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Welcome. It's episode number 57 of the Rent Roll, your podcast on all things rental housing, apartments, SFR and BTR theme of today. Is it time to worry? That's the big question right now. Obviously for a lot of folks in a lot of different industries, it seems like pessimism is climbing higher. We got a soft job market, we have a government shutdown, we have weak consumer confidence, soft leasing environment both for apartments and sf and yet also a stock market that's at record highs. The 10 year treasury is finally below 4% and still solid signs of consumer financial health, including renter health, at least in the class A and B market. So a lot of mixed signals. We've talked about some of these these last few episodes. We talked about the Q4 part market update. We did a budgeting episode last week. And yet I want to go deeper on this topic today. And obviously I say this all the time. We don't have a crystal ball. People always ask me what's the crystal ball say? I say it's fuzzy. I don't really know. But we can do our best to cut through the noise and at least look at some facts that we could consider and help us come to at least a more informed conclusion and hopefully perspective on where things might go. Prepare for different scenarios. By the way, we're going to get a lot more color on the health of the market this week and next week. And that's because it's REIT earnings call season. Always get a lot of good insight and color commentary from those earnings calls. And we're gonna cover highlights from the apartment REITs as we always do. Apartments and SFR REITs. We'll cover those in these next couple of weeks. Next week we'll be all focused on top five takeaways from the apartment REIT calls. The following week, November 13th, we'll be talking about five takeaways from the SFR REIT earnings calls. And so we do that every quarter. And so we'll keep the tradition going again this time. Hopefully we get a little more perspective what's happening. And you know, the great thing about, you know, the, the REITs, I think as many of you know, they're a relative. They're, they're a very small piece of the overall puzzle for SFR and apartments. But we get such a great color on that. It's the, they're the few owners who can are obligated to share publicly what they're experiencing and be truthful about it. And so we'll get some good insights from those that could be. And I'll try to share the themes I think are reflective of broader industry themes right now. Also this week in today's episode, we'll be covering some big headlines touching on rental housing, including Blackstone. They just had the earnings calls and they talked about moderating returns in private credit. And we'll share what that might potentially mean for multifamily and sfr. Could we maybe see some of those groups that were shifting heavily in private credit? Maybe they come back into LP Equity. We'll see. We'll talk about the possibility of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac delving into construction loans. Some news around that. We'll talk about institutional SFR investors being net sellers right now. And we'll also talk about the heavy concession market for apartment managers in certain markets, even for renewals, by the way, in some cases. There's an article touch on that today as well. And then later in today's conversation, we'll shift gears for our conversation with today's guest, Chris Finlay. Chris is the founder and CEO of Middleburg Communities. Middleburg, as many of you know, is an active owner, manager and developer of apartments across a number of growth markets. We're going to get Chris's take on the current market and talk about how Middleburg or what opportunities Middleburg sees moving ahead. And we'll also talk about one of the great nonprofits of the rental housing space entryway. And some of you know, this is an organization that Chris founded and started, formerly known as shelters to shutters and helping people struggling with homelessness get training and jobs in the apartment industry. Really great cause. And they're seeing some super encouraging results. I'm gonna talk to Chris about that as well. And that interview is recorded live on location in, in, in in Middleburg. So Middleburg, Virginia. So excited to share that with you guys. All right. So before we dive further, let's, let's give a big shout out to our sponsors for first and foremost to jpi. JPI is a leading apartment developer with a stated purpose to transform building, enhance communities and improve lives. And jpi, of course, a top builder in Southern California and Texas, expanding into the Southeast, into Arizona, as well as in the Pacific Northwest and Seattle area. And so also want to give a shout out to Madera Residential, a leading apartment owner and operator in Texas. Check them out@maderaresidential.com and also one more I just want to give a shout out to this week. Special thanks to our newest sponsor, Funnel, the AI and CRM platform. Some of you noticed that Funnel's been sponsoring the interview segment of the podcast each week, so grateful for them. Check them out@funnelleleasing.com all right, so, as always, kick it off with Here's a chart. And we got a few charts for you this week. And again, the theme of today's episode is that is it time too many is is here. The theme is, is is it time to worry about multifamily and sfr? So there's an article in the Wall Street Journal this week that quoted David Schwartz, the CEO of Waterton and a past guest of the Rent Roll. If those of you heard, that episode was a great one, not because of me, because of David, of course. And he was quoted in this Wall Street Journal article basically