🧊 ICE is coming for multifamily tenants

👋 Happy Sunday, Best Ever readers! It’s already February 1. One-twelfth of 2026 down!

In today’s newsletter, ICE targets tenants, Trump names his man, supply cools, big multifamily dominates, and much more.

🛠️ The LP Starter Kit gives you a systematic approach to vetting private deals before you wire six figures based on gut feel. Pascal Wagner used this framework to turn $3.3M into $150K/year in passive income for his family. Grab the free kit.

🎉 BEC X is two weeks away, and we still have room for you. Join hundreds of investors (95% have closed deals in the past nine months) for three days of sessions, workshops, and the connections that move your business forward. Secure your spot.

Let’s CRE!

🗞️ NO-FLUFF NEWS
CRE HEADLINES

🏦 Trump’s Pick: President Trump has tapped Kevin Warsh to lead the Federal Reserve, selecting the former Fed governor and Stanford fellow to replace Jerome Powell when his term expires in May amid ongoing political tensions.

🔬 Lab Vacancy: U.S. life sciences vacancy fell 0.4% to 23.4% in Q4 — the first quarterly decline since 2022 — as tenants signed 2.5M SF despite slowing employment growth and weak VC funding conditions.

🏘️ Supply Cooldown: U.S. apartment completions dropped below 100K units in Q4 for the first time in 10 quarters, according to RealPage, with just 89,400 deliveries marking the lowest total since early 2023 as the construction pipeline eases.

🐶 Top Dog: Multifamily remains the top target for 74% of U.S. investors in 2026, with Dallas holding the No. 1 market spot for five consecutive years as value-add and core-plus strategies dominate preferences.

💵 Wallets Open: Seventy-four percent of CRE investors plan to buy more assets in 2026 than last year, with 97% maintaining or increasing real estate allocations despite uncertainty around economic outlook and labor markets.

🏆 TOP STORY
MULTIFAMILY OPERATORS ARE FEELING THE ICE IMPACT

Look, after these past couple of weeks, everyone’s tired of talking about ICE. But the reality is that while all the focus is on Minneapolis, apartment landlords across the country are reporting significant operational challenges as enforcement intensifies, with 40% of owners, developers, and investors saying that recent policies have hurt leasing efforts and occupancy rates.

The impact varies dramatically by region. In Florida — where roughly 22% of the population is foreign-born — 67% of landlords reported negative effects from immigration policy enforcement. Texas saw 21% of owners report significant negative impacts, with another 26% experiencing somewhat negative effects. 

The consequences extend beyond simple vacancy. Tenants are disappearing from units mid-lease, payments are arriving late or not at all, and some properties are experiencing double-digit occupancy drops.

• Vacancy Spike: One South Florida landlord operating 300 apartments in Miami-Dade County reported vacancy surging from a typical 2% to now 30%, directly attributing the shift to federal immigration policies and enforcement actions.

• Behavioral Shifts: Foreign-born residents are increasingly moving in with friends or family to avoid putting their names on documents, creating hesitancy around public appearances and financial transactions like sending money home. The effect reaches beyond those directly detained — it's changing behavior across the broader foreign-born population.

• Labor Pressures: Thirty percent of survey respondents experienced negative impacts on staffing and labor availability from immigration policy shifts, compounding operational challenges as properties struggle with both tenant turnover and workforce constraints.

The timing compounds existing multifamily headwinds. The sector is already navigating softening rents, elevated vacancy levels, and record new construction deliveries (though they have slowed). Immigration enforcement adds another layer of demand erosion that researchers say has been underdiscussed in market analysis.

The administration's deportation program — described as the largest in U.S. history — has accelerated rapidly. The Department of Homeland Security reported deporting more than 600,000 unauthorized immigrants in 2025, with another 1.9 million leaving voluntarily. Nearly 70,000 migrants were being held in detention centers as of early January. This month, HUD notified landlords and public housing authorities that they have 30 days to prove eligibility and citizenship of nearly 200,000 tenants or face potential sanctions.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Immigration growth in the U.S. fell by more than 50% between July 2024 and July 2025, and population experts expect that decline to accelerate sharply this year. In a typical year, 100,000 to 200,000 immigrants rent in the U.S., primarily in middle-to-lower-income submarkets and older boutique buildings. With immigration expected to remain suppressed for the foreseeable future, that segment of rental demand has effectively disappeared, creating a one-sided risk with no offsetting demand tailwind for apartment operators.

