WS454: Commercial Real Estate Cycle Reports with Glenn Mueller

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:00] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Real Estate Syndication Show. Whether you are a seasoned investor or building a new real estate business, this is the show for you. Whitney Sewell talks to top experts in the business. Our goal is to help you master real estate syndication.

And now your host, Whitney Sewell.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:00:24.1] WS: This is your daily Real Estate Syndication show. I’m your host Whitney Sewell. Today, our guest is Glenn Mueller, thanks for being on the show Glenn.

[0:00:32.5] GM: Thank you.

[0:00:33.7] WS: I’m honored to have Glenn on the show. A little about him, he has 44 years of real estate industry experience, including 36 years of research. He is internationally known for his market cycle research on income producing real estate, his real estate securities analysis or research and his public and private market investment strategies and capital market analysis.

He is a professor at the university of Denver’s FL Burn school or real estate and construction management and is also a real estate investment strategist at the Black Creek group. Glenn, thank you again, I’m honored to have you on the show and I’m really looking forward to this. I know this is going to be a popular show and I want to tell the listeners ahead of time too that Glenn is even going to share a screen with us so we can see some slides that he’s going to explain.

But we’re going to try to explain it in a way where if you can’t see the screen, you can also gather lots of great information but you know, Glenn, tell the listeners maybe a little more about yourself and what your focus is right now and anything I didn’t cover in your bio and let’s jump right in.

[0:01:32.7] GM: Sure, well, my experience comes from being a bank loan analyst, from being a builder and developer myself. I’m actually building my son’s office building right now in Saint Paul Minnesota and it’s building number 58 in my career. I’ve worked for a lot of big institutional investment firms as a real estate investment strategist and currently with Black Creek group and we’re actually closing our fourth industrial fund.

Today, we sold it to Prologis for 4.4 billion dollars. I’ve been doing my real estate market cycle research which helps us determine where to invest around the country for a long time and teach that at the university of Denver where we got both undergraduate, graduate and executive real estate programs so it’s something that’s widely used throughout the real estate industry and investors are interested in it as well.

I’m going to now flip to here and share my screen so that I can just show just a couple of graphics that should help with what’s going on. Whitney, let me ask, if you can see that okay. Real estate is honestly fairly simple. It’s a delayed mirror of the economy and I’m talking here about commercial income producing real estate, not home ownership, okay?

Home ownership is really a production process if you wanted to invest in that, you’d buy a home builder stock. If you’re buying income producing real estate, five major property types of office, industrial, retail, apartments, and hotels, we look at the basic things that drive that. One is GDP growth, obviously, which is the production off the US economy.

The top graph shows you that GDP growth, since the great recession ended in 2010 has been averaging around 2%. Forecasted to slow down just a little bit in the next year or two which may or may not happen, that’s a guess on the part of the economist. But what really derives demand for real estate is employment growth and you can see there again, it kind of, 2% employment growth that’s been going on since the great recession as well, starting to slow and supposedly come in to a bottom close to zero in 2021.

That’s really statistical deal because of more baby boomers like me hitting retirement age than millennials coming out of school and going into the workforce. But that assumed when this was put together by congress, that people would retire at 65. Of course, that is not in many cases a lot of baby boomers continue to work or they stop their current job and do something else in retirement. May not slow down that much but that growth, every time a new person is employed, we need more real estate for them to work in for them to shop in and do other things.

I look at demand from employment growth and I look at supply or new construction of real estate coming along and a cost off new construction has been high, finding construction workers has been difficult. We’ve had our moderate 2% or less growth in most of the property types and most of the markets around the country as well. So that we have a balance of supply and demand or going at similar rates. We’re in an equilibrium state.

And my market cycle report here, I got the major property types, you can see four parts to that cycle. A recovery, an expansion, a hyper supply, and a recession phase. This is in essence an occupancy cycle, occupancies are low at point one. They’re at their long term average at .6 and 14. They are at peak at .11 but that’s where demand and supply are in balance. Just because we’re at a peak, we could actually sit at equilibrium for a long period of time potentially going forward.

As you can see, all of the property types today are in the expansionary phase except for apartments. It’s not because demand is slowing down in apartments. We actually have very good demand in apartments from these millennials coming out of school, both high school and college, but we’re building just a little bit too much at the moment and if we can slow down new apartment construction by as little as 10%, apartment would move back to that peak equilibrium occupancy level at .11.

