Real Estate Underground

From Silicon Valley Data Scientist to Real Estate Mogul: Neal Bawa's Journey and Strategic Insights

• Ed Mathews

Share episode

Send us a text

Clark St Digital helps you grow your real estate company with:

  • Amazing Overseas Talent who cost 80% less than their US equivalents
  • Done-For-You subscription services
  • Done-For-You project services

Go to ClarkStDigital.com to schedule your free strategy meeting.

Additional Resources:

Find Us On Social Media:

Ed Mathews:

Greetings and salutations Real Estate Undergrounders. It is Ed Mathews with the Real Estate Underground. Thank you so much for joining us today. Today is one of those times when I get to meet somebody who has a significant and formative role in my job in terms of a multifamily investor, and he didn't even know it, but I've been following Neil for several years now. I've learned a ton from him and now I'm excited to have him on the show. So Neal Bawa from Grocapitus and several other things, but thank you so much for joining us today. It's a pleasure to finally meet you in person.

Neal Bawa:

Thanks, Ed. Thank you for inviting me. I'm very excited. This is actually a terrific time to be doing a podcast, especially because it's the beginning of the year, and last year was so astonishing, so unique, so different that it's wonderful to be able to recap it as well.

Ed Mathews:

Absolutely yeah. The theme that I continuously heard throughout 2024 is survive to 25. And here we are. We survived, right, yeah. So for those folks out there who haven't come across you yet, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do for a living?

Neal Bawa:

Sure, I'm a technologist, computer science degree data science is my background had a successful tech career in Silicon Valley, I ran a technology company for 14 years. Sold it in 2013,. Got into real estate basically for taxation reasons. I live in Taxifornia big fat tech salary 40 to 50% of my income was going to the man and I didn't like that. So I got into real estate basically for tax benefits, I started investing in by building a campus for my company and then got into single- family. Oddly enough, got built a campus first, then bought a single- family and bought dozens of single families. Continued doing that until 2013. So for 10 years just investing in my own money and family's money. And then in 2013, my company was sold. I had a huge tax bill and I was told the only way to get that tax bill down was to become a real estate professional investor. We call it syndicator because that's the only instance in which you can basically leverage other people's money and also get a portion of their depreciation. So I once again got into real estate for tax reasons and so being full time in real estate from 2013, 2014 onwards so about 10 or 11 years.

Neal Bawa:

I'm a data scientist, so I look at everything from the perspective of data and there's a bunch of very nerdy, geeky investors that follow what we do. Current portfolio the size has gone up and down. Currently it's about 600 million. There are currently 1,200 investors invested in our projects and we both buy multifamily. We also build multifamily and we have a separate company that builds townhomes, so we basically run three separate businesses value-add multifamily, new construction multifamily and townhomes. We currently have 800 apartment units in construction and about 300, 400 townhome units in construction and we're managing thousands of multifamily value-add units.

Ed Mathews:

Congratulations. That's wonderful. So, in terms of the markets that you tend to play in, how do you pick a market? What are you looking for to target? Let's start with the properties that you build, your development projects.

Neal Bawa:

Sure, I can tell you that my criteria for what to build and what to buy are actually radically different, and I'm going to do this by giving you an example right. So it's always good to have an example. So you couldn't put a gun to my head right now to get me to buy a value-add multifamily in the city of Huntsville, Alabama. Huntsville is my favorite Alabamian City. I like Huntsville. It actually is one of the top cities in America to invest in. In fact, in Milken Institute's recent 2025 listing, it was high up in the list, and there's lots of great reasons for that.

