When banks start calling to ask what you'd pay for a distressed asset, that's not a coincidence. That's the market telling you something.

This episode is hosted by Reed Goossens. We're joined by Marcin Drozdz, managing partner of M1 Real Capital, who has spent 18 years raising nine figures of private capital and acquiring over 1,600 units across the US.

Marcin lived through the 2008 crash from inside a private equity firm on day one — the same day Lehman Brothers collapsed. In this conversation, he draws a direct line between what he saw then and what's unfolding in commercial real estate today, from overleveraged assets and extend-and-pretend lending to the distressed opportunities he believes are coming.

We get into why banks are already making quiet calls to buyers, what replacement cost investing means in today's construction environment, the 5 million housing unit gap that never got filled, and why the buyers who move while others are frozen will look very smart in a few years.

If you're trying to make sense of where we are in the cycle and how to position for what comes next, this episode gives you the historical context and the practical framework to do it.

Let's dive in!

Key Takeaways:

00:00 Intro

01:35 How Marcin made his first dollar

04:00 Witnessing Lehman Brothers collapse firsthand

04:40 Building during COVID and launching the mentorship side

05:44 Crisis of confidence: parallels between 2009 and today

08:55 How the JOBS Act democratized investing — gift and a curse

12:41 Interest rate reality check and where asset values stand

14:46 Why replacement cost is now a core buying metric

18:44 The 5 million housing unit gap and what smart buyers are doing

20:13 Top 5 investing tips