77. What Property Managers Need To Know About The Macro Housing Market with Ivy Zelman

**Marc Cunningham** (0:00)
As a property manager, have you ever found yourself in a conversation with an owner-client about the market? And they're telling you things that you just are sure aren't correct, but you're not sure exactly what's going on in the macro market, and you don't have the data at your fingertips to be able to tell them what's really happening. Well, hey, my friends, it's Marc Cunningham with the Property Management Business Podcast. I'm going to be speaking today with Ivy Zelman of Zelman & Associates. If you don't know who Ivy is or you don't know who Zelman is, you're going to find this conversation very interesting. They are the premier aggregator of data of all things housing in the US. So in this conversation, we're going to touch about it on a couple of things I want you to listen for specifically. Ivy is going to share what's going on, first and foremost, on the macro side of housing. You need to know that as a property manager. She's going to talk about BTR, that's billed to rent, how that's impacting us as residential property management companies. What's that? What does that do to our rental rates? She'll talk about her projections for rental rates going forward, and how does renewal rates, how do they differ? We have a nice little conversation about how renewal rates differ from market rates and what direction that's going to go to. She talks about what she would recommend we should be doing to improve our occupancy, and what concessions she suggests we put into our properties to get them rented quicker.
Then we're going to end up with a short conversation on how we, as property managers, can spend the time we need to educate our owner clients. Here's my conversation with Ivy Zelman.
Ivy Zelman, welcome to the Property Management Business Podcast.

**Ivy Zelman** (1:53)
Thank you for having me, Marc. Pleasure to be here.

**Marc Cunningham** (1:55)
So, you're talking to a different group of people, I think, in this podcast than you normally speak to. You were out a few weeks ago at the NARPM, and that's the National Association of Residential Property Managers, for people that don't know what that is. You were at their annual convention, you gave a keynote talk about the state of the housing market and property management, how it all ties together.
We're going to talk about a lot of the things you said there within that. But before we do that, can you just kind of give your background, you've got a fascinating background being who you are, the CEO of Zelman & Associates, but take it just a couple of minutes and let people understand who you are, what Zelman is and what you guys do.

**Ivy Zelman** (2:37)
Well, thank you for that.
Well, I have been following the residential housing market for dating myself, Marc, for over 30 years.
I started my career in investment banking and quickly realized I didn't like it, and wound up in equity research and fell into an opening that I was an associate. I was working for a senior analyst that was gifting me the housing stocks as the company we work for, Solomon Brothers, was going through some turmoil. So I got really lucky. I had an opportunity with the scandal Solomon Brothers had and been doing equity research ever since. And for those of you that are not as familiar with that term equity research, really our role as analysts are to provide our outlook on housing across all types of housing and also give recommendations on individual companies that operate in that ecosystem. So we cover companies from invitation homes to Sherwin-Williams, to Lennar, and multifamily operators, building product companies. So we really try to cover the entire ecosystem, providing a lot more insights for the people that are utilizing our research and really the client base where we make money is selling research that we're aggregating to institutional investors and private equity operators. So that's the background and we've been fortunate, despite the craziness post-GFC, you know, our firm did pretty well during the crisis. People need us even more, understand what's happening and reading the tea leaves. And we actually sold the company in 21 So officially, I'm no longer the CEO. I'm now working for Walker Dunlop, running our investment banking equity research business.

**Marc Cunningham** (4:23)
For people that have listened to this podcast a while, we've had Jesse Letterman on two or three times to talk about the single-family rental survey you guys put out. Later on, we'll share with folks how they can participate within that. But the data you guys put out is fabulous. It is my favorite data of all the data that's out there. And it's so comprehensive. As you said, reports on individual companies, reports on markets, on segments, that way. So if folks are not getting that, watching at least that single-family rental survey, that is fabulous data. I share that with my team every month when you guys put that together. So love that.