Neal Bawa:

Huntsville is easily the most forward looking. If I look at a 10 year horizon, it's easily the best. I would not consider Montgomery or any other, or Birmingham to be anywhere close to the potential of Huntsville, but you'd have to hold a gun to my head, and the reason for that is this Huntsville completely lost it when it came to granting multifamily permits over the last four years. They basically let anybody and everybody permit. They didn't really look at what was going on. So, of any city in America of any size, Huntsville has the highest percentage of supply coming in in 2024 last year and 2025 this year, which means that this city is most likely a wily city in America to see massive rent declines, concessions and all those kinds of things. On the one side, you couldn't hold a gun to my head. Now, on the other side, in the U construction, I just paid $900 for a ticket for my team that lives in Florida to fly to Huntsville because we think that, given the extraordinarily strong 10-year fundamentals and the extraordinary distress in the multifamily market, this is the right time to buy cheap land. So when I buy cheap land in 2025, I actually won't close on it until 2026, which means I won't actually bring it to market until 2028. So I am tracking Huntsville's delivery and the last significant delivery is in mid-2026. Let's call it end of 2026. So I'll have 27 as my gap year by 2028,. Those extraordinary fundamentals will take hold and I expect rent growth in Huntsville to be at 5% or 6%.

Neal Bawa:

And so I always want, when I'm coming in for a new construction, to be coming into a market that has insufficient supply, because at that point in time, the single biggest factor that affects the profitability of a new construction project is high-speed lease up at high rents without significant concessions, and then you just sell that sucker right there, you don't even wait for a year. Sure, you can optimize, but something could go wrong. The market could turn, cap rates could change, interest rates could go up. If you're at 95% and you're at a high speed, high velocity, low concession lease up, sell it now. Right, that's Huntsville and a lot of people are like, no, let's wait for a year. The answer is if I'm very sure about the market supply for the next 12 months and I'm very sure that interest rates are not going to spike in the next 12 months, sure I'll do that. But in most cases, if I time it and I come in at a low supply time, I'm already above performance.

Neal Bawa:

Right, because my leasing velocity was so spectacular because of lack of supply that I've already gotten my second year's rents in the first year, especially if I use concessions.

Neal Bawa:

One way to do that is, even if it's a market that's been nominal and everybody wants to rent, still, give them two months off and charge rents that are 10 to 15% higher than your pro forma. And now you've hit your 30% pro forma. Sure, you give two months of concessions. That's fine, that's a worthwhile hit to take. So hopefully I answered your point and illustrated just how Huntsville today is probably an incredible city to buy cheap land in, but a terrible city to do multifamily value add for the next 18 months because basically every month there's going to be a hand grenade lobbed at you, which is another 200 unit property opening and another 200 unit property opening all the way through the fourth quarter of 2026. So basically, you'll be fighting a fire every single month for the next year and a half, and so when I'm looking at the two criteria and I'll go back and answer your question about what the criteria are, this is how far apart they are.

Ed Mathews:

So it's fascinating. So basically you're because you understand I was going to say the 10-year plan, but actually, it's a lack of a plan in Huntsville's case You're able to judge when these projects will come to market. You're judging just I'm just trying to break this down to the audience and then you're judging the absorption rates of those new delivered deliveries and you want to hit the market as they are leased up at 90, 95%.

Neal Bawa:

I want everything that's in supply to be leased up before I come to market. I don't want to compete with anybody else, right? So I want to come in into a supply trough. And a lot of people are like, yeah, but this is just your estimate. No, it's not. I can tell you when, like anybody else, like Ed Mathews, when I'm projecting the future. It's just an estimate. I could be wrong right, and often am. But this is the one area in which I actually have a crystal ball, and the reason is simply this with multifamily, one of the most fundamental rules and this is very important for the value add.

Neal Bawa:

Guys, you're thinking this is for new construction. No, it's not. Listen up. What I'm saying applies equally to value add and new construction. You have a crystal ball. It's a real crystal ball and it works.

Neal Bawa:

Multifamily developers do not pull permits until their loan is ready to close, because permits are expensive, usually $5,000 a unit, some places $10,000 a unit. So nobody in their right mind is going to spend $5,000 a unit on a 200-unit project that's a million dollars to pull permits unless they're ready to go vertical, unless they're building. That's the only. But it'll do it. Now, the moment they pull permits, you know that their building is going to come to market at the very soonest about 21 months from then. Best case, Probably 24 months or 27 months. Down the line, 18 to 27 months is the timeline from the time you pull permits.

