Today’s guest is Jason Fudin.
Jason Fudin is the CEO and Co-Founder of Placemakr, a mixed-use multifamily operator.
Show summary:
In this podcast episode, Jason Fudin, CEO and co-founder of PlaceMaker, discusses their unique business model that blends different asset classes to create value in real estate. They offer a hospitality living or flex living model, similar to private student housing, and a pop-up hotel model where they partner with developers to run a subsection of new apartment buildings as furnished units during the lease-up period. Jason explains their transition from pop-ups to permanently flexible buildings and the challenges they faced along the way. He also shares his belief that blending real estate and higher utilization will become the norm, increasing the value of real estate.
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Introl [00:00:00]
Jason Fudin's Background and Journey in Real Estate [00:01:12]
Spinning PlaceMaker Out and the Opportunity for Growth [00:03:30]
The Flex Living Model [00:09:37]
The Pop Up Hotel Model [00:10:46]
Building a Blended Asset Class Company [00:11:46]
The blending of real estate and higher utilization [00:18:44]
The transformative impact of the company's model on real estate [00:19:36]
Attracting good people to the team [00:20:23]
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Connect with Jason:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-fudin-16613ba/
Web: https://www.placemakr.com/
Connect with Sam:
I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HowtoscaleCRE/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samwilsonhowtoscalecre/
Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com
SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE A RATING. Listen to How To Scale Commercial Real Estate Investing with Sam Wilson
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Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4m0NWYzSvznEIjRBFtCgEL?si=e10d8e039b99475f
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Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below:
Jason Fudin (00:00:00) - Let's say we're going to go build that 300 unit apartment building, brand new. Well, when you deliver it, the whole thing is empty, right? You got 300 empty, brand new apartment. What we do for partners that build new buildings is we come in and say, Hey, give us 100 units the day you open and we'll run a subsection of your building as an apartment hotel as you lease up. So if you're leasing 20 units a month, it'll take you 15 months to lease up an apartment building. For 12 of those 15 months, we'll run 100 or so units furnished where people can stay. And so we monetize that vacancy during lease up in a temporary way so that if the lease up takes a little bit longer, the developers make additional cash flow and if it goes faster, they make a little less. But it's an insurance policy that's paying them. And then for residents, they get, you know, an on site hotel, they get hospitality services for free. So we blend the asset classes.
Jason Fudin (00:00:49) - We're in the business of making real estate more valuable by blending the asset classes.
Sam Wilson (00:00:52) - Welcome to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate show. Whether you are an active or passive investor, we'll teach you how to scale your real estate investing business into something big. Jason Fudan is the CEO and co-founder of Place Maker, a mixed use multifamily operator. Jason, welcome to the show.
Jason Fudin (00:01:12) - Thanks for having me, Sam.
Sam Wilson (00:01:13) - Absolutely. The pleasure is mine. Jason There are three questions I ask every guest who comes on the show in 90s or less. Where did you start? Where are you now and how did you get there?
Jason Fudin (00:01:22) - I started growing it up up in upstate New York. Uh, I went to college in Canada as an engineer, decided I wanted to be in real estate and not an engineer because real estate blends the community analytical challenges and money. And so found my way into real estate development. Started as a secretary. I worked my way up to running a couple of billion dollars in development and then eventually started my own company.
Jason Fudin (00:01:46) - And I'm building something for myself and my team.
Sam Wilson (00:01:48) - That is crazy. So the you said it so fast, I missed it. You started as a 90s.
Jason Fudin (00:01:56) - You kept me quick, you know?
Sam Wilson (00:01:58) - No, no, that was great, man. I love it. I love it. Sometimes you're like, you asked for 90s and it's like 900 seconds. You're like, Wait, that was 90, not 900. So no, you did good. I appreciate that. But the you started as a secretary and then you started running a couple billion dollars. You worked with running a $2 billion real estate development company.
Jason Fudin (00:02:15) - A pipeline. So I worked for a senior vice president at Vornado Realty. And at the time, the Vornado office was focused a lot of focus on office and I worked on the residential side, so there wasn't as much focus there. And I got this awesome boss who said he showed up was like, I'm running all these projects, how do you want me to hand them off? And he goes, Look, you seem like a brilliant kid that's going to work your ___ off.