implying that we're not banking on 2026 and really expecting 2027 to be the better year. And I've heard other industry players say similar, tell me similar things, that they're, they'll take any growth at this point in 2026 or the grain of, as, I'm sorry, rephrase that they'll take growth in 2026 as gravy on top. But they're starting to ratchet down expectations really out of caution and don't want to be too dependent on growth in 2026. And, and so now, really, the, the mantra has gone from survive till 25 till fix in 26, and now it'll be heaven in 2027. So we'll see. Obviously, you know, people, some people, some of you all think those are, those are silly. Others of you oddly, enjoy the, those cliches. But, but either way, more focus. Now, the main, main, main takeaway here on 2027, and from a budgeting standpoint, we touched about this, touched on this a little bit last week. Maybe that's prudent. And part of the challenge right now is that there's just so many mixed signals in the economy. Okay, so here's one great example. Moody's, obviously leading economic data provider and forecaster. A lot of the financial, almost all the financial institutions use these guys. So Moody's has come out and said there's a 48% chance of a recession. And my reaction to that is 48%. That's super helpful, guys. Thanks. Right? I mean, 48%, you know, that's the ultimate mixed signal. But I get it. I mean, they probably have a lot of different indicators pointing different directions. And I see some people are already comparing 2025 to 2009. And I, again, I've talked about this previously. So I won't talk about this too much, but I remember that 2009, as many of you remember, that was a brutal year. And, and so far at least 2025 doesn't look like 2009 doesn't even rhyme with 2009, at least so far. Need that qualifier in there. Maybe next year is different, but at least so far we know that. But there is actually one variable. I've touched on this before. I've said it before, I'll say it again here. There's one economic variable that's worse than 2009. And so if you heard past episodes or read my newsletter, you probably know what it is. It's consumer confidence. And that's odd because I certainly remember 2009. I'm sure many of you do as well. I actually started in the rental housing research space in 2009. And back in 2009, unemployment was at 10%. That's more than 2x what it is today. And so I can't help but wonder if maybe the headline noise, government shutdown, the political stuff, maybe that sours our moods. And I always am somewhat amused by these surveys that when they ask Americans, hey, how stable are you in your job? How are you doing economically? They'll say, I'm fine. But then they ask, okay, well how do you perceive most Americans are? And they say, well, they're struggling. And so this idea that I'm okay, but everyone else is not is an unusual quirk of these consumer surveys that we see around sentiment. But here's the real problem with weak sentiment is that when we feel nervous, human nature is to do what? Nothing. Uncertainty. I say this all the time. Uncertainty has a freezing effect on major decisions, including relocations and moves and lease signings and home purchases, young adults leaving the nest. And of course for businesses, that impacts hiring decisions, expansion decisions. So where do we go from here? I'm going to give you two scenarios. I shared some of these in my last newsletter. I'm going to recap them really quickly here. I think the downside scenario is this. So we have weak sentiment, weak hirings, that gives way to reduced consumer spending and layoffs. Even worst case scenario is that dreaded stagflation scenario re accelerated inflation coupled with job reductions. Obviously nobody wants that. That's the worst case scenario. Now for those of you who are more glass half full, here's the upside scenario. Maybe you can hearken back to the summer of 2020 or again maybe middle of 2022. In those two periods, sentiment sank for very different reasons. First in 2020, obviously the COVID lockdowns, and later in 2022 due to peak inflation. In both instances, we saw signs Americans pulling back and businesses pulling back, only to step back in once they realized that they were doing okay, the world wasn't falling apart. So the best case scenario is that happens again today, that the current moment of slowed hiring and heightened nervousness gives way to at least steady, if not unspect, if unspectacular growth. Okay, so we'll see what happens. But I can certainly sympathize with Moody's playing it down the middle of that 48% number. And part of what I assume is triggering those Moody's estimates is the recent upticks on unemployment. Now, unemployment is actually quite low by any honest historical measure, but it is ticking back up. And with the caveat being that we of course don't have the latest monthly data because of the government shutdown. And the absence of data just adds to some of the nervousness. Now, one particular segment of the job market getting headlines is the entry level job market for recent college grads. Obviously a critical one for the apartment market. Some brutal headlines talking about the challenges of recent college grads finding jobs. Fed data shows unemployment among recent college graduates ticking up north of 5%. And that may not sound terrible, but it is high relative to history. And most of you probably saw this week the news of Amazon with I think it was 10,000 plus white collar jobs layoffs. And that was primarily driven due to increased automation and AI, which of course fuels all the doomer worries about AI taking over all the jobs. So we'll see if that's an early indicator or something bigger or if it's fairly isolated. I