Neal Bawa:

As it happens, several vendors publish the list of permits pulled by multifamily developers by city, by quarter. That information is free and it's available from lots of sources. Ask ChatGPT, it'll give you a couple of sources. Right, so you have this crystal ball. So I can just go to the last quarter of 2024. So we're talking here in the first quarter of 2025, right, I can go to the last quarter of 2024 and I can pull up this list and I can look at all of the different markets and I can look at how many permits were pulled by that market.

Neal Bawa:

Now, the cool thing is, the same excel spreadsheet also shows you how many permits were pulled one year before that, two years before that, three years before that, and I can tell you for almost every market in the US there's a few exceptions the 2020, the 2021 Q4 permit number was 50, 70, or even 80% higher than the number last quarter, and if they didn't pull a permit in the fourth quarter of 2024,. They are not delivering a building in the last quarter of 2026. So I have an actual, functional crystal ball and this crystal ball tells me what delivery is going to be. A lot of people on the value-add side have said for years and have been wrong including myself, by the way, I figured this out two or three years ago because I'm a developer, but a lot of people just simply haven't figured this out. This is value-add. I'm running a Class C. It's not affected by Classic.

Ed Mathews:

That is just a nonsensical idea.

Neal Bawa:

The market has a certain absorption number, right. So a market can absorb this many studios, this many one beds, two beds, three beds that is an absorption number. Anyone who has access to a broker can get a costal report for a market and it shows the absorption number for a market and a sub-market. So if you just total it up and then you total up how many units are coming in, which is on the same report, you can basically tell how your rents are going to be affected. Because here's what happens. The only thing true in this statement about Class Cs not being affected by new supply, the only part that's true is timing. It takes about a year for Class C to be affected. Why? Because when a Class A comes into the market, the Bs first have to drop their price because the A comes in and starts offering concessions, especially if there's a lot of supply. Right now there's a lot of supply in every market in the US. So they start offering two months of concession. Right now my Phoenix property, halfway leased, falls at Christian and Common. You can Google it Two months concession. So what I'm doing is basically I'm dropping my price to the class B levels by offering two months free. So guess what happens? Over the next three to six months, all the Bs in this market, unable to compete with me, my brand new property, will drop their price right, or they will start doing concessions, or they'll start doing whatever they need to, and then, six months later, the class Cs will do it. So the impact is there. It's the same impact on rents for class Cs as B or A. It just takes a year to get there. That year has already passed, because there was a lot of delivery in 23, a lot of delivery in 24. So now, at the end of 2024, we are seeing a decline in occupancy in the United States across the board for A's, b's, c's All of them have declining occupancy. All of them have gone from a little above 96 at the peak, which was in early 2021, mid 2021, to where we are today, where, let's just say, it's 93%. There's two different vendors and the numbers are slightly different, so we're 93. So we're about 3% down from peak to where we are today, and so it's absolutely critical for people on the value add side to use this completely free crystal ball.

Neal Bawa:

I don't think that you have to buy any data All CoStar market reports which you can get from your broker, because the broker is paying for this report. By the way, he's not doing anything wrong. He's sending it to his clients. He's allowed to do that. All broker reports tell you how much new supply is coming into any market or sub-market and also, on a separate page, tell you what the absorption of that market is. So our rule is this any market where the total absorption number is lower than the total incoming supply number is going to have issues with rents. Why bother going into that market then, when we're looking at a extraordinary supply situation the last two years were extremely bizarre and extraordinary for supply Our number one factor right now for any market in the US to go in and buy something is what is the forward-looking two-year projection?

Neal Bawa:

Because the last couple of years rent growth has been awful. If you look at rent growth across the United States in the last 24 months, we've been at maybe 1% total for those two years and if you're looking at Southeast markets, they've definitely been negative, right? So, other than the Southeast, I think we're slightly positive, but the Southeast has been negative for the last 24 months as a whole and most markets within the Southeast have been negative, with Austin being the most negative, followed by Huntsville and then a bunch of other markets. Denver, for example, has been pretty negative as well. So there's these superstar markets that are all negative. So right now if I'm looking at a value add, I'm looking at those numbers and I'll clue you in.

