💰 Landlords could be in line for billions

👋 Happy Sunday, Best Ever readers!

In today’s newsletter, landlords (might) get paid, junk gets banned, skyscrapers are back, wildfire risk spreads, and much more.

🎤 Four operators. Four very different CRE deals. One Pitch Slam Champion. Join us live August 26 to hear the pitches, cast your vote alongside the judges, and help decide who moves on to defend the title next month. Reserve your free seat.

🌟 There’s never been a better time to join the Best Ever Inner Circle. We have just 1 August bonus left (a $6,000 webinar promotion to our audience of 53,000+ CRE investors). Book your intro call to learn more and claim yours.

Let’s CRE!

🗞️ NO-FLUFF NEWS
CRE HEADLINES

🗑️ Junk Ban: Seattle's council has voted 8-0 to eliminate administrative charges, pet rent, and package fees, with upfront total pricing required on any lease signed after July 1, 2027. The City Attorney's Office can recover triple the amount of illegal fees from violators.

📦 Storage Split: Self-storage advertised street rates rose 0.7% MoM in June to $16.48 PSF, with 29 of the top 30 metros posting gains. Rates stayed negative YoY in 26 metros, and REIT asking rents have trailed private operators for five straight months.

🏘️ Class Divide: Stabilized Class A rents have climbed 1.9% YoY while Class C rents have fallen 2%, according to RealPage. Class B is flat overall, masking wide gaps between individual assets, with Austin, DFW, Orlando, and Salt Lake City best positioned on job growth and slowing pipelines.

🏗️ Sky High: Office skyscrapers are breaking ground again as blue-chip tenants prelease or self-develop to secure premier space, with American Express, Citadel, and Santander among those backing towers over 1.5M SF. Top-tier rents have hit $115 PSF in Chicago and a projected $350 in New York.

👑 Volume Kings: Northern NJ led national H1 apartment sales with a record $4.3 billion, though a single REIT privatization accounted for 70% of that volume. Dallas, Chicago, LA, and Manhattan rounded out the top five, while Seattle volume dropped 51% to $1.1 billion.

🏆 TOP STORY
EVICTION BAN COULD PAY LANDLORDS BILLIONS

The eviction moratorium is about to pay landlords. The Justice Department is negotiating the number, and owners in states that ran their own moratoriums may be able to collect too.

In 2021, landlords sued the federal government over the CDC's order. In August 2024, a federal appeals court ruled they had a legitimate claim that the moratorium was a physical taking under the Fifth Amendment, because it took away their right to remove tenants who stopped paying. The government tried to get that decision reheard, failed in June 2025, and never appealed to the Supreme Court.

Nobody has been paid yet. Plaintiffs' counsel is working from a rough $1 billion assumption across about 1,800 owners, and every claimant has to hand over rent rolls and internal records of unpaid rent to prove their share. The group has since grown past 2,000. Both sides are still arguing over how long the moratorium really lasted, since courts stayed backed up for months after it ended in August 2021. New claimants have until early September to join.

Owners did get help at the time. Federal rental assistance moved close to $50 billion through state programs, which both landlords and tenants could apply for. The lawsuit argues it came too slowly to cover the gap.

For operators who never filed, the bigger opportunity is at the state level.

• The Clocks Started Later: California's protections held through June 30, 2022 for tenants with pending rental-assistance applications, and Los Angeles County, the City of Los Angeles, Oakland, Alameda County, San Francisco, and San Diego ran local orders past that. New York went to January 2022. Washington, Oregon, and Massachusetts paused evictions while applications processed. Every state sets its own filing deadline, counted from its own order.

• What You Need to File: Rent rolls and internal records of unpaid rent, the same documents claimants are submitting federally. Owners who purged files at the five-year mark are in worse shape. Pulling the records costs nothing.

• Where This Stops Working: The federal ruling doesn't bind state courts. A claim against a state gets argued under that state's own law, and only an eminent domain attorney there can tell you the odds.

Washington, D.C. shows what a long local order does to an owner. The city lifted its eviction freeze in October 2021 and never cleared the backlog. What took three to five months before 2020 now takes 12 to 16. Unpaid rent across the city has climbed to $147 million from $11 million in 2020, and arrears average $2,207 per unit, the highest in the country. Five of the largest owners in the city carry more than $30 million between them.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The federal government is negotiating instead of fighting, which tells operators the claim holds up. That window closes in September for anyone not already in. The state and local exposure is bigger, almost nobody has tested it, and those deadlines run on separate clocks that started a year or two later. Any operator who held units through a state or city moratorium should pull the records now and ask a local attorney one question about the filing deadline.

🎤 BEST EVER PITCH SLAM
MEET THIS MONTH’S PITCH SLAM CONTENDERS

Four operators. Four very different CRE opportunities. On August 26 at 12 PM ET, they’ll take the Pitch Slam stage to make their case to seven fund managers and RIAs looking to place $10M in capital. And to you, the eighth judge.