think back around that 2022 period, or even 2023, we had a lot of tech layoffs and there was some concern that would bleed over in the larger economy and it didn't. So maybe we can hope that that's the same time this, this time too. Same thing this time too. But of course that's no sure thing. For now, layoffs do remain more the exception than the rule, even with the government shutdown. Obviously don't have BLS jobs data, but we do still have state filings on war notices of every time an employer plans a mass layoff, there's a war notice that gets filed. And we still haven't, as of this recording this week, we still haven't seen those numbers materially pick up. So that's a good sign. So even a Chairman Powell noted a few weeks ago in his press conference that while there's not a lot of hiring, there's also not a lot of firing. So hopefully that's just a reflective of some nervousness and certainly related to that too. Lack of not only is there a lack of firing, but there's also still solid wage growth. It's moderated of course from the crazy peaks a few years ago, but it's still above today's wage growth is actually above the pre Covid norms at least. At least as of last reporting. So still above 4%. That was prior to the government shutdown when the data spigot shut off as well. And the wager with numbers are actually better among younger workers who are more likely to be renters. So that's good. So maybe some of those employers recall how tough it was to hire people, hire good people after doing mass layoffs in 2020 during COVID Maybe there's some lessons learned there and some reluctance to do too much now. So that's again the the positive way to think about it. And of course the thing about mixed signals, I mentioned this earlier, the ultimate bull signal is the stock market. The S&P 500 is soaring to record highs this week, at least as of this recording. Hopefully this comment's not dated by the time it comes out. And the same thing with the 10 year Treasury. This has been befuddling many of the macro economists the fact that the 10 year treasury is below 4% again and again that's as of this recording, which hopefully this is still true as the when the day that on the day that you're listening to this. So again, very mixed signals. Now let's tile this back to apartment and SFR demand. And again, I know I've talked about this a lot in these last few weeks, but it's important and I'm trying to add some, some, some new context to this. There's a lot of confusion right now and questions about demand and these demand numbers. And I've talked about this before, but I want to give another reminder here. There are a lot of ways to measure demand. If you're talking about net absorption, AKA renter household formation, those numbers are still quite strong. And you know, data providers and nerds like me, we think of demand more in terms of absorption household formation. It's the net change number of occupied units. Data providers like Costar, RealPage, John Burns, Yardi, they all have different data pointing to good macro absorption numbers. And that's a good story. You know, I think a lot of people try to just dismiss those Numbers, I mean, yeah, there's more retention, everything else, but these are still net increases in the number of occupied units, no matter how you slice it. There are other factors, absolutely, but that's still a positive story. Now, not only are those macro numbers high, but the financial health of renters remains fairly healthy. And I've talked about this before too. I'll just briefly recap this. At least in the A and B market, I should say the class A and B renters, we see rent to income ratios, the lowest level since 2019, back below 22%. Now, again, real challenge, the lower end of the market. I don't want to dismiss that, but the class A and B, I make the case all the time. I think that affordability right now is more of a tailwind than a headwind. Plus, retention is sky high with renters who are actually paying the rent every month and no sign of a flight to affordability, which you might expect when consumers lose purchasing power. Instead, we've seen more of a flight to quality with renters moving up market, getting good deals with concessions to, to live in higher quality newer units and better locations. And so it's more a flight to quality, not a flight to affordability. Those are all positive indicators now. But, but, but, but if you're thinking about demand, I mentioned demand, there's different measures, different ways to measure if you're thinking about demand in terms of leasing activity and leasing traffic and vacancy, lease signings, those numbers are weak. And if you're, you know, property manager, property owner, asset manager, you're probably thinking about demand in terms of these, in these types of terms. John Burns and their SFR Leasing Index, I talked about this a while back. They've shown softening numbers since 2022, high renewal demand, but lesser inbound leasing activity, in part because of high competition from increased supply. Now, for sfr, that's not only build to rent new construction, which has been concentrated a handful of markets, but also increased SFR listings, often through these accidental landlords. Those folks who are going to sell their homes decide to rent out, rent it out instead for a variety of reasons. And we've seen an influx of SF or SFR inventory on the market these last few years. And that's, that's slowed down new leasing activity. And it's the same story for multifamily, obviously not accidental landlords, more purposeful in this case, but high supply via the biggest construction boom in a half century. And so while there's a lot of macro demand out there, that demand is being spread across a