Neal Bawa:

The two markets in the United States currently actually have the highest projected rent growth are Kansas City Kansas Never thought I'd be saying that and Burlington Vermont Never thought I'd be saying that either. And these two markets have very high occupancy, very little supply maybe only a few hundred units on each side coming in and significant population growth. Especially Kansas City has picked up in population growth. It was never like top 10 in the US. I don't think it's top 10 in the US right now, but certainly accelerating in its population growth curve. So on the one side population's coming in, the other side nobody's building anything. So you've got this potential and the gap between where the Southeast is now the cheap part of the United States, is not cheap anymore, right? So the average two bedroom rent in these cheap Southeast markets has gone up 400 bucks in the last three, four years. So they're not cheap anymore. But Kansas City looks very interesting and the other market that looks extraordinarily interesting at the moment is Indianapolis right. So when I'm looking at population growth versus incoming supply, versus home price growth, they all Kansas City looks really good, indianapolis looks really good and typically I tend to be like everybody else.

Neal Bawa:

I'm not in any way not subject to following the herd. So just honestly saying that, and I tend to invest in these bullish, passive, fast-growing Southeast markets, I'm not doing that right now because I can't make any rational arguments about investing in these markets. I'm not saying these markets are not going to be the fastest growing. Southeast is going to be the fastest growing. I'm saying there's no fundamental benefit to buying now when I know that many of these markets not all of them, many of these markets are just going to continue to have hand grenade after hand grenade of delivery for the next six, nine or 10 months. Oh, by then, why do I need to fight it out now? And given that I know that there's not going to be any rent growth, it's not like I'm going to pay more nine months from now. I'm not. You're probably going to pay a little bit less, two or 3% less. So I'm just not in a hurry to jump into Southeast markets right now, a year from now, I'll probably be buying Southeast again.

Ed Mathews:

One of the things that has been happening, at least in my part of the world, is insurance. Right, insurance has been up on average, I think, 27%. It was a number I saw, I believe, on LinkedIn last week. My numbers actually were up, depending on the building, even more, and I'm curious about what you're seeing in the insurance marketplace and how are you managing that increase? I know plenty of owners, myself included, who have zero claims and their insurance is going up by that 20, 25% margin.

Neal Bawa:

I'm going to give you a really awful answer. But it's very truthful, I'm managing it by suffering. It's very truthful, I'm managing it by suffering. I don't know of any way to mitigate insurance hikes. We've tried all kinds of things aggregating insurance, things like that. It makes small differences, but overall we're getting slaughtered, and so the approach that I've taken is a rather radical one.

Neal Bawa:

There are 323 MSAs, or metros, in the United States that are basically 90% plus of our population, and I've started to rank each metro by the combination of property taxes and insurance, because it's not just insurance, it's also property taxes, right. So what we've started to do is traditionally, like everybody else, we would rank population growth, income growth, job growth, right, that's what everybody does. Now what we've done is we've tripled our weightage as we rank cities. We rank cities every month. We publish this data. I have this real estate trends presentation that I do in early February that about 2,000 people watch and that those rankings are visible once in a year. We provide them for free.

Neal Bawa:

You'll notice that my weightages have changed. So does this in any way benefit my existing portfolio? No, taking it in the ass, sir. But does it affect forward-looking? Yes, we've simply tripled the weightage that we assign to property taxes and insurance. So a city or metro or state that has lower property taxes and lower insurance now ranks significantly higher. So I can give you some examples. Property taxes and lower insurance now ranks significantly higher. So I can give you some examples. As a result of this, texas has gone from being at the top of our list to being in the second half of the list, not quite at the bottom. Florida has gone from being at the top of our list to being in the sort of bottom second half. So we have a bunch of other markets. New Jersey is at the very bottom because it has the highest property taxes and pretty high insurance as well. So we're looking at this and basically saying, okay, what are the states that still give us the job growth, population growth, home price growth and income growth? Right, the four key factors At the same time have a low combination of property taxes and insurance and we're investing in them. So North Carolina Raleigh is a good example of a market that Milken ranked at number one. I currently rank it as the best market in the United States.

