YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert Boucai

lines on the record: 63
first: 2025-12-04
most recent: 2025-12-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Being on a hedge fund business, I've become cynical. I wish I were more optimistic and believed in human ingenuity and the ability to persevere and solve problems”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Besides watching my kids grow up, I love women growing up in Boston the last 25 years have been a great experience in winning, but also winning and investing in stocks and real estate. I love to be competitive and win.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Groupthink that we see every day within my industry specifically, and it comes down to folks looking at only a handful of markets, these high population markets where I'm a value investor and that's how we've set up our strategy. If you really take the time to look at it, you see that we want to look at the data and look at solving what's actually going to drive the returns of your investment. And that's rent growth. What we focus on is low supply markets. And we've seen that that has outperformed these high population growth markets that come with supply and lack of barriers to entry.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The two things that I most value was hire the best people you can afford to hire and try to make a decision at the last possible moment to preserve optionality.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've seen the trends in the legacy business, which continues to be an increase in allocation to passive investment. There's still opportunity given where the level of the S&P is and where multiples are that perhaps the market can be broadened out. If the market broadens out beyond the top half dozen or so market cap companies, that creates opportunities for stock picking. That remains to be seen. The AI revolution is hopefully going to create some dispersion in the marketplace.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We would love to continue growing this business. We're providing a unique service to people that need income. We enjoy meeting people, we enjoy going to new markets to find new properties to improve and enhance people's quality of life. We would like to continue to grow ownership of units and make this a great business and try to help all AAs that need help with income and planning for people and to continue to expand what we're doing.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A big wage increase that typically shows up in events over the following 12 to 24 months. That was something that we conveyed to the real estate team and gave us more conviction and projections to 3% NOS. In fact, it's likely to be higher than that. We also learned on the public market side that this was an incredible opportunity because the company was getting a lot of backlog, a lot of business, a lot of contracts because of the spending around the Navy buildup and the competition against the Chinese Navy, for example, which really helped us and it's opened our eyes to what's going on in the real world, in the country. I mean, most of us in our business on the hedge fund side travel to San Francisco and Miami and Los Angeles and Boston. They don't visit the real parts of the country, which James visits all the time in Columbus, Ohio, Charlotte, North Carolina, St. Louis, Missouri, Denver, Colorado. These are the real cities where Americans love.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, we're able to help them on the underwriting side when they're doing rate locks and timing the rate locks. We know what the calendar is for NFP and CPI and James will get on the phone with our trader when they do the rate lock to make sure we got the optimal outcome. So that's one way we help them. On the underwriting side, we recently looked at a deal in Norfolk, Virginia, which is a market that has not had historically strong population growth, but is quite levered to the Navy defense spending in the Coast Guard. We spent some time trying to understand the outlook for the Norfolk Virginia market and did some work around the largest employer, which happens to be a public company. We spoke to some of the cell society analysts on it. We spoke to the company and came to the realization that the real estate market was not aware of, that the company was putting in place a 12% wage increase this past July. As we know from COVID, when you got”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's only heading in one direction at this point. Everyone has to be aware of the risk and it's causing problems both in the rental space and home ownership space. It's one of those things where we tend to underwrite in a manner that includes more of a worst case scenario from an insurance perspective. And by default, we end up not being able to pursue those deals because it just doesn't meet our returns threshold. We don't want to take a loss versus our underwriting on insurance costs increasing down the road. So we underwrite it conservatively. And then effectively it forces us to stay clear of a lot of these deals where it's something that's very top of mind. I'd say insurance is a big risk that we think about a lot.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're very aware of is probably more related to insurance insurance wasn't discussed broadly as an industry until 2021 when we saw the amount of replacement costs increasing and then weather related insurance losses taking up across the country. We've been very aware of that. And although insurance has come down drastically over the past 12 and 24 months we're seeing a lot of renewals where we're decreasing our insurance costs across the country. It is something we're aware of and it does give us a pause when we think about certain areas whether it's close to a flood zone or has cat exposure or Florida, Houston areas like that specifically, the insurance risk caused a lot of pain for people in the portfolio. The cost has come down, but it is still elevated and it's an area where I'm not sure insurance is going to get a whole lot cheaper.