great number of properties. And so here's the real page data on leads per unit or leasing traffic. And it's dropped off substantially since peaking in 2021. It dropped in 2022, dropped further in 23 and in 24 and in 25, kind of leveling off from 24, which was already kind of a low watermark for Q3. And so vacant unit's taking longer to backfill and that's putting downward pressure on rents as operators prioritize occupancy. But let's zoom out for a moment because it's easy to get really absorbed in the current moment in both SFR and multifamily. The weakening leasing traffic is not new to 2025. It didn't start when people when the moody started ratcheting up their odds of recession, or when we Amazon did their layoff notice, or when unemployment started tick back up or recent college graduates struggling to find jobs. It predates all that stuff. Traffic started weakening back in 2022. That's back when mortgage rates started to increase and when inflation peaked, when job growth was still booming and wage growth was much higher than it is today, even though wage growth is still good. So any honest analysis can't attribute outsized credit just to the job market for softening here in 2025. This trend long predates that. So it really correlates, of course, more to supply. And I still will contend that even right now, supply is a much bigger headwind than anything happening in the economy for both apartments and sfr. Now let's go back to the macro demand stat for a moment. Absorption. Now, I want to encourage you to watch this one very carefully going forward because I think a lot of people are going to misinterpret this number over this next year or two. Okay, so here's a prediction I feel pretty strongly about. Absorption is going to go down. It will. And I think it's going to go down regardless of what happens in the economy, what happens in the job market, what happens to the homeownership. Absorption is going to go down. And specifically for apartments where those numbers have been at or around all time, highs or record highs. And why do I say that? Well, because it's inevitable. And I say it's inevitable because supply is correlated with absorption. So we know that supply is going down and we're going to see absorption go down with it. It's just math. Absorption and household formation tend to be correlated with supply. You can only absorb a housing unit that's available. The big supply Wave has unlocked a lot of pent up demand that drove those numbers way up going forward. Lesser supply means lesser absorption capacity. That's why a place like New York City in San Francisco, even in good times, they usually rank low for absorption despite its their size. Because there's a chronic supply shortage. Less to absorb. The lower the vacancy rate, lesser the supply, the less capacity there is for absorption. So it's really quite simple. So, so hear me on this. Even if you disagree with me on everything else, I hope you align me on this. Lesser absorption is not, is not a signal of a weakening market necessarily. That's because supply, we know supply, whereas we don't know what's going on. The economy, we know supply is going to be plunging these next couple of years. There's less supply to absorb, therefore absorption will be less in the future. So let me give you two quick scenarios. If absorption drops off, but supply drops even more, then what happens? Well, vacancy ticks down, right? Reduced vacancy puts upward pressure on rents. But if absorption plunges faster than supply, then vacancy is not going to improve. And that is a much more concerning scenario. So you have to watch absorption in connection with vacancy. Just because absorption goes down, that's not a bad thing. It's more of an expected thing. But we want it. But you want to see it as the industry participant, you want to see it go down. You want to see supply go down more than the drop off in absorption. Therefore vacancy goes down. So tying it all together, a lot of mixed signals. If you're a doomer, there's plenty of fodder to work with today. If you're an optimist, there's plenty of free to work with to just mixed signals. Uncertainty has been the key word all throughout 2025, and it remains the case here at the end of 2025 as well. All right, that takes us to rental housing trivia. All right, so rental housing trivia. Today's question is. This one is in honor of Wham. The women of asset management meeting happening this week. So the question this week is the nation's first all female architecture firm became known for designing more sanitary and better ventilated tenement buildings in New York city in the 1890s. Who are they? Okay, so tenant buildings is the original workforce housing. New York City had a lot of very undesirable type housing built for workers in the 1800s. Poorly ventilated, poor lighting, not particularly safe. And this all female architecture firm, the nation's first all female architecture firm, found a solution for that that started with actually living in one of these old tenant buildings for a few months and coming up with ideas to do it better. So who are they? And we'll come. That's, this is a tough one. That's one of the harder questions we've had. But I'll give you the answer here in a little bit. But next up in the news, all right, in the news when we break down, headlines touching on rental housing topics of the week. And we got a few big ones this week. First from the Financial Times, Blackstone says era of bumper private credit returns has ended. Now the headline is a little bit sensational, but it's not wrong. You know, I read through the transcript of Blackstone's earnings calls. Earnings call, and they're still very bullish on private credit strategies. But here's what John