Jamie Thiel & Jeni Burke | EmpowHer House
🏭 $1.2M Flex Industrial Acquisition | Cincinnati, OH
Two industrial properties anchored by a national credit tenant, with $400K in capital sought and a value-add vacancy opportunity.

Chris Lenoir | Haverkamp Group
🏘️ 165-Unit 55+ Luxury Living Development | Omaha, NE
A $14.1M raise for the third community in Haverkamp’s Attivo Trail active-adult living strategy.

Odelia Zalayet | Goose Equity
🏢 Multifamily Acquisition | College Station, TX
A $13.8M, 98%-occupied multifamily acquisition with $5M left to raise and 90 days to get it closed.

Tim Woodbridge, Matthias Gruenwald & Vinny Carias | WCG Investments
🏕️ 198-Site RV Park | Outer Banks, NC
A $14.2M acquisition of a supply-constrained RV community with below-market rents and a 200-person waitlist.

Which deal would you pursue?

Join us live, cast your vote, and help crown this month’s Pitch Slam Champion.

💰 CRE TRENDS
WILDFIRE RISK NOW SPANS $1.4 TRILLION IN PROPERTY

More than 6.4 million acres have burned across the U.S. so far in 2026, running 154% of the 10-year average, with 95 uncontained large fires and the country at Preparedness Level 5, the highest on the scale.

Cotality's 2026 assessment counts more than 2.5 million properties at moderate or higher wildfire risk across the 10 most exposed states — California, Colorado, Texas, Oregon, Arizona, Idaho, New Mexico, Montana, Washington, and Utah — carrying $1.4 trillion in reconstruction cost value. Last year the figure was $1.3 trillion spread across 13 states.

• California Holds the Bulk: The state accounts for 1.28 million at-risk properties and $850 billion in reconstruction exposure, along with six of the 10 most exposed cities. Los Angeles carries 250,000 properties on its own.

• The Exposure Runs Inland: Just under half of at-risk properties across the top 10 states sit outside California. Colorado and Texas hold 560,000 between them, at $252 billion in reconstruction costs. Austin leads all non-California cities at $49 billion, followed by San Antonio, Denver, and Spokane.

• What Changed in the Score: Cotality now models conflagration, where fire crosses from wildland into a neighborhood and spreads house to house. Structure density, building materials, wind patterns, and ember exposure now sit alongside terrain and vegetation in the calculation.

Mitigation still moves the number more than anything else. California communities ranked highest for property-level mitigation carry expected loss rates 78% below the statewide average. Cotality is pitching the expanded data to carriers as a way to underwrite individual properties instead of broad areas, which means a building's own score matters more than its ZIP code did a year ago. Owners in the top 10 states can expect that score to have moved without the building changing.

🌟 BEST EVER INNER CIRCLE
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This is a $6,000 sponsorship, included free with your membership.

And you'll be joining a growth system built to help experienced CRE operators raise more capital, find better deals, scale operations, and build the relationships that move their business forward.

Only 1 August bonus left!

🎙️ THE BEST EVER CRE SHOW
HOW TO CUT A 40% RAISE DOWN TO 25%

Banks are lending again. That's good news. The bad news is that sponsors can't raise enough to cover the gap.

This week on the Best Ever CRE Show, Seth Weissman of Urban Standard Capital joined Richard McGirr to work through the two structures that close it, and what each one actually costs.

The math is unforgiving. A senior lender holding at 60% to 65% leaves a sponsor raising 35% to 40% in common equity, and at the sub-institutional end, that money has gotten hard to find. Roughly 98% of Urban Standard's book is senior-first loans, but the firm writes preferred equity and mezzanine debt as well, sometimes behind its own paper.

• The Stretch Senior: Urban Standard will write 70% to 80% of cost, occasionally 80%. Stack a pref at low-to-mid teens on a senior at six and change and the blended cost lands around 8%, which a stretch senior can often match with one lender instead of two and a common raise that drops to 20% to 25%.

• Why Banks Resist Pref: Senior lenders frequently refuse a pref provider behind them, want that provider on the guarantees, or stall over intercreditor terms like standstill rights and the option to buy the senior loan at par. Most banks decline the complexity and hold at their number.

• The Test Before Levering Up: A Huntsville deal Urban Standard financed took a couple hundred unrenovated units from $600 to a $900 market rent on kitchens and baths alone. No entitlements, no rent trending, nothing that required outside events to cooperate.

That last filter is where Seth draws the line on leverage. He left development in 2016, after New York deals started pricing at four caps that underwrote as threes and the margin for error disappeared. Run the math forward, and a four-cap market repricing to a six-cap erases half the value, with moderate leverage taking the equity with it. Higher proceeds work when the business plan is controllable. They compound the damage when it isn't.

👉 Listen to Seth’s full episode here.