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Higher interest rates, I tend to think that if they would have higher interest rates, it would likely come with higher inflation, which we benefit from population growth. If the United States population growth doesn't grow at the rate it has historically, that could be problematic. Replacement cost, if replacement cost goes down, if there are cheaper ways to build, particularly some of the markets that may have more land than others, that could potentially be a risk. We have never seen that. It's always possible some form of technology allows you to build a lot cheaper. The last one would be high unemployment at an inopportune time. For example, unemployment is meaningfully higher than it has been historically. Those are the large risks that I would see playing on. If you have a high unemployment, it likely comes with lower interest rates, means the capitalization rates are lower in the value of the income stream is highest. There are all sorts of offsets to each of the risks that I mentioned.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was an analyst at Blackstone, I was told 90% of my job was formatting, which is a form of communication. We pride ourselves on being transparent, communicative, trying to set an expectation that we can over-deliver on. We have quarterly reports, we have quarterly distributions, we are very clear about how our properties are performing versus what we had underwritten. And we're very responsive. Adam does an amazing job as head of our investor outreach in that department. It's an important way for us to differentiate ourselves versus our peers.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the moment of something we have optionality of doing, every deal is set up as an SPV. So we maintain the ability to do that down the road. It's an important consideration in the current construct each investor will have the option at the discretion to decide. If we go into a fund construct, we think we're able to maintain that optionality. We're still working through that. As I often tell the guides, Warren Buffett made 99% of his money after the age of 50. I turned 50 a few months ago. The important aspect of that for Warren Buffett was the fact that he probably paid minimal taxes. That's one of the reasons why real estate is so attractive is the tax advantages creates. But most of the funds that are in the real estate business do not allow you to have those benefits because they're typically using floating rate debt. They typically have a short-term hold. Sponsors are typically incentivized by the promote. We have tried to set it up such”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To access such as the IA channel, which would benefit hugely from what we were doing, this is an extremely favorable proposition for taxable investors. It's very much in debate and remains to be seen.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An interesting question for starting a business and for where we are, the deal by deal makes more sense. It allows flexibility for the investors. It allows optionality for tax enhancements. We don't take, for example, bonus depreciation, which is very favorable for a lot of the investors in New York. It's not favorable for them to take bonus depreciation. What allows us to have the ability to manage a business the best at the moment over time it's a debate whether the deal by deal versus a function makes more sense and it's when we're going through the positives if we were to have a funk because perhaps the rates of return could be enhanced because we could optimize the timing of the cash flows we might be able to take advantage of better pricing because we have purely discretionary money that could be helpful you could perhaps get better expense management with insurance as an example it's one we are debating it also allows us to tap other markets that we may not at the moment be able”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is not a huge town. That's how it developed into a business. The investor base we have speaks to the specialness of what we're doing. The investors we have work at a lot of these firms that have these products are the distribution platforms. We have investment bankers. We have private equity professionals, credit professionals, CEOs, family officers that have the ability to invest in any of these firms. They're choosing to invest with us for a reason because we have created that seat on the Gulf Stream that they want. They'd rather fly on a Gulf Stream than a triple seven and an A380. I don't blame them.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We slowly started talking to people when Adam joined in October of 23, we started talking to more people and realized that there was a need out there. We came to the conclusion that as investors in the public market, we have great respect for the big alternative firm, but 80% of the investors don't pay taxes. 20% do. That's the growing part of their business because they're slowly trying to expand to the private wealth market. Their products are not optimized for taxpaying individuals the way others are. The analogy I like to give is they're selling seats on a 777 or an Airbus 350. We're selling seats on a Gulf Stream. Our market is not as big as their market, but it is much more customized. We cannot deploy $5 billion of capital a year. We could deploy $100, $200 million type of capital a year. That's what we're capable of. With the discipline, with the Bybath, with the limitations that we have and the returns that we're trying to achieve, especially on the couch on cash fund.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're not paying tax on that, and that quotes that are above inflation because you're going to get inflation invents with leverage, maybe it's 5%. And then the other $5 million, you have stocks and bonds and whatever investing you want to do on the side. So you would have $400,000 of tax deferred income that you're getting. And then you have your other $5 million that you've invested in other things. So does that solve part of your problem for retirement that you're trying to get some income stream that you can then use to plan your vacation and your monthly expenses the feedback to that was you're totally right and you need to do that that has been the reception that we got i understand so this is what i need to do if you want to do that you can't just show up at 65 and do that it takes years of planning and if you want to do it in multifamily you can't be all in one deal you need geographic diversity you need time diversity depending on the maturity date of it that we have that's how it became a business”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back