Richard McGirr interviews Bruce Stein, uncovering how his early dream of becoming an architect evolved into a decades-long career in real estate development, syndication, fund management, and now portfolio consulting. Bruce shares his path from working for a real estate syndicator, to a 16-year tenure at a family office deploying $300M, to running nationwide bridge-construction lending, and finally to advising investors on buying, selling, holding, and succession planning. He explains why beginn...
Dec 08, 2025•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 4113
John Chang interviews the commercial real estate market itself as he breaks down how healthcare hiring is propping up national job growth while most other sectors soften, and why that makes medical office one of the strongest asset classes going forward. He explains how an aging population and persistent healthcare labor shortages are driving durable demand, limited new supply, stable vacancies around 9%, and long-term leases with built-in rent bumps that support medical office performance. John...
Dec 07, 2025•39 min•Season 1Ep. 4112
John Casmon interviews Dani Lynn Robison, co-founder of a vertically integrated “Freedom Family” of nine real estate businesses, about how she moved from Ohio turnkey rentals into larger multifamily and fund management. Dani walks through why she brought renovations, property management, acquisitions, brokerage, and capital raising in-house, and how that 56-unit “drugs, thugs and bugs” deal became a $2M proof-of-concept for scaling apartments. She shares her hard-won lessons on hiring “Ferrari-l...
Dec 06, 2025•46 min•Season 1Ep. 4111
Matt Faircloth interviews Andrew Cushman, founder and principal of Vantage Point Acquisitions, in a fireside-chat style episode that ranges from partnerships to banks to skiing 20,000-foot peaks. They break down why Andrew has avoided the typical “GP partner” model, how he instead built a tightly aligned internal team, and why operational control matters more than flashy capital-raising. The conversation digs into the dangers of ego-driven 10x scaling, the realities behind today’s “extend and pr...
Dec 05, 2025•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 4110
Pascal Wagner interviews Soren Godbersen, exploring the evolution of real estate crowdfunding, how platforms vet deals, and why LPs should understand platform incentives before investing. Soren breaks down the differences between aggregator platforms and vertically integrated operators, sharing lessons from his decade at EquityMultiple and his new work at Lightstone Direct. The two discuss LP psychology in today’s environment, platform vs. direct-to-operator due diligence, and why asset class se...
Dec 04, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 4109
Amanda Cruise and Ash Patel interview Scott Lurie, a Milwaukee-based investor, developer, lender, and syndicator who has scaled from single-family flips to $700M+ in AUM. Scott explains how discipline, conservative leverage, and a long-term mindset helped him not only survive but aggressively buy through the Great Recession—including a 410-unit acquisition for $9K per door. He shares why he focuses on value-add industrial and multifamily development today, how he underwrites and syndicates vacan...
Dec 03, 2025•56 min•Season 1Ep. 4108
Richard McGirr shares why facts alone don’t move investors and how a well-crafted personal story can radically improve your marketing and capital raising. He walks through Russell Brunson’s Epiphany Bridge script, showing how it builds on the classic Hero’s Journey to turn your backstory, “wall,” and breakthrough into a compelling narrative that breaks your audience’s false beliefs. Using his own journey—from a collapsed software company and wiped-out income to discovering real estate and rework...
Dec 02, 2025•27 min•Season 1Ep. 4107
Richard McGirr interviews Hiten Samtani, founder of ten31 Media and creator of The Promote . Hiten shares how his background running the newsroom at The Real Deal shaped his approach to storytelling, why he built a media company that treats real estate like the character-driven, high-stakes world it truly is, and how entertainment is the secret ingredient missing from most industry coverage. He and Richard dig into niche media strategy, viral growth, CRE culture, and why “knowing your audience” ...
Dec 01, 2025•56 min•Season 1Ep. 4106
John Chang shares why commercial real estate data has become less reliable following the DOJ’s settlement with RealPage, and how losing access to more precise rent and vacancy feeds weakens investor decision-making. He walks through the market’s wildly shifting expectations for a potential December 10 Fed rate cut and argues that political pressure and policy uncertainty—not the cost of capital—are what’s really slowing hiring and expansion. John then looks at how tariffs, tight immigration poli...
Nov 30, 2025•31 min•Season 1Ep. 4105
John Casmon interviews Ed Mathews, a former Silicon Valley tech executive who walked away from a high-flying software career to build a more family-centered, freedom-focused life through real estate. Ed shares how missing too many “18 summers” with his daughters pushed him to leave DocuSign and go all-in on multifamily after seven years of flipping houses and small-building rehabs on the side. He explains how he scaled his Connecticut portfolio by finding “rock star” contractors through trade-to...
