6 Predictions for 2026 That Could Reshape the Economy and Housing Market

Has real estate finally bottomed? Ben Miller, CEO of Fundrise (managing over $7B in real estate), says it’s so. And he’s not just talking about commercial real estate. If true, one particular type of real estate investment could do exceptionally well over the next year, but most people (even Dave!) are going in a different direction. Where could the next big real estate boom happen? We’re getting into it! To continue this prediction season, Ben joins us to walk through a few crucial economic outlooks that could greatly affect the housing market. From AI stunting hiring to inflation actually going down (below 2%!), American wage trends changing dramatically, and the assets that will perform best, we’re getting his take as someone who manages billions of dollars in real estate. Want mortgage rates to go down? We need lower inflation, and Ben says there’s good news on the horizon for stable prices. New technology adoption could lead to much lower inflation (even deflation in some cases). Could this be what reignites the housing market as mortgage rates react to a more stable economy? Ben gives his full take, with some surprises even Dave wasn’t prepared for. In This Episode We Cover The bottom for real estate prices? Why Ben thinks it’s here (or very close) The end of runaway inflation: How AI could kill the concern over rising costs More Americans making less, and what happens when AI takes tens of millions of jobs The one type of residential real estate that is poised to perform best in 2026 A new AI tool that could be pivotal for rental property investing research And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1215 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dave Meyer?

  How will AI impact the economy? And what does it mean for investors in 2026? It's a massive question that may define the next few years and beyond. And today we're diving deep.

• 0:16Dave Meyer?

  Hey, everyone. I'm Dave Meyer, housing market analyst and head of real estate investing at BiggerPockets. My guest today is Ben Miller, the CEO of Fundrise. Ben is a thought leader in the real estate and finance space, and he has a long track record of finding value and making deals work in many different investing markets. We had him on last December when he came on to the show and presented a case for real estate investing in 2025 that mostly proved correct. But since the market is always changing and we face a lot of uncertainty heading into next year, I had to bring Ben back on to share his expectations for the economy next year and how he recommends real estate investors take advantage. We talk a lot about AI and its potential impact

• 1:00Dave Meyer?

  on different parts of the economy and the housing market, including how you can leverage new tools in your own analysis and investing. Ben, welcome back to the show.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 1:10Dave Meyer?

  I am always looking forward to these conversations. You are exposed to a lot. You see a lot of different stuff in real estate and in the economy. And you always have a very unique perspective on where things are going. So maybe we can start there and have you tell us just what's your read on real estate and the housing market right now?

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think real estate is bottomed, but I've been humbled by the last half decade. You know, we had COVID, we had interest rates. So I'm much more humbled than I was before. There are three or four really big things happening in the world today. Obviously, AI, interest rates, the political environment affects the business environment a lot these days. And then, I mean, the good news is that supply is going away. New supply of construction is really falling off a cliff. So those are part of the big four things driving. Real estate these days.

• 1:59Dave Meyer?

  All right, great. Well, let's dig into each one of them one at a time. But before we do, when you say real estate has bottomed, do you mean that for multifamily specifically?

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Well, I guess all real estate is interest rate sensitive. And I think interest rates are approximately, but this is my point of view. Obviously, it's impossible to know. But it's, yeah, I think interest rates are going to keep falling. The market doesn't believe that. The market doesn't know. There's a lot of debate about that. And I think so that would affect all real estate, including single family housing.

• 2:28Dave Meyer?

  So you think the federal funds rate will keep falling? Is that right? But you also think mortgage rates will fall as well?