to the part where I met James in January of 2022, once we had that meeting and we agreed on it, I mentioned to a bunch of my friends over the following couple of months, I was thinking of doing this and here's why and here's what made sense to me. A lot of him said to me, I would do that too. That really makes a lot of sense. That's when it came to me that maybe this is a business. I was really doing this for myself, but ultimately I realized that this was a need that needed to be provided to other people. What I often say to people who work in our industry and financial services is what do you think you need to retire? And how do you think about retirement? And I use an example. If you think you need $10 million to retire at the age of 65, let's fast forward to 65. So you're going to wake up one day and you're going to start trading in your pajamas and trying to make a living at 65 from that. I said to them, assume you had $5 million in real estate paying 8%.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have about 50 to 70 percent of the equity already raised at the time that we actually go hard on the transactions. That gives a lot of certainty to both the seller and us internally. A lot of times we're buying two, maybe three deals at a time.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of our transactions were doing fairly quick due diligence. We know exactly what we're looking for. We're very thorough, and we can do it in about three weeks. I would say that's not much quicker than what's in the market. But once we complete that due diligence, we're putting up an outsized deposit. Typically, somewhere in the range from a million to two million dollars. So it's larger than most of our peers. We have a number of programmatic investors that have met us over the past two to five years, sometimes longer, who underwrite us as managers. They understand our philosophy and what we're looking to buy. We have a fairly simple document that outlines exactly what we're buying. If it meets these thresholds, it's non-binding, but we present it to them and they've underwritten us as managers. They don't want to make the decision of, do I want to buy North Carolina or do I want to buy Ohio, depending on what we're looking at? I'm going to sign up for the next five deals, ten deals, whatever the number of deals is, they're programmatic in nature. So we know that when we're buying deals.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partner with other groups, with other equity providers that require some sort of sign off and they need to go and find that equity. For us, we have the capability to buy it internally. Most of the time, what we're doing is we're buying the asset. We're completing due diligence. If it's a deal we want to move forward with, it's exactly what we thought it was. We're going to rate lock. We're going to eliminate the interest rate risk. And we're on the hook to buy it at that point. That's when we present the opportunity to our network to say who would like to invest alongside us. Here's our thesis. Here's our internal investment memo. We put some disclosures on there and we share the opportunity and it's resonated.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at anything from it could be a broker deal, it could be off market direct from another principal. We know exactly what our buy box is. We're upfront about that. We're quick to move past a deal. If the operations are soft or we don't like the asset or the market, or if we can't get it at the right price, it comes down to a disciplined approach. What we've seen is for the groups that we buy from or typically a quick call to them if they're thinking about an asset that they're going to be selling in the future. Do we want an early look at it and an opportunity to buy it off market? And do we want to be a repeat buyer from them? It goes both ways. We'll submit close to 200 LOIs a year for transactions. We look at a high volume, we submit these LOIs. If we get a deal awarded, groups know exactly that we have the balance sheet in the capability to take down the deal and that we're signed off internally on it. We don't require outside approval. A lot of groups that compete with us, it's inefficient because we're looking at deals that are called $30 to $100 million. A lot of our competitors”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Multifamily is far less crowded than it was a couple years ago, given the number of people that have floating rate debt that are over leveraged, that are on the sidelines, that can't raise capital. For well-capitalized buyers, it's a good environment to take advantage of that. While other groups are not certain what they're doing with their portfolio or if they're going to have liquidity events in the future, a lot of times these groups put their foot on the gas and 21 and 22 when assets were incredibly inflated. There's less competition. Groups need to be nimble, though. You need to have deep relationships and a strong track record of closing and being a good buyer and someone that holds up your end of the bargain for these transactions. Your reputation is critical. You need to know exactly what you're doing.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Portant in our business to underpromise and over deliver, you have to delight people, you have to give them a better experience and expect them to not keep them coming back. That's what we try to live up to as a team where we under promise and over deliver that we project lower event cores than we think we can get. And as James mentioned, that we're selling our cap rates where we are today, where we think we're probably going to do better than that.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a perfect world, we would be selling during a compressed period, it makes a lot of sense for us to hold these and to sell inevitably if we're able to get interest rates coming down or if we see that the market compresses and we can sell them during compressed period, that's a benefit of the longer-term fixed rate financing. Ideally, we could put together a handful of deals and get a premium, and that'd be a very good outcome for our investors, for us. We underwrite that we're going to be selling them in an environment similar to today, which is largely a buyer's market. It's not a great time to be selling, but we think that we're going to have an opportunity to sell during ideally a compressed period, either as a portfolio with a handful of the deals or a larger transaction if it makes sense. And there's equity out there that wants to pay a premium for portfolios.