Gray said. He said base rates and spreads have come down. So the absolute returns reflect that some of that excess return when you were getting mid teens returns, the lender and senior credit two and a half years ago has gone away. So yes, that has been some loss of absolute return. So he's basically saying the returns have normalized. All right. And he's making the point of saying that the private credit market in their view at least, I'm just regurgitating what he said. He's saying that it's still a very healthy market but returns have normalized. And obviously not only have rates come down, but there are so and we think about our world and apartments in sfr btr. There's so many new entrants in the private credit space. And a lot of institutional groups talked about this previously. We had Dan Walsh from citymark Capital talking about this a number of episodes back. A lot of institutional groups have shifted from equity to private credit strategies these last couple of years. And so you know, now you have to wonder with lower returns, a higher competition for quality assets, for quality deals, you wonder is this finally going to push more capital back into LP equity? So we'll see. But we had James Ray on the podcast a couple months ago. I got probably our most listened to episode ever. One of the things he talked about is hey, you know, these things will balance themselves out. And we'll see if that's, this is a trigger for that to happen. All right, next headline comes from the Wall Street Journal. Renters have the upper hand and they are probably keeping it. Apartment rents nationally are advancing at their slowest pace in years because glut of new units is taking longer to absorb than expected. All right, so for those of you in the industry. Nothing terribly surprising here, but it's good to see broader awareness of it. However, there is one good anecdote I want to share from this article from a Ren renter in Denver. And this renter is talking about getting a two month concession, which not surprising. But here's the surprising part. It's two month concession on a renewal. So let me read this. It says Spencer McKean is one of the beneficiaries. The 29 year old video game programmer has been renting a one bedroom apartment in Denver at roughly the same 15 $1,575 a month rent for these past three years. So unchanged rent for basically three years. Okay. Continuing the article, it says that comfortably makes up less than 30% of his income this year. His landlord is charging him only nine months of rent on his 11 month lease. So in our terms, that's a two month concession. A two month concession on a renewal. Now that is pretty wild. I don't think that's going to be the norm by any means, but certainly in a soft market like Denver. And Denver now has the biggest rent cuts among any major market in the U.S. in Denver, it's not particularly surprising and I'm assuming that Spencer lives in a higher supplied submarket. So it's a good reminder. I talked about this last week in the budgeting podcast episode. It's a good reminder that you have to compete for renewals, particularly in an asset where you have, you may have inverted rent rolls or nearing that scenario, meaning that your advertised rents for new leases may be below your in place rents that your current renters are paying. And so a renter like Spencer, like, you know, even if you can afford it, you don't want to pay more than what you're going to be charging a new renter to coming in at. If you see an advertised rent lower than what you're currently paying or lower than your new letter, you're probably say, hey, I'm a renter in good standing. I've been paying the rent every month. I've been a good tenant. You know, I want the same deal. And so if you're offering two months concession in the front door, you know, that's, that's in this case, they're still trying to get those rents. It's probably a scenario like that where you're having to offer that concession to keep your retention rates. All right, so, so more on that if you're curious. Now, we talked about this last week as well, the implications for budgeting if you want to really prioritize renewal, trade out. It's going to come at the expense probably of higher turn costs, higher vacancy loss and of course more turnover as well. So obviously want to do that math. All right, this next one comes from actually a tweet from Lance Lambert who runs Resi Club, a media outlet focused on housing. And it says seven of the eight largest institutional significantly landlords are currently net sellers according to partial Labs data. So I just wanted to share this because you know that for all the noise around institutional investors are buying up all the houses. You know, those same voices tend to ignore the part where institutions sell a lot of houses, but that's just the reality of today's SFR market. We talked about this in the podcast in the past, but you know, a lot of groups that are recycling capital focused on being net sellers of existing scattered site homes and putting more capital into new construction and btr. All right, next headline. This comes from Politico. It says home builders push new frontier for Fannie and Freddie construction loans. The policy has had industry interest for years, but recent Trump posts may add momentum. All right, so obviously this would be a game changer for both home builders and for apartment builders right now. As many of you know, the gscs, Fannie and Freddie, they could only lend on completed homes and unstabilized apartment deals. And so we've talked about this in the past on this podcast. We've had the former heads of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as guests and this was a topic and you know, good