📋 The tenant union threat, explained

👋 Hello, Best Ever readers! Today is National Dance Like a Chicken Day — really. Do with this information what you will.

In today’s newsletter, tenants unionize, HUD loosens up, borrowers balk, alternative lending surges, and much more.

Today’s edition is presented by Tribevest. The Fund of Funds training last week with Seth Bradley was one for the books, and if you missed it, the replay is now live. Watch how Dr. Reach went from newbie capital raiser to $33M raised and on track for $3.3M in earnings in under 2 years...not by finding better deals, but by changing the vehicle. Watch the replay.

📩 Free Training | Missed Opportunities in Real Estate Tax Strategy | Thursday, May 21 at 1 pm ET. Where smart investors leave money on the table — and how to stop. Save your seat.

Let’s CRE!

🗞️ NO-FLUFF NEWS
CRE HEADLINES

⚖️ Appraiser Reckoning: A defamation suit filed against the Appraisal Institute alleges inflated membership rolls, insider contracts, and nearly $2.4 million in losses in 2024 — part of a pattern of alleged mismanagement dating back more than a decade.

🏗️ HUD Loosens: HUD has removed several FHA multifamily environmental review requirements tied to railroads, pipelines, and power lines, aiming to cut underwriting delays and improve the competitiveness of FHA apartment financing.

🏠 BTR Saga: After months of silence, President Trump has urged the House to pass the stalled 21st Century Road to Housing Act, which includes a seven-year forced-sale provision that has brought BTR financing to a near standstill.

🏦 Borrowers Balk: CRE loan demand has softened across construction and multifamily categories, according to the Fed's latest lending survey, as borrowers pull back despite banks maintaining largely unchanged credit standards heading into mid-2026.

🏥 Getting Well: The global wellness real estate market has reached $876 billion and is projected to more than double to $1.8 trillion by 2030, driven by 23.5% average annual growth since 2019, with the U.S. leading at $254 billion.

🏆 TOP STORY
TENANT UNIONS ARE COMING FOR MORE THAN JUST NYC

New York City's housing politics have never translated cleanly to the rest of the country. But what's taking shape there right now — a city government actively organizing tenants against landlords, with a paper trail of legal commitments and forced capital spending to show for it — is less a local story than an early signal of where urban multifamily is heading.

The clearest case study is the Pinnacle Group bankruptcy. After Pinnacle's 5,200-unit NYC portfolio sold to Summit Properties USA for $451.3M in January, the Union of Pinnacle Tenants had already established a presence in at least 80% of the 93 buildings Summit acquired. The result: $30 million in committed rehabilitation spending over five years, plus a $3 million revolving credit line from Summit's lender — capital allocation driven by organized tenant pressure, with city officials in the room.

What makes this different from prior tenant movements is government participation. In NYC, that looks like:

• Mayoral Backing: Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made tenant organizing a pillar of his administration, hosting "Rental Ripoff" hearings that give tenants a direct line to senior officials and building-specific enforcement.

• A Seat at the Table: The city's newly revived Office of Tenant Protection now sits in on landlord-tenant negotiations — a direct government presence that previous tenant movements never had.

• A Legal Framework: The Tenant Power Act, currently before the state legislature, would require landlords to negotiate directly with tenant unions — a framework that doesn't yet exist at scale anywhere in the country.

This isn't limited to New York. The organizing infrastructure is already spreading.

• Michigan introduced legislation in May 2025 establishing tenant rights to form unions and hold meetings.

• Washington, D.C., has proposed giving tenant associations budgetary authority equal to 1.5% of annual rents at district-owned properties.

• In Colorado Springs, a tenant union at a 120-unit property saw immediate maintenance response after going public — without ever reaching the bargaining table.

• The Tenant Union Federation launched a national campaign in September 2025 targeting private equity landlord Capital Realty Group, with active unions now in Louisville, Kansas City, and New Haven.

Organizers in six states have described a deliberate shift toward building-level unions that bypass the legislative process entirely, targeting landlords directly, and the investor math is already responding. Ron Cohen, chief sales officer at Besen Partners, told Bisnow that when investors hear "union" or "unionization," they "either run the other way or underwrite those assets way differently, i.e., for considerably lower values."

THE BOTTOM LINE

Tenant unions don't need legal collective bargaining rights to move operator economics. Coordinated complaint filings, rent strikes, and city-backed enforcement pressure are already extracting capital commitments and compressing valuations. What took New York years to build is now being exported intentionally, with a playbook and a national network behind it. Markets that look nothing like New York today may not look that way for long.