Jason Fudin (00:02:39) - Like, let me know if you're drowning. So I just I worked an ungodly amount, learn the industry from some amazing colleagues. And when I left that role, yeah, I was responsible for about 2 billion of development between master plans, individual ground up developments. Um, and then then went over to a regional developer and ended up working with my now co-founder and we bought land and capitalized deals and did regulatory, you know, buildings, condos, apartments, retail, you name it, and then just continue to work my way up till eventually went back to that big company. He was an executive there, ran their innovation division, which was novel seven, eight years ago for a big public REIT and then built what is now place maker within the organization and spun it out. And we're about six years old now.
Sam Wilson (00:03:30) - Wow, that's really cool. When you decided to spin Place Maker out of that organization, what was the opportunity you saw in going off and doing your own thing that maybe wasn't there when that company was inside of the other business?
Jason Fudin (00:03:43) - So I always expected to go build my own company.
Jason Fudin (00:03:45) - And the reason I chose real estate development is it was $1 trillion asset class and I figured there had to be a niche space where smart person could go build something that they were passionate. And so I kind of bided my time. You know, I built a lot of real estate for other people, made them a lot of money. And then when I saw the opportunity to make real estate more valuable, real estate is just a set of cash flows. People become really like emotional about it, but really it's a set of cash flows. And so what became really obvious to me is if you could increase those cash flows in a predictable, nonvolatile way, you'd make real estate more valuable and saw the opportunity to do that. And I started doing that. And a big company, that company is a REIT, so they're precluded from having a hospitality operation in house and so they were unable to own the business I was building. So spun it out. Uh, asked my now co-founder to join me, raised a few million dollars of capital and and off we went.
Sam Wilson (00:04:38) - Got it. So you guys spun that out and now we talked about this before we started recording and I'd love to hear kind of what and again, I'm talking out of my league here quite a bit, so I'm going to have to rely.
Jason Fudin (00:04:49) - I doubt that, but I appreciate it.
Sam Wilson (00:04:51) - No, no, you're you're not too dumb it down for for somebody like me to understand. But you guys and I think the words that you use, you are you said we are a tech enabled operator, which means you guys are a venture. Lincoln said venture capital backed, tech enabled operator. Is that the way the way you said that?
Jason Fudin (00:05:09) - Yeah, I said it all jargony, but that's true. I'll dumb it down for you. So basically, a bunch of folks that invest in high growth operating companies have invested north of $70 million in our operating company under the premise that it will become a large public company over time. And so there's two major innovations in our operating business. One is blending multiple real estate asset classes to create higher yield, more viable real estate, the commingling of real estate.
Jason Fudin (00:05:42) - The second innovation is operating that co-mingled real estate in a way that depends largely on software and other technology tools in order to maintain lower expense ratios. And so off a more cash flow, more profit on the property base. And so we are those two things. As an operating company, we're pioneers in the blending of asset class classes and were the forefront of using technology to operate those assets efficiently.
Sam Wilson (00:06:08) - Can you give me a case, a case study on that?
Jason Fudin (00:06:11) - Yeah, sure. So we and we also buy buildings, so I'll put it all in one. There's a building we bought in Nashville, I think you're in Tennessee, right?
Sam Wilson (00:06:19) - Am Yes.
Jason Fudin (00:06:20) - We bought a building that in. Asheville and the sober neighborhood just off Broadway, its 300 or so units. The cost us about $140 million, $150 million. And so we acquired that with an outside investor. We we bought that asset with the with the plan of blending hospitality and multifamily. So that 313 unit asset has about 200 furnished units today, just over 100 unfurnished units, a single onsite operating team that's probably about a third the size that you'd see at a hotel, the same at the same size.
Jason Fudin (00:06:51) - And something like 80% of our arrivals are contact list. And so a lot of that like concierge check and stuff that needs to happen at a traditional hotel doesn't happen for us. All the locks are automated in our backend system. The same if you booked with us the day before, you'd get an automated code to get into your room, you can turn your phone into your key. And so that entire experience happens with a lot less kind of hand-holding. Think about like ordering an Uber today versus calling up a cab ten years ago. So we've automated a lot of that. In addition, we've blended a global workforce with an onsite team, so a lot of things that traditionally would be handled on site at, you know, all hours of the night or whatever else we handle out of, we call it off site supports team in other states, at other properties or in other countries. And that allows us to continue to maintain a pretty low cost of goods sold on the expense side. So that particular asset runs just shy of a 50% margin.
Jason Fudin (00:07:47) - Um, and an average hotel runs at a 25% margin and service maybe at 30. So we're, we're doing almost twice as good as pure play hospitality, um, because of technology.
Sam Wilson (00:08:01) - Now in that building was a it is a hotel or it is a yeah this.