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think everything will fall. I could walk you through my argument. So let's just set the stage, right? So the stage is they cut rates 3.75 to 4. The Federal Reserve doesn't want to cut anymore because they really don't know. Inflation has been stuck at about 3% for the last 18 to 24 months. And the long end of the curve, 10-year Treasury, has also pretty much been stuck at the low 4s. And so what you're seeing is essentially a lot of uncertainty about the future interest rates. Some people arguing that we're going to see a re-acceleration of the economy. And then some people arguing it's going to soften. And so the re-acceleration in the economy would happen for two main reasons.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  One is that the great, beautiful bill, that big bill is going to start hitting the economy around April. And so a lot of those tax incentives will hit in '26. And there's an argument that companies will start spending and hiring as they get all these tax incentives from the bill. That's one acceleration argument. The other one is obviously AI and data center build. Those are the two main arguments for why the economy would accelerate. I'm skeptical on both. I think that the economy is not doing great outside of AI, outside data centers, and that most companies, most people, if you get a big windfall from your taxes, are you going to spend it on hiring people? Or are you going to basically sock it away, a little worried about the state of the economy?

• 4:02Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  I personally think most people aren't like in a risk appetite. Mood.

• 4:07Dave Meyer?

  It's risk off, right? Like, most people are risk off right now and wait and see. And although a tax boon might help some people start hiring, I don't think it fundamentally changes the outlook in a way where people are going to feel confident about making large investments. I think that on a business level, and actually on an individual level as well, just like average consumers.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Totally. That's my view as well. And I say, you know, a year ago, when they passed that bill, they didn't realize that sentiment would be so much more negative. And so maybe it would have worked a year ago, but I think it's not going to reaccelerate the economy in any material sense. April's a while away, things could change. So it's possible, but that's, that's not my expectation. It doesn't seem to be yours either. The other one is AI, AI data center, AI, really AI data center spend is the biggest CapEx or biggest, like, dollars moving the economy. It's absolutely insane.

• 5:00Dave Meyer?

  It's wild.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  I think it's real. I think that it's not a bubble right now and that the amount of money, I mean, it's definitely going to keep the economy propped up, but it's such a narrow part of the economy that like, I don't think it's enough to reaccelerate inflation outside of like transformers, electrical equipment, things that you need for data centers are going to be really inflated. But there's like limited spillover effects, the way that you have spillover effects in like housing, huge spillover effects in housing construction. If we were spending a trillion dollars more on housing construction, we'd see massive spillover effects. But I just don't think that's true for AI. So what would cause things to get slower? I think that you

• 5:40Speaker 01

  have sort of two main things. One is that, you know, generally, things outside of AI are not that strong, not that hot. I mean, it's like, high interest rates really did slow down the economy. Home builders are as like strained as they've been in more than a decade. You know, inventories are high, multifamily construction is off a cliff, all real estate's pretty, pretty, pretty depressed outside of AI.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Wage growth is not really strong. Hiring is not very strong. So generally, the economy is pretty soft. And then on top of that, I mean, everybody knows this, but it's one of those things that people forget. So the tariffs were put in place in April. Companies did raise prices. They raised prices, April, May, June, July, August. And so we saw inflation stay high for longer because of tariffs. But I think we'll start to see, hey, actually, you know, there really isn't any more inflation in the economy. I think inflation is gone. There's, it's just not a driver of the economy anymore. And then people will realize, oh, my God, interest rates are too high. Like inflation is not 3%. It's actually 2% or low twos. And then I think everyone's going to wake up to that. And that's just going

• 6:47Speaker 01

  to cause interest rate sensitive things to get really, really, really valuable.

• 6:52Dave Meyer?

  I see. So my opinion is that mortgage rates wouldn't change very much in 2026 because I think until we get a line of sight of like, what's the bigger risk, inflation or recession? Bond yields are kind of locked up. And like, people are kind of locked up. And so it sounds like you think we'll get that line of sight sometime in 2026. And your feeling is that inflation will be, maybe we don't get back down to 2%, but people will see the path down to 2% and that we'll feel more confident that the risks, whether it's, you know, tariffs or some other risks that could create inflation, will be mitigated.

• 7:36Dave Meyer?

  And then for reasons, bond yields start to come down, spreads start to come down, we start to see better buying conditions and a lot more activity in real estate.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Yes, completely. That's exactly what I think. And then I think, like, if you were sort of play that out, I think there's like two main questions. One, you know, the market's forward looking. So it's possible we start seeing that sooner.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Then October or November or something like probably really, really like hundred percent by November, December, but like the market probably starts to like get anticipatory like signals earlier than that. And then, you know, everybody, you know, this is at this point, like you always end up like conditioned by recent events. So everybody got conditioned by inflation, high inflation. And it's like, usually what happens is because everybody's conditioned for it, it's the least likely thing to happen.