Let’s just look at the different property types and what’s happened over time. The blue line on this graph shows you occupancies, a peak way back in the early 1980s, a bottom with their recession of the 1990, 1991, a peak in 2000 with the technology boom that was happening, a bottom in 2002 when that tech bubble burst, another peak lower than previous ones in 2006 and seven and of course, a bottom during the great recession of 2009 into the beginning of 2010.

A fairly long recovery period and back up into the growth phase by 2016 and we’re sitting at that kind of lower peak equilibrium level in occupancies for office space for the past few years and I forecast that that’s going to continue for a couple of years going forward here. The other line, the gray line, is the rental growth and you can see that rent growth very closely follows occupancy levels and the correlation’s actually 79%.

You can see that rent growth over that time period has gone up 52, that’s both the positives and the negatives added together. You’ll see that right now, we’re looking at rent growth that should average in the three to four percent range which is just at or a little bit above inflation.

Each quarter, I analyze each individual market and where they are, you can see the national average here at .8 in the cycle and different markets below it and above it but most of them in the growth phase, so as we go out to look for office properties, to purchase and invest in or to build in that market, we typically will stay within that expansionary phase.

You can see a couple of markets over the top and I’ll give you two good examples here in Texas. You got Austin just over the top and you’ll notice that it has a plus one after it. That means that it moves from position 11 in the second quarter of 2019 to position 12 in the third quarter. Someone may ask why don’t you have year end debt already?

As you know, real estate is a private marketplace that data on what’s happened doesn’t come out till the end of the month after the end of the quarter so I’ll get my data on January 30^th, run my models and by mid-February I’ll have the new report up. Austin moved up a little bit. It moved into the hyper supply phase which means its occupancies went down a little bit.

Austin’s one of the top markets for technology in the country right now, lots of new jobs happening there but the office developers have no net for a few years and they’re putting up just a little bit too much space. It’s a situation of a little more supply than demand. Houston Texas on the other hand is just the opposite. As you know, we’ve had oil prices for the past few years so the oil industry has been laying people off, slowing down, drilling and exploration so it’s a case of declining demand.

They don’t have a lot of new supply there but the demand is falling on faster and so it’s even further down into the hyper supply phase. Note that each property type is different and I’ll use Denver since I’m here in Denver as a good example. Denver is right there at .8 along with the national average, right in the middle of expansion phase, good job growth, supply, just matching up with that new demand that’s in the marketplace.

If we look at industrial, you can see again, very similar cycle, following very similarly to the office and therefore you know, the national economic cycles, a nice long equilibrium period in the 1990s for industrial. And the same thing happening today, nice long occupancy equilibrium happening, really strong growth because of the Internet sales growing and every retailer needing to be able to put things out and you know, sell them through the Internet.

Fun fact, last year, Amazon leased 25% of all industrial space leased in the United States.

[0:10:13.3] WS: 25% in the United States.

[0:10:15.5] GM: 25%, right. You can see that, they’re averaging 95% occupancy, rents spiked up to as high as 7% growth. We expect that as we continue to supply for that to slow down back to kind of 3% but that’s still above the inflation rate of 2% and GDP growth at 2%.

Industrial’s been honestly the best performing property type or the past few years and most investors and researchers believe that that’s going to continue for the next two or three years going forward. Very strong demand.

[0:10:51.3] WS: We see the rent growth dropping there, occupancy saying pretty steady but the rent growth dropping quite a bit?

[0:10:56.7] GM: I don’t use the word dropping, it’s still positive. It’s decelerating. Instead of doing 70 miles an hour, today, it’s slowed down to 50 miles an hour and over the next few years, it’s been a slow down to 30 miles an hour. It’s still moving forward, it’s just going at a slower rate.

[0:11:11.9] WS: Okay, great clarification.

[0:11:13.2] GM: One of the things that I’m coming to is the belief that, you know, we’re now in the longest expansionary phase that we’ve ever seen in the United States. We’re more than 10 years of economic expansion. A lot of economies say, “Well I can’t last more than 10 years, it’s got to end.” But Australia is currently in its 28^th year of economic expansion.

It is possible. Instead of booms and busts like we’ve had in the past, GDP growth of five, six, 7% and then negative. 2% is something that is sustainable I think, and could last for another decade possibly. We’ll see, you know. Unless there is a black swan event. Who knows what’s going to happen if we have a war, that kind of thing. Throw all those caveats.

Let’s move on and look at industrial. You can see that majority of the markets are at the peak equilibrium level balancing supply and demand really well. A number of markets where people have started to build speculative industrial space, so a little bit into the hyper supply phase but most of those have been bouncing back and forth between that peak .11 and that .12, okay?

