release edition [086] read time [6 minutes] Welcome to The Multifamily Download, a weekly newsletter where I provide institutional insights to help you build an exceptional Multifamily career. Forwarded this email? Subscribe here. Today at a Glance:
First, a quick note before we jump in: MultiScreen is launching tomorrow! In short, MultiScreen takes a broker's OM, T12, and/or rent roll and generates an institutional quality underwrite in minutes. Detailed underwriting, multi-scenario comparisons, return sensitivities, debt comparisons, a Monte Carlo simulation, and a Goal Seek to calculate the price you can pay, plus a dozen one-click deliverables for internal IC and LP investors. Tomorrow' I'll unpack more details about what MultiScreen does, why it exists, and how it helps. Founding Member access opens tomorrow! Click here to join the waitlist. Labor DayOn this Labor Day holiday in 2026, I thought it would be fitting to frame a few of my current thoughts on the value of work, the future of labor, and how these forces may shape the Multifamily industry. To be clear, the writing that follows is largely based on my observations and opinions, rather than staunch academia and well research white papers. Somebody somewhere has probably done that already. My approach is going to be far more open ended and exploratory, with the hope that you contemplate similar topics and questions to form your own opinions. As I've written many times in the past, my goal in writing The Multifamily Download each week is to inspire you to filter data thoughtfully and form your own distinct opinion about said data. I continue to make the conscious choice not to write from a "You must" or "I know" perspective, because I firmly believe that such an approach perpetuates group-think. As a lifelong learner, I never want to eliminate the quick yet critical moment between when new information comes into our brains and when we make a determination about what we think about the new information. If nothing else, I hope this newsletter helps strengthen your ability to think critically with an open mind to then form your own convictions around any set of topics. With that being said, let's jump into it. This past Friday's August jobs report came in ~3x hotter than most expectations, showing a +162K non-farm payroll jobs print. And, the former weak July print of -23K was revised upwards by 43K jobs to now reflect +21K. (CNBC) What's going on in the labor market? I can't pretend to know the perfect answer to this challenging question, especially given how volatile both the new job and revision prints have been in recent memory. But I have to imagine that several powerful forces are colliding with each other right now in the labor force, and it's causing distortion in the data. Immigration policy, reshoring of advanced manufacturing and automaker jobs, Government jobs oscillating, healthcare jobs steadily increasing, finance jobs struggling, and a falling participation rate have all created a noisy employment landscape that makes forecasting the future challenging. Just ask Kevin Warsh and the FOMC. But one trend is obvious to many, and perhaps troubling to some: The impact of AI. The "ChatGPT" moment was less than four years ago, and since then, several frontier labs have come onto the scene, pushing the advancement of AI faster and farther than many may have expected to this point. Anthropic's Claude team has shipped countless features YTD, and OpenAI just recently launched Astra, which Jensen Huang of Nvidia is dubbing as the arrival of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).
Will AI take everyone's jobs and force UBI upon an entire generation? Never say never, but I doubt it. The future of work is more likely going to be an efficiency and optimization game. Here's what I mean. Efficiency gain is simply generating more outputs given a fixed or reduced amount of inputs. As an example, I built the MultiScreen platform (p.s. have you joined the waitlist yet? If not, you can join here) as a means of gaining efficiencies in our industry: analyzing more deals, submitting more LOIs, and communicating more data faster to more potential investors to ultimately create the one outcome that truly matters: acquiring more properties at reasonable prices. Optimization is doing more of the things that are most efficient (and enjoyable, I would argue) to compound the benefits of efficiency. Together, efficiency and optimization have the power to create a virtuous upward loop of outputs that are both increasingly valuable and enjoyable when architected properly. Like it or not, social media in 2026 is a great example of this, as I view this as the new 2.0 era of social media. The biggest accounts with the most horsepower (i.e. dollars to spend on paid media and their content teams) are accelerating the pace at which they produce and distribute content across social media platforms. At it's core, this all-out attack to accelerate content distribution is both the display of efficiency and optimization at scale for these business owners (formerly known as "creators" in the social media 1.0 era). In Multifamily, I envision a future where operating businesses may be run by fewer people, and each person on the team is a skilled generalist instead of today's niched specialists. The analyst that's stuck in spreadsheets all day won't exist, in the same way that the head of capital formation won't only spend their days golfing with future capital sources. Specialization will always have a place in business, but when it comes to building and scaling a Multifamily operating company, I would not be surprised if the focus shifts from simply building a team of siloed skillsets to maximizing revenue per employee. Furthermore, social media 2.0 is requiring both people and companies to produce content at scale. Creator-led companies have a unique and distinct advantage over silent CEO companies, and this gap is likely going to continue to widen in the age of AI. Yes, this may sound extreme today, but I can imagine a future in which the CEO of a Multifamily operating company is making key strategic decisions and building strong relationships across multiple verticals of the business simultaneously while producing organic social media content online to create a flywheel that eventually becomes unstoppable from a deal flow, capital formation, and business momentum perspective. Operating in this way would be both efficient and optimized, because this CEO would have full context across the business and therefore preserve the ability to make extremely fast, high conviction decisions that other siloed or disjointed firms simply could not. Good stewards and fiduciaries of capital owe it to their investors to maximize the surface area of the business that they touch and impact on a regular basis. The days of executives hiding in siloed verticals of operating companies are numbered, in my opinion. The paradoxical combination of speed and conviction have always been necessary elements of success in the Real Estate business, and I expect the importance of that trend to continue to increase. It's obvious that the future of work will look very different from work of the past. The only guarantee in the future is change, which means that developing the ability to be flexible and adaptable is going to be an increasingly valuable skill as time goes on. There's more to add to this, but I'll stop here for now. Today's newsletter was more philosophical than usual, so I'd be curious to hear your take, too. What do you think the future of work looks like in the broader economy and/or in the Multifamily industry? Weekly ListenThis week's listen is a Walker Webcast episode titled "The New Market Playbook", where Willy Walker sits down with Liz Ann Sonders, Charles Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist. Liz and Willy dig into why the low-volatility, falling-rate "Great Moderation" is over, and what a more temperamental, higher-for-longer regime means for how you position capital. There's a strong segment on housing too, from record-low buyer participation to the demographic case for Multifamily over single-family, plus a clear-eyed read on the AI investment cycle beyond the Mag 7. You can listen to the full episode here. Wrap UpThat's it for today. I hope you found this edition of The Multifamily Download insightful. Consider sharing this link to The Multifamily Download with a friend or colleague. Your feedback is appreciated, so feel free to reply anytime. Thanks for reading. See you next week! Forwarded this email? Sign up here. Join me on LinkedIn | Twitter | Website |
The Multifamily Download · September 7, 2026
Labor Day Special: The Future of Work
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