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It makes most sense for us to continue to be focused on the Midwest and the Sunbelt. We don't want to eliminate as much risk as possible. We do not touch California. We don't touch New York. These places where you don't know if there's going to be restrictions put in place that are going to impact our ability to manage the assets the way we need to or that are going to increase taxes on the sale. We look for states where we know they're going to be landlord friendly. They're going to enable us to run the business the way we historically have and know we need to in the future. We don't expect to be outside of 10 to 12 states ultimately, but we do look at diversity, makes sense to be across a variety of states.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing things to improve the quality of the tenant's life, adding dog parks, pools, gyms. So all the things that would get positive feedback from the tenants preparing the driveways, it's important for us to provide a good experience for the residents because it pays for itself.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And enable us to charge more for a rent premium versus what's in place versus the comps is a good outcome for us. We'll end up renovating any given community 10 to 20% of the units. We'll increase renewals to create a little bit more vacancy if we don't see that we're getting units back where we can renovate them. We're typically renovating anywhere from four to ten units a month at most of our communities.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of the properties we buy, we typically underwrite somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000 per unit for renovations. We'll do this all at the onset of the investment. So we call all of the capital up front. We have a large contingency fund for anything that can come up given our longer duration hold period. We'll give ourselves sufficient buffer, but we are going to look to renovate the community over the course of four years. We'll look for high ROI items that are going to drive leasing and demand for the community. Think fitness centers, pools, curb appeal from landscaping, signage, anything like that. I would say 70% of the equity allocated for rehab is going to the interiors. Kitchen and bath upgrades, it's flooring. It's things that are going to help us operate it more efficiently over the long haul. We don't want carpet in the units. We want wood plank flooring. We want stone countertops. Anything that's going to help reduce our CapEx spend down the road.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At closing, it was about 150 basis points of positive leverage by the time we had closed the deal. Today we've had 13% Renkrow in the past 16 months on that asset. And we've only renovated 20% of the community. So we know that we have rents that are heading the right direction and we have strong tailwinds for the next 12 to 24 months as we continue to increase the rents, get them closer to market. But we're also offering a product to these renters that's superior to what they had lived in before. Most of our residents are staying at the community and upgrading to the renovated units. That's a perfect outcome for us. We don't have to displace any of the residents. And we've been operating at 96% occupancy since we bought it. That's a good example of a deal that's down the fairway for us where positive leverage at the beginning. We have that eight years of fixed rate financing and we have an opportunity to reposition the asset.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bought a deal in suburban Charlotte, North Carolina. It was June of 2024. We identified the asset was 96.5% occupied. They were achieving eight percent increases on new leases that had moved in. They were getting strong renewal growth as well. The rents were about $1,200 here. So it's 30 minutes outside of Charlotte. It's not downtown Charlotte where you have a lot of supply. There was no supply within 15 miles. And the rents were just too cheap. It was an asset that largely hadn't been renovated. So we could go in, renovate the community. We knew the comps were $400 to $500 above us. So we had a healthy spread where we could improve the asset but still be below them from competing. We were able to buy the deal with eight years of financing in place at about a 4% rate. And we bought it around a six cap. So at 200 basis points of positive leverage. We put a small supplement alone.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rates are down, in which case we're happy with that outcome too, where we might not get quite the Renk growth we expected, but our value on a capitalized basis is going to be better than an underwritten.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That are performing the best because we're solving for rent growth. At the end of the day, we care less about population growth. We want population growth to be positive, but we're solving for rent growth, which is totally different than a lot of people's mentality and investment thesis. They're looking at population and where areas are growing. But if someone is growing, that means there's also supply, there's very few barriers to entry. There's probably land available. We look for the areas in the markets where either it's you can't build because it's too difficult and challenging to build there or the rents don't justify it. So you have a solid runway of rent growth that you can achieve before someone's going to come in and build in the market and ultimately cause pressure on the rents that you're charging. It's looking at specific submarkets where we can see there's no supply within 10 miles. There's not going to be supply until we either get rent growth of 500 plus dollars a month per unit or it becomes much cheaper to build, in which case.