Jason Fudin (00:08:09) - That's like saying like that's like saying on your phone is that the storefront that you went to or it's not that was probably not the right ways to frame it. Right? Our customers fall into four categories folks that rent with us for 12 or more months where they bring their own furniture. It's their home, they sign up for the internet, everything else. Yep. Um, and they have access to hospitality services. So, you know, you could opt in for cleaning or linen service or whatever, you know, it's just. It's a more experiential home. Sure. Um, that's about a third of that building. The other two thirds is furnished. And we have three types of furnished guests. We have long stay furnished. So think like your company is moving you to Nashville.
Jason Fudin (00:08:48) - You know, they're like, Hey, for six months, we'll pay for your housing. They just. They just rent a one bedroom apartment for six months. The next is we call it interim housing. Think like two weeks to six weeks. You're a doctor on residency, you're traveling nurse, whatever. You're reloading, you're getting your house renovated. It's too long to be living out of a hotel, but too short to actually sign a traditional lease. Right. Um, and then our last set of customers are transient. You're coming to Nashville Thursday through Monday because you're going to go down to Broadway and hopefully behave a little bit. Um, you're working Monday through Thursday in town on projects on a regular basis. You're a consultant. Um, and so that's kind of the core set of customers we have. And any particular property.
Sam Wilson (00:09:30) - And this is the same model you guys like you said, any particular property, It's the same model you guys are carrying to each.
Jason Fudin (00:09:37) - Yeah. So, yeah. So we do that in Nashville, we do that in New York City, we do that in Washington, D.C. We optimize like that particular asset will have more than doubled the cash flow from when we bought it within 24 months.
Jason Fudin (00:09:49) - So it'll be 24 months here in December, we'll have more than double the in-place cash flow. So that's obviously material for an asset like that. So it's not a hotel per se, it's not an apartment building per se. It's structurally an apartment building with an operating model that leads to higher cash flow. Think one of the easier analogies is to think of private student housing, where they're building essentially apartments. But they're, you know, they're they're structured around a specific set of customers where they can drive more cash flow than a pure play apartment building in that same city. We're like that on steroids. On steroids. Right? Like we're that times a lot more. So that's that's called our hospitality. Living or flex living model. That's about 80% of our inventory. The other 20% we run is that kind of a unique little model we call a pop up hotel. And so let's say you were going to go build that 300 unit apartment building, brand new. Well, when you deliver it, the whole thing is empty, right? You got 300 empty, brand new apartment.
Jason Fudin (00:10:46) - What we do for partners that build new buildings is we come in and say, Hey, give us 100 units the day you open and we'll run a subsection of your building as an apartment hotel as you lease up. So if you're leasing 20 units a month, it'll take you 15 months to lease up an apartment building. For 12 of those 15 months, we'll run 100 or so units furnished where people can stay. And so we monetize that vacancy during lease up in a temporary way so that if the lease up takes a little bit longer, the developers make additional cash flow and if it goes faster, they make a little less. But it's an insurance policy that's paying them. And then for residents, they get, you know, an on site hotel, they get hospitality services for free. So we blend the asset classes. We're in the business of making real estate more valuable by blending the asset classes.
Sam Wilson (00:11:28) - That's really, really genius. Where did I mean, I've had, I don't know, what's this 800 and something episodes that we've put out on this show.
Sam Wilson (00:11:37) - And I've not heard anyone doing this model. Where did you cook this up? Was this your own home cooking or was this a model you've copied from somewhere else? How did you come up with this?
Jason Fudin (00:11:46) - I would say own cooking. Um, so when I was at Vornado running their innovation group, it's been a bunch of time looking at how do you make real estate more valuable? And one of one of the there's basically two ways to make real estate more valuable. There's more, but like there's two big ways you take existing assets. One is you get more assets through the door, higher utilization. The other is you sell to the highest paying customer at any point in time, which is commingling uses. And if you think about real estate as a, you know, an evolution of a bond, a fixed income asset, your goal is to throw off more cash flow in a predictable way. And so by doing those two things, you know, the the high utilization is like co-living co-working, shared conferencing.
Jason Fudin (00:12:26) - The co-mingling is something like what we do or what a convene does in the office conferencing space. And yeah, it just was really obvious to me. And so I sat down with my analyst at the time, me and her in a room and we were like, What is the easiest way to blend asset classes, to create value? And we're like, Well, what is more wasteful than a brand new empty apartment building? Like is crazy? They were like, Well, if we can there's a there's a duration mismatch between the timing of how you lease up a building correctly, um, and how quickly someone could use it in the interim. They're like, oh, we'll just pair those two things to go build an operating company that blends the asset classes where it's free money, and then once we get good at that, we move to the permanent model. So our business plan originally was start with pop ups until you understand and get good and build the tech stack and, you know, understand customer, customer funnel and OpEx ratios and all that crap.