Look at apartments, and you can see that apartment occupancies actually peak back in 2004 and have been dropping off a little bit. Apartments are the easiest property type to get financed, hence, let’s build more. Demand is good, any time you build something new, you’re pretty well guaranteed to fill it because if you’re having a hard time to fill it, you just drop your rents to what older properties are charging and people will move next door to be in a new building for the same price.

We’ve seen really strong rent growth and apartments as well, same kind of high that we saw in industrial here, around 6%, and slowing down to kind of the 2% level now which is right at the level of inflation. You see a nice little pop here and that came in 2019 and we expect that to slow because we are over building by just a little bit.

Kind of a lot of markets at that equilibrium and then a lot of market over the top and if you look at Denver as I was talking about before, Denver is even further over the top because we’ve been putting up just way more than we need here in Denver.

Let’s go to retail. This is probably the most surprising slide you’ll see. Occupancy levels in retail are currently higher than they’ve bene in any previous cycle. They’re running 95 and a half percent where as in previous cycles, they only made 94 and a half percent. Everybody says, “Wait a minute, retail is having problems, you know, stores are closing and everybody’s talking about closing stores,” and everything else. The answer is yes, that’s true but again, this is demand and supply, there’s still positive demand.

Retail sales were up 18% over the previous year for Christmas this year. Internet sales went from eight to 10% overall retail sales, so think about that for a moment and there’s still great demand for retail. Even though retail demand’s only growing on a national average basis of around one and a half percent, new supply is only growing at 1% because in many cases, when a retailer leaves a location, that location might be repurposed. We’re taking some big boxes and turn them into close end warehouse for Amazon.

We’re taking – just had a former DU alum whose marketing an old small mall, if you will, outside of Denver as office space. That space is being taken out of the retail supply and turned into something else. Good retail actually does well.

Top malls are full, that kind of thing, and you can see there though that retail’s rent growth is actually only running right now around 1%. So a little bit below the inflation from that standpoint. So if you look at retail, most of the markets are near that peak equilibrium level doing fine but you got to pick the right stuff.

Finally, let’s look at hotels. Similar cycles in hotels. Millennials love travel. My kids travel a lot more than I did when I was their age. They’re all in their 30s but you can see here that we have some markets over the top where we are building just a little bit too much space as we go along, Denver being that too. I just read actually two days ago, 10 new major downtown hotels that are either – have already started construction or have gotten a building permit. So we are adding lots of hotel space around the country at this point in time and you got to be careful which market you invest in.

So when you look at it everything that I’ve talked about so far is the income side of real estate. Occupancies go up, your income goes up. The rents go up, your income goes up, and so if you pick the right property types and the right markets you are looking good. Things are going to do well. So having a good understanding of that is important. Those market cycle charts by the way, we actually posts on our University of Denver website at the Burn School. So just go to du.edu/burnschool and you can get my quarterly market cycle reports.

[0:16:38.4] WS: Nice, yeah I would love to put those on the shownotes as well or a link, you know I’ll put a link there or something that would be great because I know a lot of people would love to go back and look at those. I would love for you to – if you could just focus on the apartments a little more or dive into this a little more. I know the majority of the listeners are in the apartment business and if we could talk about that cycle just a little more in depth that would be amazing.

[0:16:59.1] GM: Sure, well like I said, there is great demand. We are looking at another five years of growth in apartment demand from millennials coming out of school and again, either high school or college and I am sure that most of your listeners probably had a college education. Only 25% of the people in this country had a college education. The other 75% come out of high school and typically wouldn’t stay at home.

Some probably still do but a lot get kicked out. So they go get an apartment. The average age of a first time home buyer in the United States is 36 years old. Think about that blue collar worker who got out of high school, got a job, got a loan to buy their first car, started renting apartments, spending everything that they make, the parents don’t have enough money to help them. Then they get married and then they have kids, then they start saving money and it takes them –

You know, from the age 18 until 36 to actually be able to get that down payment to buy the house. So a great demand from that standpoint. In addition some older millennials like me are like, “Okay I am done having to manage a house, sell it, let’s just rent an apartment.” So there is some growth in demand in the other end of that as well.

[0:18:17.1] WS: I have heard of that as well. I know like my grandparents, my grandfather is 99, they still live at home. You know, they wouldn’t dare dream of moving out of that house in any way, form or fashion. However, like you said, I know lots also that are retirement age, they’re just like, “I don’t want to have anything to do with the yard anymore. I am just going to find that apartment” or a place like that where everything is taken care of.