• 8:25Dave Meyer?

  Huh. That's interesting.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  The thing we're defending against. That's my view. And then I think what's going to, the question is going to be, what happens after that?

• 8:32Dave Meyer?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  What then? Now I'm going to take a really big leap. I think it goes through 2%.

• 8:38Dave Meyer?

  Really? Why? I'm curious.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Because AI is deflationary.

• 8:44Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, yeah. So please expand.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I, okay. So so let me do fun rise. So fun rise. We're 200 people. We have a lot of different departments. Customer service. We get 6,000 tickets a month. Uh, half of them are handled by AI.

• 8:59Dave Meyer?

  Wow.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Maybe more. We used to have twice as many investor relations people handling tickets as we do now. You know, we have like cybersecurity, IT. We used to have eight people. Now we have five. We used to have three people doing copywriting. Now we have none.

• 9:15Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  I mean, it's just go down the list. Everywhere that AI touches, it either suppresses the number of jobs hiring, or it gets rid of jobs. And then that will suppress wage growth.

• 9:27Dave Meyer?

  Yes, I agree with that. I was actually just debating this with someone on the market, our other podcast earlier, that I thought real wage growth was going to go negative next year. I just think that trend is going to continue. But so basically, people are going to lose their negotiating leverage in labor negotiations. And so wages are going to go down.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, we can debate, and I think it's really hard to know exactly if it goes negative or exactly what happens, because certain people benefit and certain people will get punished. But overall, you're replacing people with software.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  And that's deflationary on wages.

• 10:04Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, right.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Right? So you have this thing where people became more expensive and goods became cheaper.

• 10:10Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, or services, basically, like if you think about it. Yeah. So services are more expensive.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so AI is the first technology that really makes services cheaper.

• 10:20Dave Meyer?

  Interesting.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  It's going to make people cheaper.

• 10:22Dave Meyer?

  So that's, that's the argument for lower wage growth in general.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  You basically have majority of people with lower wages and then a minority of people with higher wages. Because if Dave had 10 employees and now he has five, is Dave making more money? Maybe because he has a lot more profit. So the average may not be lower, but like the median will be lower.

• 10:47Dave Meyer?

  Okay. All right, everyone, we got to take a quick break, but we'll be back with Ben Miller right after this. This week's bigger news is brought to you by the Fundrise flagship fund. Invest in private market real estate with the Fundrise flagship fund. Check out fundrise.com/pockets to learn more. Summer bookings sound great until someone slips by the pool, gets hurt on your dock, or damages your property during a long holiday weekend. A lot of short-term rental investors don't realize their standard policy may leave gaps when it comes to short-term rental activity. That's why investors use Steadily. They offer landlord insurance built for real estate investors, including short-term rentals. And if you're a BiggerPockets Pro member, you'll also get 5% off your landlord insurance premiums.

• 11:32Dave Meyer?

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• 12:17Henry Washington?

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• 14:03Speaker 03

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• 14:36Dave Meyer?

  Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I'm here with CEO of Fundrise, Ben Miller. Let's jump back in. That's a scary proposition, to be honest, when I think about it, just like society wise. To me, the idea that we'll have fewer people employed and at lower wages is a big break in the economic system, is it not?

• 14:58Speaker 01

  I think that there's a transitionary period that could be quite ugly. And I've actually sat down and done a lot of work on this. You can go on ChatGPT, go on Claude and ask these questions of like, okay, you know, what percentage of their work can be replaced by, you know, GPT-5, GPT-6, you know, go through the tasks they do. And you can really quickly get to a pretty confident conclusion that like, it's not less than 10% of most people's work. And in some places where you've, where you've built a customized application, like for customer service, or customized accounting software for AI, it can do more than 50%, I think. Let's say 50%, maybe 90% in some cases. And so you say, okay, let's just say it's 20%. Well,

• 15:41Speaker 01

  20% of 100 million is 20 million people, right? It's a lot. It's huge.