Jason Fudin (00:13:18) - And then once we get good enough, it's no longer free money. We make it the core business. And that's that evolution that we evolved to. We started the company in 17 and my partner and by 2021, so within four years we were buying and rolling out permanently flexible buildings. And today we have a couple thousand units of this stuff.
Sam Wilson (00:13:35) - That is really cool. Tell me about some of the operational challenges that you face and how you overcome them.
Jason Fudin (00:13:44) - I mean, operations is messy in anyone that anyone that's in the operating business knows that you designed your best set of procedures and structure. You hire super talented people that are empathetic and then you learn by doing. And so every time you make a mistake, you figure out why you made it. You make a right, you make it better. And that's kind of been our iterative process. I'd say we've accelerated it by using technology. We've accelerated by bringing a bunch of veterans on that run, billions of dollars of assets or, you know, hundreds of stores or whatever.
Jason Fudin (00:14:19) - We blend. Leadership generally is a mix of people from the multifamily world in the hotel world, so each can take their best habits hopefully, and try to cancel out each other's worst. And I'd say one of the biggest mistakes we made early on when we started the company is we didn't appreciate the value of building the right culture and talent. You know, as developers were kind of like, Oh, we just, you know, you build a building like any bricks need windows, whatever. Like a company's not like that. It's like a living organism. And so one of the biggest mistakes we made at first was not appreciating how critical it was to build that culture, that set of norms. And, you know, we had like core values that couldn't even tell you what they were. So it was total crap. Um, but today, you know, we have three norms of the company. We own it, we make it better, we treat people right. Everyone rallies around that and they know that if they ____ up, but they do it in, you know, an effort for one of those norms that they're going to get some grace.
Jason Fudin (00:15:11) - And that's helped us build a foundation of a high quality team. And then people that do a great job, we promote them fast and often and give them more and more responsibility. And so and then we offer people where we feel like they're not a fit. We don't just wait it out as some big company.
Sam Wilson (00:15:26) - Oh, no. I think that's that's really, really great. And that was going to kind of be my next my next question behind this because there's you know, I look at what you're doing and obviously don't understand it in a comprehensive way, but it's like getting something like this off the ground. You got to find that multifamily building that that was just built that's empty. Then you got to find that model. How are we going to set up the pop up hotel? And we got to find all the services, all the people to plug in. I mean, that's a lot of things to get all moving in a common direction and get it working out of the gate to where the first one works.
Sam Wilson (00:15:59) - Then you can go out and do it like you've done across the country. I mean, that just sounds like a monumental undertaking.
Jason Fudin (00:16:05) - Yes. Yes. I mean, that's the business. You know, certain innovations are kind of like blue ocean, like AI or something else where basically, you know, human technology has never, you know, cross that chasm. And so it's a very different kind of innovation. You know, like you fundamentally change the way something works, like when the world went from like pulleys for lifting weights to hydraulics, you know, like it was just a pure technological change. In our case, the reason I called it a tech enabled operation is that's exactly what it is, is we're solving thousands of little problems in a cohesive way so that the outcome leads to higher profitability, effective, you know, customers, a customer product. Our Net Promoter score is close to the Ritz-Carlton, even though we're at that much lower. So, yeah, we had to solve a million problems and we have another 10 million to solve, but that's what makes the operating company valuable.
Jason Fudin (00:16:58) - It was just a small little like jump leap, whatever. No one would pay us the money. They pay us on a contracted multi-year basis to increase the value of the real estate.
Sam Wilson (00:17:09) - Right, Right. Yeah. No, I like that. Yeah. There are thousands of problems to solve. Do you feel like what you guys are doing? I mean, feel like it's you're on the you're on the front end of this kind of model? I mean, do you see other operators beginning to copy your, your kind of.
Jason Fudin (00:17:27) - Yeah, we've seen people do pieces of it. So to your point, every piece that we do is complicated. So we've seen people run furnished apartments like a hotel where they sign leases and have to deal with the management contracts and the structure. We've seen people run apartments this 30 day plus corporate housing. We've seen people buy the stuff and bring another operators. We've seen we've seen every version of we've seen folks in the hotel space just try to use technology to make them more efficient operators.