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looking at such a high volume of deals, we'll dig into the past five years of operating performance. We think the market's fairly efficient from a renter's perspective. If the rents are too cheap, the renters are going to find it. And there might be repositioning from a physical perspective. It might be upside there. But you can identify a lot of these compressed markets through occupancy and performance historically. What we gravitate towards is the deals where we know over the next 12 to 24 months, even if we don't have to do anything physically to the community, we're heading in the right direction, and then we're going to be able to further improve it. It's finding the deals where we see strong renewal growth, strong income-to-rent ratio with employers in the market, and then really little supply. What's unique about us is that a lot of institutions focus on the highest population growth markets in the country. If you step back and look at the data, you look at it over the past 10 years, 20 years, it's not the Austins, the Dallases, the Tampas of the country.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once you pencil out the math on any one deal you're looking at and it looks good, what are the subtle things beyond what the numbers tell you that lead you to want to buy one asset versus passing on another?”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the environment is in three to four years, we want to look at over a longer duration time where we have a predictable revenue stream that we can improve by renovating interiors, figuring out how to operate more efficiently, drive ancillary revenue streams to drive overall cash flow on the asset, and then be able to exit the asset ideally during a compressed period and not be forced to sell when it's not a seller's market.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit unique in this, we end up underwriting about 100 deals a month. It's the best data that we can get out there. We subscribe to a number of different data providers. The best data we can get is from underwriting deals, looking at rent rolls, seeing where the rents are heading, seeing which markets are compressed right now. We focus primarily in landlord-friendly states. That's the Midwest in select markets within the Sunbelt. Looking at about 100 deals a month, five of them might actually be interesting enough where they meet our narrow box where they have the right in-place performance. We can tell that it's a compressed market and the rents are heading the right direction. And then we can get it at the right price where we can generate the right cash on cash returns. For us, to Robert's point, we looked to have about two-thirds of our return to come from cash flow. That is the best risk adjusted way for us to look at these versus a floating rate buyer that might not care about cash flow and might rely on appreciation at the exit and be relying on.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More likely, you're probably getting something in the low teen because of that, the lessons you have risk to rates, it also lessens your risk to exicap rates on the back end. If rates go up during the hold, if your cap rate ends up being 100 basis points wider, it's probably because it was higher than expected inflation during the hold. If that's the case, you probably had better than expected income growth. You're going to have a higher cash on cash and you project a bit maybe your cap rate is higher. So your IR might be slightly lower, your cash on cash will be slightly higher. For us, I view it as a way of de-risking our transaction.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goes back to the income replacement side. If you are trying to get the task benefit from investing in real estate, you get it from having a long-term hold because it allows you to use the depreciation shield. If you buy a piece of multifamily property, you depreciate most of the assets of a 27 and a half years. If we're trying to buy that income stream, goes back to the example of 6% capital with 5% broad financing, it starts out as a cash and cash slightly over six year one and it grows through the hold. Maybe that's 8% over the hold. If you use floating wave financing, that number may not be as predictable. You're subject to the Fed reason and lowering rates. In the fixed income side, if you hold it for 10 years, you have it more predictable income stream. You're less dependent on rates for your return. Going back to the example, if you have a 10-year hold and you have an 8% cash-in cash over the 10-year hold with a fixed income defining, if the asset doesn't grow in value, you're getting an 8IOR. If the asset grows two to three percent of you, which is...”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, to making distributions was things like office or retail of tenant improvement heavy. Therefore, maybe more episodic in its ability to return capital to investors. What we are trying to create is a synthetic fixed income replacement stream for an investor and a tax advantage one, multifamily lends itself best of all those assets classes to doing that.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You look at the different real estate asset classes, it's the least controversial one. We can debate work from home with regards to office. We can debate on consumption patterns with retail data centers are too big for someone like us to address. Multifamily, there's no debate. People need a place to live. That's the most important thing. Second most important thing because it always has access to the lending market because of buyers we can borrow off of Fanny and Fuddy financing. We always have access to both from the bond markets effectively. Whereas the other asset classes have more risk in accessing the capital markets. This is the easier asset class to own for predictability, for safety, sleep at night, investing money. The other thing I would point out is that multifamily is an asset class that has historically had low capacity lends itself.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it didn't feel like we could get the right cash on cash returns that could justify buying these assets. We met in January, after about a year and a half to Robert's point of getting to that 6% cash on cash, finally saw these values drop about 30% from peak. And then we were able to start buying below replacement costs. I felt that there was very limited downside from that point. There was enough people that were on the sidelines. There's enough groups that had taken on floating rate debt. They weren't buying. They had legacy portfolio issues. We knew that there was going to be some sort of correction from when we met. We just weren't sure when it was going to happen. After about a year and a half of a lot of conversations, okay, this is an attractive entry point. We're going to have this business for 30, 40 years. We're believers in multifamily, but this is an outsized period of time for us to take advantage of the opportunity. That's when we launched.