to look deeper to see what the liquidity will be like for any particular investment sector.

Capital goes to where there’s growth, so it’s going to be plentiful for building factories for supply chain reshoring, but I think there are some regulatory inducements encouraging people to over invest based on government policy. On the flip side, the office sector is in a difficult position. But there will be some enormous bargains for investors willing to take the binary risk to either repurpose it to recover value or to tear it down. Multifamily still has the best liquidity among the various food groups because we have Fannie, Freddie and HUD, which are all backed by the U.S. government because of the national imperative to make sure everybody has a roof over their head.

Every business and every market are different. We’re levered to the things that help us make money and insulated from the things that could hurt us. The pundits should stop making aggregate statements that every office investor is doomed and everyone building industrial plants in the Midwest and South is a winner.

Taking a long view about where we invest and how we finance our investments has always worked for us and will continue to protect us from possible trouble ahead.