Jason Fudin (00:17:51) - So we've seen like all of the pieces of our business, I would say that no one effectively like we does. We do bring it all together and to bring it all together is where the real value is created. It's the flexibility, you know, building in the optionality into the real estate. But yeah, we've seen a lot of people touch around the edges and then there's a number of buyers and developers that pursue just the real estate strategy and they bring us in as their partner. We either power their stuff or we operate their stuff or whatever. Um, the company today is on a trajectory to be worth a couple billion dollars over the next few years as kind of a niche player. So if you think about, again, private student housing, that's a small market relative to real estate United States, but there's multibillion dollar players in that space. And like if our view of the world is wrong and what we're doing is niche, we become a couple of billion dollar company, we create a few billion dollars of creation of value in real estate and.
Jason Fudin (00:18:44) - Pondered. We go. My belief, my strong belief is that the blending of real estate and the higher utilization of real estate will become the norm for new projects because it's more valuable, right? And that will be reflected in land pricing. And as soon as land trades at a price that reflects a higher and better use. Developers won't have a choice but to build versions of our model as a physical asset, right? And when that happens, we're not a couple of billion dollar company. We're competing with the biggest hotel companies in the world, the biggest public companies in the world. And we're powering a new generation of real estate assets and corporate markets.
Sam Wilson (00:19:19) - I love it. No, I absolutely love it. This is this is an episode I'm probably going to kind of mentally catalog or putting my my, my brain bank and say, okay, you know what? We're going to we're going to go back to this 1 in 7 years like a what do they call those? One of those things we did as kids, whether you'd like.
Jason Fudin (00:19:34) - Right time the time capsule. Yeah. There you go.
Sam Wilson (00:19:36) - The time capsule, You know. You know, first grade. I want to be a firefighter someday. Like, okay, open this in 20 years. So I'm going to come back in about seven years and say, okay, where did Jason and his company go and how his real estate really shifted? Because you're absolutely right. Like the highest and best use with what you guys are doing is transformative in the way that these buildings are operated and owned. And I think this is this is really, really cool. I got one final question for you here, Jason, before we sign off. And it really comes down to bringing good people on your team, what would you say? Because I know you mentioned this there. You said, hey, you know, we've brought on some of the brightest and best that we could. How did you attract them to what you were doing and make it an attractive place for them to come come to work.
Jason Fudin (00:20:23) - I think actions speak louder than words. And so if you see the way me and my partner run the business, we run it in the way that we'd want to be treated as employees. We've built a culture of transparency, of hard truths and a, you know, the best answer wins, not the most senior person. And I think that that attracts a players and they bring in their other friends and people they've worked with. And it's kind of contagious in that way. I think also structurally we've made ourselves accessible to a bigger pool of talent. So we on the corporate side are remote first, and that means that we have team members in some 30 states. That means that anyone in America that has access to high speed Internet can work on the corporate team. In fact, that means anywhere, anyone, anywhere in the world technically could if we structure their contract correctly. Right. Um, and that's been, that's been huge on the non property side is there's a lot of overlooked, highly talented people, whether they're new moms or otherwise, want to live in places that don't lend themselves to a corporate office.
Jason Fudin (00:21:23) - So we've, we've, you know, dipped into that largely. And then on property, you can move up within our within an organization so much more quickly than you can like pick a big apartment operator hotel where it's like, well you do two years at the front desk and you do like, ___ that, man. Like if you're doing exceptional work and you're having an impact, we're going to give you more and more. And so for our property team members, they're able to move up quickly and get that responsibility. Everyone gets stuck in the company from our cleaners through the executives, and we built the company where hopefully we all went together.
Sam Wilson (00:21:53) - That's awesome. That's awesome. Jason, thank you for taking the time to come on the show today. This has been awesome. Learned so much from you and love the model you guys are bringing to the market. If our listeners want to get in touch with you or learn more about you and your firm, what is the best way to do that?
Jason Fudin (00:22:07) - Yeah, just shoot me a note on LinkedIn.
Jason Fudin (00:22:08) - I do a pretty okay job of checking it. I'll get back to you. And then we always have positions open, so please apply for them. You can mention you heard me on this podcast and come stay with us as a guest.
Sam Wilson (00:22:19) - Sounds great. Jason, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Certainly appreciate it.
Jason Fudin (00:22:23) - Thanks, Sam. Thanks for having me.
Sam Wilson (00:22:25) - Hey, thanks for listening to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate podcast. If you can do me a favor and subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whatever platform it is you use to listen. If you can do that for us, that would be a fantastic help to the show. It helps us both attract new listeners as well as rank higher on those directories. So appreciate you listening. Thanks so much and hope to catch you on the next episode.