people can disagree on this and I think there are some valid reasons to oppose this. But the upside is this, that it would likely make construction lending somewhat less cyclical and more liquid. Make construction less, more liquid and you can, you can tap into the existing network of agency lenders for potentially favorable financing without having to deal with with HUD and all the red tape associated with that. So obviously this is a complex issue, a lot of details to work through, but I am curious to see where it goes and I do think it's has could be a true positive for increased supply. All right, next headline Biz now apartments are a hot commodity, but rent growth doesn't show it. All right, so this is a good story. Tells us what we already know for those of you in the industry. But I appreciate an article that captures facts over the doomsday narratives. Lots of good demand, even more supply. So no rent growth. And there's good commentary in here from Sam Tannenbaum at Cushman heads up multi yearly research over there. And he said, we've delivered more units than any time in history. We need time for the market to catch up and lease up those units. So well said, Sam. And our last headline comes again from the Wall Street Journal. This one says renters are conning their way into luxury apartments. Atlanta, where up to half of the rental applications contain fraudulent information, is the epicenter of a national surge in these scams. All right, so first of all, kudos to the Wall street writing about the rise in lease application fraud. It's a huge issue. It's gotten sparse attention until recently. There's been a few articles now on this topic. I talked about this previously as well. Obviously, for those of you in the industry, you've been talking about this for years, really dating back to Covid. And we're finally starting to see attention around this topic. And it's important because it ultimately backfires on honest renters via higher cost, reduced availability, more cumbersome application process, et cetera. Now, I appreciate the article, so I nitpick it too much, but I do want to point out one thing which is there's this narrative out there and the article kind of picks up. It was saying, hey, all the construction is focused on, on luxury, top of the market. And so there's a, there's a, there's a shortage of affordable housing. And so therefore these, this, this fraud is kind of like a Les Miserables situations, moving up to, you know, upmarket just to find a place to live. And I think that's, that's actually incredibly wrong. And, and part of it for this simple reason, which is that there's actually plenty of availability especially in place like Atlanta in class C, lower rent apartments, you know, we have very high, especially these last few years. I mean, obviously during COVID everything was with limited availability, but you know, since the, for the last three years, you know, we've had pretty good availability even in class C. And so you can certainly find more affordable apartments than, than trying to lease a, a brand new luxury apartment building that this article talks about. But I think if, if you're going through the headaches of if you're going to commit leasing fraud and you're using Tick Tock, you know, buying a 1500 service off tick Tock to do it, why not target a nice property? So, you know, there you go. But anyway, kudos to Wall Street Journal for bringing light to this. All right, let's come back to our rental housing trivia question of the week. The question was the nation's first all female architecture firm became Known for designing more sanitary and better ventilated tenant buildings in New York city in the 1890s. Who are they? The answer is Gannon and Hands. Mary Gannon and Alice Hands. You know, most of us probably don't know their name now, but it's, it is a big name in architecture history. Their designs were featured in Harper's Bazaar magazine and in Vogue magazine. So two, you know, kind of, you know, even back then and names that we have stood the test of time obviously from then to now. Let me read something. An architecture historian named Bethany Gene Laskin said, she wrote, rather than the long, dark corridors of past tenement designs that were considerably dangerous and isolating, Gannon and Hands tenement created an openness that provided a greater sense of safety and community. And then Sir Sydney Waterloo from London, he said this the best. He called Gannon Hands plans the best plans for single tenements I have ever seen. The most clever and ingenious. And so some of these ideas around open airflow, natural lighting, you know, corridors and courtyards, you really became the foundation for the modern, you know, wrap apartment buildings and garden apartment properties that we see today. And so hats off to Mary Gannon and Alice Hands and not only being the nation's first female architect or architecture firm, but also being a major disruptor in how we design apartment buildings. With that, that's going to take us to today's interview. Today's interview is sponsored by funnel, the AI and CRM software trusted by four of the major REITs and many leading operators like BH and Cortland. To learn how Funnel can help your property centralize operations and automate everyday tasks, visit funnelleleasing.com and today's guest is the founder and CEO of Middleburg Communities, Chris Finlay. Chris is also the founder of Entryway, formerly known as Shelters to Shutters, which is helping those who struggle with homelessness get on the job training and find jobs working in apartments. Had a chance to talk to Chris in Virginia, in Middleburg, Virginia, which is the namesake of his company. And so hope you enjoy my conversation with Chris.