Neal Bawa:

Raleigh was my market of the year for 2024, a year ago, when I was doing real estate trends presentation. I didn't pick it this year, but it's definitely at the top of the list. It's unquestionably a market that is benefiting from the fact that multifamily syndicator after multifamily syndicator is saying I don't want to deal with the ridiculous property taxes in Texas or the ridiculous insurance in Florida and now I have a place that has decent property taxes and decent insurance. They're not low. If you want to go low property taxes, low insurance, your answer is go to Nevada, right, arizona, nevada are low property tax, low insurance, and so you've got both of those there.

Neal Bawa:

They don't have the potential of Raleigh, right. And notice, I'm not saying North Carolina, because I don't think Charlotte has the same potential or Wilmington has the same potential, or Greensboro or Salem have the same potential. I think Raleigh is truly extraordinary and it also offers decent property taxes, decent insurance. So that's the answer to your question. I'm doing a lot of things on a forward-looking basis so that I don't get hit again, but for my existing properties I have no magic bullets and I don't think anybody else has one either.

Ed Mathews:

I was hoping so. You mentioned you have a presentation, a webinar coming up, and it's something that I've enjoyed every February since I discovered you a couple of years ago, so can you tell the folks about that?

Neal Bawa:

Sure.

Neal Bawa:

So throughout the year we gather data. We're a bunch of nerds that have a channel in Slack and usually there's six or seven posts a day from our industry, and they come from the fact that we are subscribed to every newsletter that you can possibly imagine, and then some. And then, of course, there's a bunch of products that we pay for, so we get access to paid news from them, and so what we like to do is we like to take data and we like to put it together for our investors, and we do that four times a year for people that are our investors. They get access to this amazing information, and we do that on a quarterly basis. We call it the investor club webinar, so it's only for the investors. Then, once a year in February, we take all of the data, we put it together. It's an insane amount of data. It's 50 plus reports, it's 200 newsletters and then, starting mid-December, we start collating it and then at the end of January, we start doing practice presentations and then we do a public presentations in February. We do it on our platform. We do it on three different IRA company platforms. I've been presenting for those for a long time and then we do it at two or three conferences, and so the goal is to have an extremely attractive presentation that, in a 60 minute timeframe, would basically give people a very good look at what is actually happening in the industry. So, for your subscribers that are watching on video, I'm going to basically give them a two or two to five second view of what I'm going to be presenting in the next few weeks. You're looking at this is a 55 slide presentation, so, as you can imagine and I'll stop sharing now as you can imagine it covers the economy.

Neal Bawa:

Where we think the Fed is, do we think that there's a soft landing? How did the United States do versus other economies, both from a GDP and a dollar perspective? So we cover all of that. And this is, by the way, the first year where all news has been good news, because every year there's mostly bad news and a little bit of good news. But here the dollar crushed it. The US led all economies in the world, whether developed or undeveloped, and we actually had a very nice soft landing, which I wasn't expecting. Obviously, I was expecting a recession, and so the soft landing did occur.

Neal Bawa:

Our job creation for the year was 180,000. Any year where you create 180,000 jobs in a month. I will take that year, yay. And this was a year where interest rates were astonishingly high. Normally, you get no job creation whatsoever in years like that. If you go back and look at the nine instances where the Fed has raised interest rates since World War II, it just completely kills the job market, right? Well, none of that happened. And at the beginning of the year World War II it just completely kills the job market, right? Well, none of that happened. And at the beginning of the year, inflation was over beginning of 2020, it was in the fives, having been in the nines six months before that. So it went from nines to fives to 2.6% at the end of the year, and so we managed to also reduce energy prices by 7.1% and we managed to increase consumer spending by 3.1%. It's like these numbers actually almost don't jive. You don't get all of these things happen together, but it did happen. Am I an economist? I don't know. I'm somebody that can present the data and leave it to people to make their own thoughts.

Neal Bawa:

And then the second section goes into single family. So we talk about all of the single family trends. What happened in single family, where the big winners losers, things like that. And then, of course, we go into our realm, which is multifamily. So we'll spend 15 or 20 slides looking at what happened in the next year. What are people saying about next? What happened last year? What are people saying about next year? Good and bad, talk about cap rates and prices distress, what's happening with delinquency. So we'll do charts on what are the delinquency levels. Are they ticking up? Are they staying stable? So we'll talk about all of that on the multifamily side. And then, of course, in this case we usually have a segment or two. That's the unique segment. And this year's unique segment is Trump. Right, we've got to address the elephant in the room, and so we have a section that basically talks about what the challenges on the Trump side could be.