[0:18:39.3] GM: Right. So, you know, and of course, where do people move is another question, and I just joined another sub-group of baby boomers called baby chasers. My winter home is here in Colorado near my two sons. My other son who has – and I have four grandchildren in Minnesota, I just moved my summer home from New England to Minnesota to be near my grandkids and there’s already research done that says I am going to buy a house that is approximately 2300 square feet.

It is going to have a couple of bedrooms so the grandchildren can stay. It is going to be near a park. It is going to have room for them to play in and that kind of stuff. So that is another new trend that we are seeing is the millennials when they’re retired instead of going to Florida like my grandmother did. You know, they are moving near their grandchildren.

[0:19:29.0] WS: Well Glenn if we are looking at data like this, where should we look to get the most accurate information? You are an expert in just research and especially the markets and where can we know that we are looking at accurate information?

[0:19:41.2] GM: Right, well if you’ve got investors that are really active, Co-Star is probably the number one data source in the country for the five major property types. They actually own apartments.com so they’ve got very detailed information on the apartment area. They just bought Smith Travel, which is the go-to data for hotels and they have been doing this. Every broker that lists a property for rents listed on CoStar. It is the multiple list service of the commercial real estate industry.

If you are a one off investor, then you probably want to go talk to a commercial broker who has access to CoStar and get them to run a report for you. We use it at the University of Denver. I use it to help the students learn it because when they go out into the industry they have a better chance of getting a job, where they go, “Hey, I am proficient in using CoStar.”

[0:20:30.8] WS: Yeah, they are definitely going to be using it every day in the field. You know, so a few questions Glenn before we run out of time. It is just amazing to have you on the show and just your expertise but, you know, everybody is wondering, how are you prepared for this potential downturn?

[0:20:44.6] GM: We are at my firm at Black Creek, we are behind high quality assets in great locations that can weather the downturn. We never try to be able to sell and liquidate at any point in time. You want to sign longer term leases that will ridge you through the next downturn so that when that lease comes due, the market’s back and doing well. So location has always been number one and quality is number two and then obviously, upgrading your tenant quality would be number three.

So those are probably the three key things that wealth investors do that. I’ve got a number of people that say, “Hey, I think we are at the peak” and a year or even two ago, they sold out and they are sitting on cash and they miss a couple of years of additional upside.

[0:21:35.5] WS: So any recommendations of weathering that downturn, like you are talking about, how you all are prepared for that property to be able to weather the downturn.

[0:21:43.3] GM: Again, in quality properties, you know, taking care of your clients, your tenants and gaining the highest quality tenants you can get I think are the two keys to weathering a downturn. Also, potentially lower leverage, so that if your income on a property does decline, you can still make your mortgage payments. I think most of the industry has lowered. It used to be in the direct world, 75% was kind of an average load to value.

Now most banks won’t even go above 60%. If you look at the RIETs both the non-trading and the public RIETs, they all have leverage levels down in the 30% range. So they are very well insulated from a cash flow problem.

[0:22:27.8] WS: Are you all considering bridge debt right now as well or only agency debt or any specific debt pace that you all are considering or won’t consider at the time in the cycle?

[0:22:38.3] GM: It has a large multibillion dollar company, we typically don’t do bridge debt. We use both mortgages and lines of credit that the large firm can use. So it is not something that an individual investors can do, you know getting an income producing real estate, the typical is a ten year, is the maximum loan, and right now with interest rates continuing to be low, locking in at that low rate for the full 10 years I think is probably the best way to go.

[0:23:06.7] WS: And can I ask what markets you all are focused on?

[0:23:09.2] GM: You just saw that I covered 54 markets in five property types, right? So that is 280 plus markets and you know, we are deploying millions of dollars every month and so I can’t say one market over another, give me a property type and that type of thing and it is going to be different for each property type. So that’s why the cycle report helps and so we like a particular market, now let’s go find a property in that market.

Well then we have to find, we got to determine the right submarket and then whether or not that property has the quality and then underwrite the tenants and the leases that are in it and all of the other things necessary. So there is no question that real estate has become a true profession that’s why every university in the country now pretty much has at least one real estate class, if not a real estate program. University of Wisconsin is the oldest in the country.

University of Denver is the second oldest, it started in 1934. So you know, we have been teaching this stuff for a long time.