• 15:46Dave Meyer?

  It's too many. Yeah.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  And it doesn't actually cause unemployment to go through the roof. Maybe unemployment goes to 5.5% or 6%. Is it mostly, it suppresses hiring?

• 15:59Dave Meyer?

  Well, that's kind of what's going on right now, right? Like, we're not seeing layoffs. We're just seeing no one hiring.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that like a generation of people who are in their early twenties are gonna like really get impacted.

• 16:11Dave Meyer?

  Yeah. I mean, you look at unemployment for 16 to 24 year olds right now, it's already 10%. Like, that's really high. And it's hard to imagine that picking up anytime soon. That's what I mean about the societal challenges here. Like, there's obviously benefits to it, but... There's a lot of stuff that just feels uncertain. Another reason why, going back to your previous point about people not wanting to make a lot of investments, it just feels like so uncertain about these things, how these things are going to play out. We've had ChatGPT for two or three years now, but it's still so brand new. There's going to be so many different forms of AI that start to come in, not just in large language models,

• 16:55Dave Meyer?

  that could do totally different things. So I buy the idea that this could be deflationary, at least in the short to medium term. And I can't really think in my head of precedent for that in the economy, where it's been a sustained deflationary period. We've had lagging wage growth for 40 years in this country, but this seems more serious than that.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess I'd argue the opposite of that. You've probably seen this graph, but corporate profits have been going up for like 25 years.

• 17:28Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  And if you look at the number of people it takes to produce something, it's been falling. It used to take eight people per corporate dollar, and now it takes like two, and it's falling to one. So technology has been making the economy more productive, need less workers, and it's been mostly gains to capital.

• 17:47Dave Meyer?

  Yes.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Not gains to labor.

• 17:49Dave Meyer?

  That's right.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  So I think this is very consistent with that.

• 17:51Dave Meyer?

  That's a good point. So there is precedent. Yeah.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's more similar, but more extreme.

• 17:57Dave Meyer?

  It's just more dramatic. Yeah, it's basically the acceleration of a pattern we've seen.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Right. And it's a pattern that is both very productive, very counterproductive, counterproductive politically.

• 18:09Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Productively, from a capital point of view. I'm not as bearish. I think that like, an optimistic view would be that AI is really designed for the young people. They're much more like adaptive. So it could be that like, at some point, all these young people are getting hired to really be the The person in the office who understands how to use AI.

• 18:34Dave Meyer?

  I'm following you. I mean, obviously, no one really knows, but I think this is very plausible. This is a very plausible line of thinking here. To continue sort of your thesis here about real estate in general, how do you think this impacts? Like you're saying deflationary, that could lead to lower mortgage rates. I totally buy that if it is deflationary. So then like, is this kind of where the thesis about real estate bottoming comes from is like, we're going to get cheaper cost borrowing and asset prices are going to go back up?

• 19:04Speaker 01

  That's my expectation, my belief that, um, yeah, that basically the, we end up in a new era. This era is different. We go through these paradigms. You and I've been through, I don't know how many now, three or four. So we're going into a new one and, and that new one is not like the old one. COVID almost accelerated it or something like we went through like a, usually they're like about a decade. At this point, it ended up being five years or something instead of, instead of being 10. And so the old one was money printing, inflation, high rates. And now we're going to go into something that's like high productivity growth, high returns of capital, lower inflation, but higher real interest rates. Cause what happens is we have really high GDP growth and high growth that drives the real interest rate up,

• 19:49Speaker 01

  but it drives inflation rate down. So it's a little bit of a, you get some and you lose some. But generally like that's good for growth and which, you know, real estate is a leveraged, levered investment in growth. And so the leverage part gets cheaper and you get more growth. And so I think you're just going to see a lot of benefits and then it's going to be more asymmetric. I think that high end does better than low end real estate. So San Francisco, New York, you know, places that selling to a multimillionaire. The high end is absolutely crazy how much money is going to be created for top 0.1% of the country. So a high end of real estate, I think is where you want to be.