Neal Bawa:

And then the last section, which is the most entertaining, which is what people really come for, is city picks. For the last 12 years that I've been presenting this, I've been picking a best city in the US and a you can call it a runner up, but it's like up and coming city. Last year, raleigh was picked as city of the year and Indianapolis as up and coming, so we'll see what happens this year. So we picked that at the very end and because I go through seven different city graphs. So these are seven different top 10 graphs from different sources that point out some interesting cities, and then people see patterns and then, of course, I pick my two and then I get an absolute avalanche of questions on a hundred other cities that I didn't cover. Remember 323 metros? I probably covered 30. And so it usually goes on for like 45 minutes just to basically talk about why I didn't pick Grand Rapids, michigan, or why I didn't pick so-and-so city.

Ed Mathews:

You just called their baby ugly right.

Neal Bawa:

So it's pretty aggressive where people are like, oh, you're completely wrong, it's okay. Here's my rationale for not picking your baby.

Ed Mathews:

Fair enough. All right, neil, I have enjoyed this. I could listen to you talk about this in terms of how you view the market for, honestly, for hours. So I appreciate all the information and your experience that you're sharing. I would like to get into knowing you a little bit better, and so let's hop into the final five. So, neil, I'm always interested in why executives like yourself what drives them right? Because at some point it's not money, right Money? The mortgage is paid, the kids' college is paid for. You don't want for anything in terms of financial, but nevertheless, you still get out of bed on Monday morning and you go to work and you work hard. So what is that? What is your purpose?

Neal Bawa:

Achievement, I think you have to quantify it in terms of how you help the world. I'm an immigrant. I love my adopted country. These days, I think I love it more than the people that live here, given all the stuff on social media, which I stay away from, but I adore this country. I think it's the greatest country in the world and if I could do something that actually helps and it's quantifiable, that's what makes me get out of bed.

Neal Bawa:

One of my companies is building 10,000 rental townhomes. They're not subsidized income, they are for profit, but the incomes must be less than 85K. All families living in brand new three-bedroom townhomes incomes less than 85K. That is a colossal challenge and I didn't say I want to build 500 of them because I think that's easy. 10,000 is incredibly difficult. That's $2.5 billion to invest and my goal is six years. So far I'm making phenomenal progress and I think we'll probably get there a little bit before six years. So it's achievement. It's the ability to say, 25 years from now, I'm going to have something to tell my grandchildren about what Neil Bauer did and how he helped, and I think that's a very big deal. So I think the one word answer is legacy.

Ed Mathews:

It is. It is a very big deal. So I'm always interested in executives and who they listen to and pay attention to and the people that have helped them along the way. So I'm curious what is the best advice you ever got and who gave it to you?

Neal Bawa:

Somebody told me that the best book, the most important book that you'll ever read, is the Miracle Morning, and they also told me it's not the best book you'll read, and they told me it might not even be in your best five, but it will be the most important book that they will ever read. They were right on both cones. It is not in my best books list. It is at the top of my most important books list because it gave me a routine that allowed me to find my best books. It created a structured routine that I follow to this day, every single day, and that routine allowed me to find my best book. My current favorite book is called Traction. I use that book to reinvent my company and become a company that uses EOS or the entrepreneurial operating system. There's no way I would have found this book or any of my other top five favorites without Miracle Morning.

Ed Mathews:

Yeah, Gina Wickman, and Traction is an outstanding book. We actually use EOS here as well, and it started implementing it last year Terrific. And you've actually answered a future question within the lightning rounds. We're going. We actually use EOS here as well, and it started implementing it last year Wonderful. And you've actually answered a future question within the lightning rounds. We're going to. We're going to. You're even being efficient. So, thank you. Always curious about mistakes and how, what people learn from them, right, because I personally, I don't think mistakes are a problem. I think they're an opportunity, and so I'm curious about your perspective on a professional mistake that you made and what did you do about it.