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I met Robert in January of 2022, multifamily, the acquisition volume had doubled since 2019. It was just an incredibly compressed market where you had tight cap rates, an incredible volume of deal selling. But the playbook had, to Robert's point, switched for a lot of groups where they began doing three to four year hold periods. Everyone was utilizing floating rate debt. You had all the non-traded REITs, which were raising a tremendous amount of capital. So you had these non-traded REITs that were actually buying about $20 billion worth of multifamily in 2021, about 10% of all transactions in the multifamily space were being traded to these non-traded reeds. You had these cap rates that had been compressed. There was a ton of capital chasing these deals, but there was rent growth there. But for someone who only employs fixed rate financing, it was not an attractive time to be deploying. The values didn't make sense where these things were trading on a per unit basis. There was no discount to replacement cost. Felt really risky.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I met Robert, we had a cycle that was ending. I saw the opportunity that sounded amazing. At the same time, Jerry had evolved into more of a family business with the founder being close to 70 years old and his children coming into the business. It didn't make sense for someone who had an entrepreneurial aspect that they were looking for and looking to start their own business. Robert was a great partner and view the world through a similar lens. All the aspects that he likes about real estate, whether it's the tax efficiency, the distributions. It also aligns perfectly with my investment strategy, which is de-risk assets when you can own them.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the time. Now wife had also been born, raised, went to school within about 25 miles, and we thought it would be an exciting opportunity to go and live somewhere else. So we ended up in. Los Angeles, I end up spending 12 years at JRK. It was a great experience. Came in as an analyst and ultimately ran the investment vision as the president for the last five years while I was there.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grew up in Massachusetts similar to Robert coming out of college. I was graduating in 2008. First job out of school was pension consulting. I did that for about a year and a half before getting into investment banking. I realized pretty quickly that I wasn't particularly passionate about investment banking. I'd been reading a lot of real estate books at the time in something that clicked with me and was interesting to me was real estate. So I joined a company called Boston Capitals. At the time, they owned departments in the country. It was a large affordable component of that company where they owned about 200,000 units across the country. I was in a smaller division within there buying market rate communities. That was my first steps into multifamily. I loved everything about it. I love traveling the country. I love finding it new opportunities, figuring out ways to operate more efficiently and love the transaction aspect of it. After about two years there, I kept on coming across a firm called JRK Property Holdings. They were expanding rapidly and they were in Los Angeles.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're having calls monthly. We have met Adam Donahue who decided to join us and help us with organizational matters and has been a real asset to the group. We decided to start in October of 23 because in August of 23, James came to me and said, you know what, we can get 6% cash on cash on deals today. I said, okay, that's attractive. Finally, that makes sense. And remember, six to a California New York taxpayer act at the 12 by 13% bond. That's pretty good. So we started in October 23. Since that time, we've acquired eight assets, about 2,100 units. We've made a lot of progress since then, but it was a long time coming.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A cost than a cost to buy the asset. So if it costs 5% to borrow against an asset and you pay 6% cap rate, you've got 100 basis points of positive leverage. You're making 6% on your own level capital. You're making 100 basis points of spot on your leveled capital. Hopefully you can increase your 6% cap rate to 8% over the hold. And you're getting even more spit over the hold. That creates a very attractive income stream and return stream for the investor. If you get an income stream, let's say over a hold of 8%, that means that if the asset does not appreciate over, say, a 10-year hold period that you're getting an 8% IOR. The probability in my mind of an asset not growing in value of a 10 years is low. It can happen, but it's low. And if that's your left tail and your income distribution, that seems to me to be a pretty good risk award. That's how we came across and that's how we decided to work together. Fast forward to August of 2020.”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of these funds have primarily tax free investors, are you servicing and damage foundations, sovereign wealth funds that don't care about taxes? And that's great. But we care about taxes. If you care about taxes, the advantage of investing in real estate is that you're getting this tax-sheltered income stream. The only way to benefit from that is if you hold it for a long-term hold and you can only finance it with fixed-rate debt if you're going to value that. So that's what we did. James and I met in January of 2022. We agreed that this would make sense to do, but unfortunately at that time, the math didn't make sense. Cap rates were below borrowing rates. There would be negative leverage, not positive leverage. One of the cardinal rules of real estate investing that we have at New Book is we want positive leverage to happen from day one. That's a great form of self-discipline because by definition, you're financing out of a”
2025-12-04 · Capital Allocators · Robert Boucai & James Broyer – Tax-Efficient Multifamily Real Estate at Newbrook (EP.475) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source