Nov 29, 2025•51 min•Season 1Ep. 4104
Matt Faircloth interviews Robert Beardsley, partner at Lone Star Capital (LSCRE), about navigating the current multifamily cycle, surviving 2021–2022 acquisitions, and why the most resilient opportunities today hinge on debt structure, affordability incentives, and supply-constrained submarkets. Robert breaks down how Texas multifamily has shifted from a “prices only go up” environment to a more balanced but still competitive market, where Class B suburban assets with little new supply outperfor...
Nov 28, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 4103
Pascal Wagner interviews Bronson Hill, founder of Bronson Equity, about how LPs can invest confidently in today’s noisy and divided market. Bronson shares how raising $50M+ across multifamily, oil & gas, and alternative real estate has shaped the way he vets operators, evaluates risk, and structures deals more conservatively after recent market challenges. He explains why understanding your true investment objective—cash flow, tax benefits, or equity growth—is the key to picking the right de...
Nov 27, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 4102
Amanda Cruise and Ash Patel interview Thomas A. Kucharski, president and CEO of Invest Buffalo Niagara, about how his organization has helped transform Western New York from a legacy manufacturing market into a growing tech and advanced industry hub. He explains how their team centralizes regional data, builds commercial listing systems, and acts as a neutral connector to incentives, infrastructure, and workforce programs—without taking commissions—so companies can de-risk expansions and relocat...
Nov 26, 2025•44 min•Season 1Ep. 4101
Matt Faircloth sits down with Ben Lapidus for a deep-dive into the origins, evolution, and future of the Best Ever Conference as it approaches its tenth year. Ben shares how a chance Skillshare class with Joe Fairless in 2012 sparked their partnership, how the conference grew from 175 attendees to a premier commercial real estate event, and why it remains intentionally focused on capital-raising and syndication. They walk through standout memories, the impact BEC has had on major companies in th...
Nov 25, 2025•44 min•Season 1Ep. 4100
Richard McGirr interviews Nick Jones, founder and CEO of Alakai Capital, about how he scaled his commercial real estate company from a solo operation into a multi-department organization. Nick shares how he transitioned from land brokerage into development, why retail provided the best entry point for his early deals, and how cultivating tenant and broker relationships became the backbone of his growth strategy. He also discusses building organizational infrastructure—accounting, asset managemen...
Nov 24, 2025•58 min•Season 1Ep. 4099
John Chang breaks down the September jobs report, the ripple effects of tariffs, and what current economic uncertainty means for commercial real estate investors. He explains how healthcare employment is propping up national job growth, why stalled hiring across most industries is signaling caution, and how policy unpredictability is weighing on business decisions. John also outlines the markets most resilient to recessionary pressures and highlights why today's cap rate environment may offer st...
Nov 23, 2025•29 min•Season 1Ep. 4098
John Casmon interviews James Faillettaz, a Minneapolis-based investor who scaled from five units in a spreadsheet to restructuring an entire real estate company after an ambitious early strategy nearly collapsed. James shares how he over-hired, over-built, and over-extended while trying to operate like a Silicon Valley startup—then completely rebuilt his structure with the help of mentors and mastermind groups. He walks through how he created new momentum by taking over distressed properties thr...
Nov 22, 2025•49 min•Season 1Ep. 4097
Matt Faircloth interviews Christian Macellari, Head of Acquisitions and CIO at RSN Property Group, about how their team has grown more than 20% in the past 15–16 months by staying disciplined, data-driven, and relentless in sourcing opportunities. Christian explains how RSN underwrites roughly 400 deals a year to close just a few, why top-down market conviction matters before drilling into individual assets, and how their team blends off-market outreach, broker relationships, and distressed-debt...
Nov 21, 2025•54 min•Season 1Ep. 4096
Pascal Wagner breaks down how the IRS categorizes income into three buckets—active, portfolio, and passive—and why high-income earners often misunderstand how tax write-offs actually work. He explains common investor mistakes, including expecting real estate depreciation to offset W-2 or stock-market gains, and shares the simple rule that changed his entire tax strategy: “you can only offset like with like.” Pascal also walks through exceptions such as oil and gas, real estate professional statu...
Nov 20, 2025•16 min•Season 1Ep. 4095
Amanda Cruise and Ash Patel interview Jeremy Barker, a former firefighter turned serial entrepreneur who has built a nine-figure net worth through value-add industrial and office deals. Jeremy walks through how he bought nearly vacant, 100,000+ square foot assets, pre-leased them during due diligence, and created tens of millions in equity with very little cash out of pocket. He shares how going bankrupt twice, living in his truck, and then rebuilding through Murphy Door and commercial real esta...