[0:24:13.9] WS: And they don’t teach us how to balance a checkbook in high school, yeah. So Glenn, what is a way that you all have recently improved your business that we could apply to ours?

[0:24:22.6] GM: I think, well for us, the most important thing is finding and hiring and retaining good talent. The entire industry is in great need of high quality people and, you know, I just started my graduate real estate development class last night and asking the students where they are from, what they are doing. The majority of them are in the real estate industry. A lot of people are 20% of my students have been engineers and have been working on doing the engineering on a building.

Some of them are on the construction side and they go, “Hey, I want to be the developer now. I want to be the person that’s making things happen,” and so they are looking to upgrade, to get more responsibility to be able to do more things, throwing out some golden handcuffs with ownership and things like that are some of the keys I think to making things go better but right now, pretty much all the top companies are focused on finding and retaining talent.

We get many, many people coming in asking us to, “Okay, can I have a career day? Come in and talk to your students?” They will hire them for an internship, a paid internship that used to be free. Now everybody is paying interns and I look at it as a way to try your boots on before you buy them. “Hey, I had an intern for the last semester or quarter, whatever and I like him.” Great, offer him a job when they graduate so that they know they are coming right out into something that they like. They get to try you, you get to try them.

[0:25:50.8] WS: What is the number one thing that has contributed to your success?

[0:25:54.2] GM: Hard work, keeping my eyes open. I love what I do, I tell my students God gives everybody different gifts. Do that for a living and it won’t feel like work. If you enjoy what you are doing, it is highly probable you are going to be successful. So helping my students figure out what their God given talents are, some of them are really great people persons. So they are going to do brokerage, property management, that kind of thing.

Some are really good, technically with numbers, etcetera. They are going to be good in construction, finance, that kind of thing. So helping them figure that out is good. I think one of my keys to success is I have taken really complex stuff and been able to break it down and explain it easily as I just did here with my cycle reports, you know? I got like 20,000 people that watch that cycle report every quarter.

[0:26:44.4] WS: I’ll be watching it now, now that I know about it. So you know, what is a common theme you see across agents that maybe it is something that is holding them back from being successful in the real estate industry?

[0:26:55.1] GM: What’s holding people back is them not understanding everything well and if I can then – I guess it correlates that to not having enough education. You got to keep learning and growing throughout your career and joining up with professional association, keep current on what’s happening. My best friend in grad school who actually introduced me to my wife 43 years ago said that the most important thing he ever learned was you got to circulate to percolate.

If you are in the developments industry and you are not a member of ULI or Land Institute NAIOP you are probably not connected with what is going on, knowing what is happening currently in the marketplace, which means that you are behind the times.

[0:27:39.5] WS: Glenn, it’s been a pleasure and honor to have you on the show and somebody with your level of experience and expertise, tell us again that link though to find your reports?

[0:27:47.6] GM: It is from Denver University, so it is du.edu/burnsschool. When you get to that page, on the top obviously is our programs, undergraduate, graduate, executive, scroll at the bottom and actually it’s got two years’ worth of my cycle reports there for people to be able to pull up.

[0:28:11.8] WS: Okay, we’ll have those on the shownotes. So if listeners go to the website and go to this episode, you will see a link there to what Glenn is referring to and tell the listeners how they can possibly get in touch with you Glenn or how they can learn more about you as well.

[0:28:24.7] GM: My profile is on the University of Denver website and my email address is there as well. It is actually on the market cycle report as a matter of fact. It is [email protected].

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:28:38.5] WS: Don’t go yet, thank you for listening to today’s episode. I would love it if you would go to iTunes right now and leave a rating and written review. I want to hear your feedback. It makes a big difference in getting the podcast out there. You can also go to the Real Estate Syndication Show on Facebook so you can connect with me and we can also receive feedback and your questions there that you want me to answer on the show.

Subscribe too so you can get the latest episodes. Lastly, I want to keep you updated so head over to lifebridgecapital.com and sign up for the newsletter. If you are interested in partnering with me, sign up on the contact us page so you can talk to me directly. Have a blessed day and I will talk to you tomorrow.

[OUTRO]

[0:29:18.7] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to The Real Estate Syndication Show, brought to you by Life Bridge Capital. Life Bridge Capital works with investors nationwide to invest in real estate while also donating 50% of its profits to assist parents who are committing to adoption. Life Bridge Capital, making a difference one investor and one child at a time. Connect online at www.LifeBridgeCapital.com for free material and videos to further your success.

[END]