🤝 TOGETHER WITH GROW YOUR CASHFLOW
AVOID SIX-FIGURE MISTAKES BEFORE YOU WIRE

Are you an accredited investor deciding where to invest your next $50k–$500k? Do you feel like you’re guessing when you vet funds and private deals?

💸 Most LPs still wire six figures into funds off a webinar and a gut feel.

After his father passed away, Pascal Wagner had to help his mom retire on what he left behind. He applied what he’d learned deploying $150M in his venture career, invested $3.3M across 23 private deals for his family, and now generates over $150,000 a year in passive income for them.

🛠️ That experience led him to build a simple system for defining a personal Buy Box, comparing funds side-by-side, and running 506(c) debt funds through a checklist before investing. Grab the free LP Starter Kit for a lite version of that system you can apply to your next deal before you wire a dollar.

💰 CRE TRENDS
LARGE MULTIFAMILY SHARE HITS RECORD HIGH

Large multifamily buildings now represent roughly one in three renter-occupied housing units in America — the highest share on record dating back to 2011 — while single-family rentals have dropped to just 31% of the rental market.

The shift reflects 15 years of accelerated multifamily development outpacing single-family construction growth following the Great Recession. Here's what's driving the trend:

• Supply dynamics: Heavy multifamily construction has made apartment units more affordable for renters, pushing large buildings (20+ units) to capture an unprecedented market share while single-family rental inventory grows at a slower pace.

• Recent activity: Multifamily construction starts rose in 2025, contributing to falling rents and rising concessions across apartment markets, though the permitting pipeline has retreated to pre-pandemic levels, signaling a potential broader slowdown ahead.

• Market impact: Excess apartment supply continues suppressing rent growth as available units outpace renter demand, even as multifamily construction activity begins to moderate from recent highs.

And if that’s not enough, President Trump's recent executive order limiting institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes — with a carve-out for master-planned build-to-rent properties — adds another layer to the evolving rental landscape.

🎉 BEST EVER CONFERENCE
2 WEEKS: THERE’S STILL TIME TO JOIN US AT BEC X

Two weeks from today, hundreds of serious real estate investors will gather in Salt Lake City for BEC X. And there's still time for you to be one of them 🫵

What's happening February 18-20:

✍️ 30+ sessions from operators who are actually navigating this market successfully. Marcin Drozdz on raising $300M after the '08 crash. Vanessa Alfaro on using AI to 100x results. J Scott on where multifamily is actually headed. Tax strategies with Amanda Han & Matt MacFarland.

🛠️ Plus exclusive pre-conference workshops on February 17th—LP deal vetting, capital raising playbooks, and beyond multifamily strategies (only available for Conference Plus and VIP ticketholders.

But here's what really matters: 95% of attendees have actively closed deals in the past nine months. From GP-LP Speed Networking to hallway conversations that turn into partnerships—the real value happens when you're in the room.

🎙️ THE BEST EVER CRE SHOW
HOW DEVELOPMENT BECAME WHACK-A-MOLE

Paul Frank has been developing commercial real estate for four decades, from Burger King build-to-suits in the 1980s to Dutch Bros coffee shops today. He's navigated 21% interest rates, the Great Recession, and pretty much every market cycle since Reagan. But the last six years? Those have him telling aspiring developers to think twice.

Frank joined Ash Patel this week on the Best Ever CRE Show to discuss how development risk has fundamentally transformed, and why even seasoned pros are getting blindsided by costs and timelines they never saw coming. He breaks down three areas where the rules have changed:

• Municipal Chaos: Planning and building department staff are working from home, failing to communicate, and producing little output. Frank has had longtime public sector contacts privately describe their newer colleagues as "worthless" — a stunning admission from career government employees who were never exactly entrepreneurial themselves.

• Cost Shocks: Frank asked his architect, civil engineer, and several commercial brokers to estimate building permit costs for a 10,000 SF office project. Guesses ranged from $50,000 to $150,000. The actual bill came in at $587,000 — just for stamps on paper.

• Entitlement Traps: Mill Valley, California, encouraged In-N-Out Burger to start construction on a new location while processing the drive-thru permit separately. After the company committed to the build, the city denied the drive-thru, destroying the business model. Meanwhile, a McDonald's with drive-thru has operated down the street since the 1960s.

Frank's advice to anyone evaluating development deals: recent completions matter more than historical track records. The game has changed, municipalities have become unreliable partners, and costs are impossible to predict. Sponsor experience in the current environment is everything.

🎙️ Listen to Paul's full episode here.