A data scientist’s process for success in multi-family real estate

Neal Bawa is a technologist who is universally known in the real estate circles as the Mad Scientist of Multifamily. Besides being one of the most in-demand speakers in commercial real estate, Neal is a data guru, a process freak, and an outsourcing expert. Neal treats his $947 million-dollar portfolio as an ongoing experiment in efficiency and optimization. The Mad Scientist lives by two mantras. His first mantra is that "We can only manage what we can measure". His second mantra is that, "Data beats gut feel by a million miles". These mantras and a dozen other disruptive beliefs drive profit for his 700+ investors. In today's episode, Neal shares insights about his strategy for multifamily investing, some interesting market statistics, and what he expects the future of the real estate market to look like. Episode Link: https://multifamilyu.com/ --- Transcript Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals.   Michael: Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode of the Remote Real Estate Investor. I'm Michael Albaum and today I'm joined by my very special guest, Neal Bawa and he's talking to us about multifamily investing syndications and some really, really interesting market statistics about looking forward into what the real estate market future holds for all of us. So let's get into it.   Hey Neal, thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show with me today. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing some wisdom with me.   Neal: Well, it's exciting to be here, especially because I am a fan of your company and until five minutes ago, I didn't know that I was doing a podcast with Roofstock. So super excited to be here.   Michael: Awesome. Well, surprises always tend to keep people on their feet. So I'm really excited to chat with you today. So I know a little bit about your background and who you are but for anyone listening, who might not be familiar if you can give us the quick and dirty who you are, where you come from, and what is it you're doing in real estate today?   Neal: Absolutely. I'm a geek, a nerd, a maverick, I come from Silicon Valley. I live in Silicon Valley, I'm a data scientist by profession with a computer science degree. I've had a successful tech career, which, after 17 years ended in the sale of my technology company. I got into real estate because I live in Texas Fornia and I was paying 53.7% of my gross income in taxes and so you know, I looked around and looked at lots of different avenues to save money, looked at solar panels looked at oil, and came to the conclusion that none of those were anywhere close to real estate in terms of the incredible taxation benefits. I tell people, real estate is America's number one legitimate tax mafia. That's really what it is. I mean, no other area has the astonishing, the shocking tax benefits that real estate has. So I started doing real estate for that and started sharing a lot of my data science, you know, thought processes and ideas and it sort of just exploded from there. The first time I shared my insights on data science, I had four people in front of me. A week ago, I had 1100 listening.   Michael: Oh my gosh, that is really, really cool. So I love chatting with data scientists with geeks and nerds as the self-proclaimed title that you gave yourself, because I think it puts a process. They come from very process oriented backgrounds, and it allows them to apply the same processes to real estate, which I'm sure we're gonna get into in a little bit. But you're doing some pretty amazing things in the multifamily space if I