• 20:29Dave Meyer?

  Interesting.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  I've spent 20 years focusing on workforce, real estate, real estate for middle class. Because usually middle class real estate is more resilient. This is where I don't have my thinking as refined, but I think that could be impacted by this hollowing out dynamic.

• 20:45Dave Meyer?

  Haven't thought about it that way. I buy the idea, you know, if you're right, that we'll have a lot of wealth creation at the top. That's certainly a continuation of a trend that's existed in the US for a while now. I guess I've, I've made my own investing thesis more about affordability and trying to find places similar to what you're saying about workforce housing, trying to find places where the average person can afford the average price home. Is your move away from that thinking that affordability for the average American could get even worse than it is right now?

• 21:19Speaker 01

  That's the political dynamic that's really quite ugly.

• 21:22Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  There's affordability in terms of goods and services, and there's affordability in terms of assets.

• 21:29Dave Meyer?

  Sure. Yes.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  I think assets get more expensive, but goods and services get cheaper. So like it's harder to buy a house where you can afford, you know, the healthcare may get, maybe it gets cheaper for the first time. Not, not in the short term, but really like healthcare is very impacted by AI. And so that's why I have said if you're going to buy assets, which is real estate, you want to be in assets that benefit from the wealth effect. And we haven't shifted our real estate strategy yet around this. It's still early, early days on this, but like high end San Francisco for sure. No question. High end New York. You probably want to be in the suburbs. I think it's like a challenge for where you want to invest. You really have to think about that. So you want to be near these big economic centers, but not actually probably in them.

• 22:13Dave Meyer?

  I, I'm curious, this is kind of another tangent, but like, how does the average person afford rent in this scenario? You know, asset prices are going up. People are making less and less money. Like I see a lot of people talking about universal basic income. Is that kind of the avenue you go down?

• 22:29Speaker 01

  I don't think so. Have you heard this thing? It's a new concept to me. I heard it recently. It was, it's as opposed to redistribution, you have pre-distribution.

• 22:39Dave Meyer?

  No, I have not heard of that.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  It's actually comes from the right, but it's the argument from, or in Cass from New Compass. The argument is people don't want handouts. They want a job and they want a purpose. And so we'd rather do it is, is affect. So like unions are pre-distribution, minimum wage pre-distribution, things that like are before you get to the government. So you sort of like, you affect the. Workplace. So rent control is kind of a redistribution thing. Anyways, I think it's going to be really popular. And so I think that like there'll be this new movement around how you address this inequality. You know, rent control is like, obviously an example of that. And it's, I mean, it's, it's pretty crazy in some places where you can't pick people and you can't raise rents and

• 23:26Speaker 01

  probably a million units in New York will go bankrupt because like they essentially their costs went up, their, you know, their, their mortgage went up, their insurance went up. Everything went up, but the rents didn't go up. So like all these affordable housing projects in San Francisco and DC and New York and are going bankrupt. So it's like, that's a taking, right? That's a way of like, kind of redistributing wealth from the owner to the renter. So that's a version that's already happening. Uh, so what's the next version of that? I think it's hard. I think maybe, maybe they, you know, Europe, you can't fire people. Maybe they start making it so you can't fire. Maybe like unemployment insurance becomes like 10 times more expensive. So you have to like support people like, so they, there's all sorts of possibilities, but I think it's like, uh, in a world where you have an extreme

• 24:09Speaker 01

  effect on AI, I think you see extreme government intervention to the private economy.

• 24:13Dave Meyer?

  Yeah. I mean, something would have to happen in this, if the scenario, like I, I just don't think you can have a functioning society where people continue to make less and less and unemployment goes up and up and all the money's going to a very small percentage of people. Like that's, that's just the recipe for civil unrest. If you look at history. So like something would have to happen. Yeah.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  And you, what you'd hope is that somebody has a good idea.

• 24:38Dave Meyer?

  Yes, I would definitely hope that.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Right. Well, mostly I'm giving you bad ideas.

• 24:42Dave Meyer?