🤝 TOGETHER WITH TRIBEVEST
HOW ONE CAPITAL RAISER CHANGED EVERYTHING WITH A FUND OF FUNDS

Dr. Reach already had the investors. He already had the deals. What he was missing was the vehicle...a compliant, professional structure that allowed him get paid compliantly for bringing capital to deals the same way every single time.

After implementing a Fund of Funds through Tribevest's Institute for Structured Capital, he raised over $33 million and is on track to earn $3.3 million in under 2 years.

In just 6 weeks, the Institute for Structure Capital Accelerator (ISCA) will give you a live Fund of Funds, a branded deal page, soft commits tracked and ready to close, and direct relationships with institutional lead sponsors presenting live deals.

The next cohort starts June 1st and is limited to 30 seats.

Watch the replay of our live training here, and click below to learn more about becoming a professional fund manager in just a few weeks.

💰 CRE BY THE NUMBERS
ALT LENDING SURGES, RENTS FALL AGAIN, AND MORE

💰 53% 

Alternative lenders captured 53% of non-agency CRE loan closings in Q1 2026, up from 19% a year earlier, as debt fund origination volume surged 280% YoY, according to CBRE. The shift marks the first time alternative lenders have led non-agency originations, displacing banks as the dominant source.

🏦 33 months

U.S. rents fell for the 33rd consecutive month in April, with the national median asking rent dropping 1.7% YoY to $1,673, according to Realtor.com. New multifamily groundbreakings jumped nearly 20% in Q1, signaling continued downward pressure on rents well into 2027.

🏗️ 55,000 units

Multifamily construction starts fell to roughly 55,000 units in Q1 2026, the lowest quarterly volume since 2011. Only about 579,000 units were underway at quarter's end — a 50% decline from the 2023 peak.

📉 7.71% 

The multifamily CMBS delinquency rate climbed to 7.71% in April, up 56 bps from the prior month, as large loans in NYC and SF went delinquent. Two years ago, the rate sat at 6.57%.

▶️ BEST EVER WEBINARS
DEPRECIATION MISTAKES COSTING INVESTORS THOUSANDS

Most investors think about cost segregation after the deal closes — if they think about it at all. But the timing, structure, and asset type of your acquisition can materially change your after-tax returns, and the window to capture those benefits is often smaller than you think.

🗓️ On May 21 at 1 pm ET, tax incentives experts Lon O'Connor and Ed Vettle walk through anonymized real-world examples across multifamily, office, industrial, and manufacturing properties — showing exactly where investors leave value on the table during underwriting, acquisition, and post-close planning.

You'll learn:

• How cost segregation and depreciation strategy impact cash flow and after-tax returns

• Where investors most commonly miss opportunities during underwriting and acquisition

• How deal timing, asset type, and project structure change the math

• How bonus depreciation changes are reshaping investment strategy today

• A practical framework for evaluating these opportunities across your portfolio

🎙️ THE BEST EVER CRE SHOW
THE CAPITAL GAP CANNABIS REAL ESTATE HAS CREATED

Cannabis companies sit on real assets — licensed industrial facilities, long-term leases, operating businesses — and still can't get a bank loan. Federal law classifies cannabis as a Schedule I controlled substance, which means fewer than 25 of the roughly 4,700 U.S. commercial banks will touch it. The ones that do risk filing suspicious activity reports on every transaction, putting their charters on the line for a handful of deals.

That regulatory wall has created a capital vacuum that private lenders are now moving into, at rates that reflect just how few of them are competing for the business.

This week on the Best Ever CRE Show, Chris Reece joined Ash Patel and Amanda Cruise to break down how disciplined underwriting in a capital-starved market actually works, and why the window to do it at current rates is closing.

• The Underwriting Logic: Cannabis retrofits like irrigation, lighting, HVAC, and security are expensive and nearly worthless to a non-cannabis tenant. Disciplined lenders ignore those improvements entirely, underwriting at the property's conventional industrial value. A building worth $2 million as standard industrial gets financed as a $2 million asset, even if the borrower spent $6 million on buildout. That gap is the downside protection.

• The Competition Landscape: Most private lenders who entered the space overextended on inflated cannabis valuations and washed out. What's left is a thin competitive field, elevated lending rates, and borrowers with almost nowhere else to go. Reece compares it to the early days of business development companies: high demand, scarce capital, and pricing that reflects the imbalance.

• The Window: Rescheduling cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III — which the Trump administration has flagged as a priority — would let operators deduct ordinary business expenses for the first time, improving borrower credit quality across the board. It would also bring more lenders in. Reece puts the current window at five to seven years before competition compresses returns.

When rescheduling happens and banks start entering, the pricing advantage narrows. The opportunity exists precisely because most capital won't go near it, and that won't last forever.

🎙️ Listen to Chris’s full episode here.