Neal Bawa:

I think it's the mistake that tens of thousands of syndicators have made.

Neal Bawa:

We started to believe that cap rates would never go up, and I think that as a community, the entire multifamily community, at some point started to believe that because the demand in the United States was only going one way, it's continued to increase.

Neal Bawa:

This somehow insulated cap rates from ever going up, and I think the lesson that we've all learned is sure, the demand is incredible Last year was a fantastic demand year, right, but the cap rates are in the shitter, or I should say they're up, which is them in the shitter, and so I think the biggest lesson that I've learned is that cap rates have higher sensitivity to interest rate than they do to demand, and also the accompanying lesson is cap rates are also extraordinarily sensitive to supply. So I think at the beginning of this podcast I talked about all of the things that I've changed in my criteria so that I don't get hit again, so I won't go through that again. But that was the big one and I felt like, in my status as the mad scientist of multifamily, I should have known better, even if others didn't, and so I beat myself up over it every day.

Ed Mathews:

And thank you for doing that, because people like me follow you religiously on YouTube and elsewhere to gain the information that you're dreaming, and it's interesting that I always tell my team I don't have to be right, we just have to get it right. And in my case, that means we've made several mistakes and along the way or misread something along the way, and as long as we learned from it, it's a win. We'll take that win. So, neil, I'm also interested in what success means to you. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Neal Bawa:

Success means, on the personal side it's just harmony at home, and on the professional side, a feeling of satisfaction. People like me are rarely happy because we are very driven, but there's this satisfaction that we did good, there's this satisfaction that it was a life well lived. That's wonderful.

Ed Mathews:

I couldn't agree more. When you're not building multifamily or on your mission to build 10,000 townhomes, what do you like to do for fun?

Neal Bawa:

I like to life hack. One of my favorite books is Tim Ferriss' book the Four-Hour Workweek, the Four-Hour this, and that he's written a whole four-hour series. He made me realize that what's fun for me is life hacking. So at any given point of time I'm running two dozen, maybe three dozen, experiments on myself and on my home and on all other kinds of things. I'll read out the top five list if you find it. I think people will find it interesting. Sauerkraut versus kimchi versus wheatgrass is a current experiment. So I'm experimenting on all three. Sauerkraut is winning.

Neal Bawa:

What will 100 sessions of physical therapy do to my body? I've completed that 110 sessions. So now I've documented it. I'm losing hair. So minoxidil liquid versus minoxidil foam versus remixidil hair vitamins, so that one is six months in Impact of locking myself out of the snack cabinet for one year on my weight. That's completed. It was seven pounds. Will a smart bottle with an hourly LED reminder actually improve my water retention as weighed by my smart scale? The answer is not really. So these are all experiments that I'm running. I run dozens of them at any given point of time. My brain needs inputs. The best way to do that is to run life hacks. Fascinating.

Ed Mathews:

So, Neal, it's truly a pleasure to have this time with you. I'm grateful for the opportunity and thank you for all the information you just delivered to the audience. If people want to learn more about you or your upcoming annual webinar, or anything else about your operations what's the best way to do that?

Neal Bawa:

MultifamilyUcom. That's multifamily, followed by the letter U. com. All of our webinars are published there. So we just did one on Airbnb Industrial, we did one on the impact of Trump. Generally, we have about 14,000, 15,000 people that attend these webinars and that's how we interact with them. We are not a hard sell organization. We actually don't have any sales team. So when we do the webinars, we have a 60 second sort of view, an upcoming deal or project. We only work with accredited investors. So of the 84,000 people that are in our ecosystem, 1,200 are investors. Everybody else is there for the knowledge. We don't have an educational product. We don't sell education. We provide it for free. So multifamilyu. com is the best way to join the ecosystem.

Ed Mathews:

Thank you, Neal Bawa. Thank you so much for joining us today. It truly was a pleasure. Hopefully we'll cross paths again at a future conference somewhere, and in the meantime I'd love to keep in touch.

Neal Bawa:

Sounds good. Thank you, Ed.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Ed Mathews - Clark St Capital

Host