Nov 19, 2025•50 min•Season 1Ep. 4094
On this week’s episode, Joe Fairless interviews Jeffrey Brogger. Jeffrey shares practical ways to revive “dead” contacts using AI voice agents that hold natural two-way conversations and surface real buying signals. He explains where these tools outperform blast emails and basic SMS, why latency and compliance matter, and how he builds lower-cost, highly customizable stacks with VAPI, Twilio and modern LLM voices. The discussion closes with an omnichannel playbook that uses ads, email, website a...
Nov 18, 2025•26 min•Season 1Ep. 4093
Richard McGirr breaks down why most syndicators struggle with online ads and explains why cold traffic is the last place capital raisers should be spending money. He argues that private investments require a level of trust that interruptive ads can’t establish, and that most managers burn cash chasing low-quality Facebook leads with terrible conversion. Instead, Richard outlines a hierarchy of “trust-based traffic,” from podcast tours that borrow a host’s credibility to scalable paid influencer ...
Nov 17, 2025•37 min•Season 1Ep. 4092
John Chang breaks down the latest economic and market signals after a week of meetings in New York City. He explains how the temporary government funding deal both alleviates short-term pressures and extends broader uncertainty—impacting GDP, consumer spending, and investor sentiment. John also unpacks capital flows, interest-rate volatility tied to upcoming Federal Reserve changes, and why debt availability is improving even as risk factors persist. He contrasts Sun Belt oversupply with strong ...
Nov 16, 2025•29 min•Season 1Ep. 4091
John Casmon interviews Travis Watts, a long-time Best Ever contributor, full-time LP, and author of Passive Investor Tips . They dig into where we are in the multifamily market cycle, why the last three-plus years have felt so painful for LPs, and why Travis believes we’re entering a true recovery phase that could mirror the opportunity of buying in 2010. Travis shares how investing consistently from 2015 to today—even with about 30% of his portfolio “compromised”—still leaves him well ahead of ...
Nov 15, 2025•53 min•Season 1Ep. 4090
Matt Faircloth interviews Todd Dexheimer, a multifamily and assisted living operator focused on steady, fundamentals-driven investing. Todd breaks down how he thinks about market selection—favoring job and population growth, sane rent-to-income ratios, and controlled new supply over “sexy” boom-bust metros. He then walks through a massive 99-unit value-add on the Mississippi River in the Twin Cities, where he transformed a mismanaged, dated asset into a lifestyle property with standout amenities...
Nov 14, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 4089
Pascal Wagner interviews Evan Polaski, digging into what 18 years across retail and multifamily have taught him about raising capital through multiple market cycles. Evan shares what it was really like trying to raise an institutional fund heading into the 2008 crisis, how the “denominator effect” froze commitments, and why that experience still shapes his view of risk today. He contrasts institutional and retail LP behavior, explains why he’s gravitated back to necessity-based retail, and calls...
Nov 13, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 4088
Amanda Cruise and Ash Patel interview Steven Wear, chief marketing officer of SSSE, about the firm’s nationwide self-storage investments and how it’s evolving the model through creative financing and energy innovation. Steven explains how SSSE focuses on secondary and tertiary markets to avoid oversaturation and zoning risks, and why they advocate for local moratoriums once they’ve entered a market. He discusses using substitution of collateral strategies to maximize returns on seller-financed d...
Nov 12, 2025•43 min•Season 1Ep. 4087
Richard McGirr interviews Spencer Carpenter, Best Ever CRE’s guest booker and founder of Outlier Audio, to workshop networking strategy for the Best Ever Conference. They dig into how to define an ideal client profile, sell outcome-based podcast campaigns instead of one-off bookings, and qualify prospects quickly so Spencer only offers high-touch strategy sessions to the right fits. Spencer and Richard also explore building simple but effective lead magnets and email drips, using click tracking ...
Nov 11, 2025•48 min•Season 1Ep. 4086
Richard McGirr interviews Ryan Floyd, a portfolio manager at Barca Capital, about why thoughtful, authentic investor relations is one of the most overlooked levers for raising and retaining capital. Ryan explains how most IR decks fail by avoiding honest discussion of what isn’t working, over-summarizing numbers in text, and underusing long-term, segment-level data that actually helps investors make decisions. He shares why investors crave more history, more segmentation, and better-designed cha...
Nov 10, 2025•48 min•Season 1Ep. 4085
John Chang breaks down the Urban Land Institute and PwC 2026 Emerging Trends report and what it means for commercial real estate investors. He walks through ULI’s top ten markets to watch, including Dallas, Miami, Houston, Northern New Jersey, Tampa, and Phoenix, highlighting where overdevelopment, insurance costs, and local policy risks could pressure performance versus where solid job and demographic trends still support growth. John also explores why he favors sectors like seniors housing, me...
Nov 09, 2025•37 min•Season 1Ep. 4084