  I mean, I, but I, this is not your job. Like you're not a policy maker. So I, I understand. I'm just curious if you had any, if you had seen any good ideas.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  No, I've seen any good ideas. I have to think about that. But I, but I mean, anyways, but you, but you can, you understand what, where I'm coming from.

• 24:58Dave Meyer?

  I do understand what you mean. Yes.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  But I mean, the point is what people say AI is a bubble. What I hear is deflation. Yeah. I say, oh, so you're going to put two, three, four trillion dollars into, into AI. It's either deflationary, very deflationary. So the two versions of, of it is they put trillions of dollars into building artificial people. It's software that can do the work of 20 to 50% of people's work. That's like my base case. Or worse, it is a bubble, it blows up, and then we have super deflation. Because you have you have built trillions of dollars of AI, you know, data centers that are pumping out all these like tokens that are replacing people's tasks and the AI economy blew up and deflated. So I'm like, oh, you know,

• 25:45Speaker 01

  it's just a question of how deflationary it is.

• 25:47Dave Meyer?

  Stay with us, everyone. We got to take a quick break, but we'll be right back. Henry, it's holiday season. What do you get a real estate investor for the holidays?

• 25:56Henry Washington?

  Well, if that real estate investor is me, you can get me a 15 unit apartment building.

• 26:00Dave Meyer?

  Oh, does that work? Do people just send you apartment buildings?

• 26:02Henry Washington?

  They are now.

• 26:04Dave Meyer?

  Well, I got a suggestion, actually. If you are looking for a gift to get a real estate investor, buy them a ticket to the upcoming Texas Cash Flow Roadshow. We're going to be in Texas. We're going to Austin, Houston, and Dallas from January 13th to 16th. We're going to be having meetups, workshops, live podcast recording. We'd love to see you all there. So if you're thinking you got a friend in the Texas area and they're trying to get into real estate investing, they're trying to scale their portfolio, go to biggerpockets.com/texas and go buy them a ticket. For my wife's birthday, I wanted to make her a new website for her landscape design business. So I researched a lot of different options. I tried out a couple, but honestly, it was really

• 26:44Dave Meyer?

  overwhelming. It was pretty time consuming and still the site wasn't coming out the way I wanted it to. Then I tried Hostinger and everything was super simple. I asked Hostinger's AI to build a clean site for her business and it had a working version up in minutes. No coding or designer needed. Plus, its AI agent helps with SEO, website copy, and email marketing after launch. You get domain, website, email, all in one account. And right now you can get Black Friday and Cyber Monday pricing through December 14th. So snag Hostinger's services at their lowest prices before the sale ends. Create your website today for just $1.99. Go to hostinger.com/realestate and use code

• 27:29Dave Meyer?

  REALESTATE for an additional 10% off Black Friday and Cyber Monday pricing. I just booked a ski trip to Park City and I've already got the whole thing. Planned out. Five days, first tracks every morning before the crowd show up, my knees reminding me I'm not 25 anymore by the second run, and an embarrassing number of overpriced burritos at the lodge. I don't even care. This is the trip I look forward to all year. But here's the part I actually appreciate. The practical side of my brain kicking in is that my place doesn't have to just sit there empty the whole time I'm away. I can list my space on Airbnb and bring in a little extra income while I'm out getting humbled on a mountain.

• 28:12Dave Meyer?

  And with the co-host network, I'm not the one handling all of it. You can partner with a vetted local co-host who can create your listing, manage reservations, message guests, and even handle the styling. So I get to fully focus on my trip and my place is still working for me the whole time. Find a co-host at Airbnb.com/host.

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• 30:05Dave Meyer?

  Welcome back to the show. Let's jump back in with Fundrise CEO Ben Miller. All right. Well, you've given me a lot to think about, a lot. Before we get out of here, though, just curious, you've given us a couple of hints that you think about investing near these big economic hubs, you know, being careful about where around those hubs you choose to invest. What about different asset classes? Like, do you think residential versus multifamily or commercial will perform differently in the coming years?

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Well, I definitely don't touch office.

• 30:36Dave Meyer?

  Yes, me neither, thankfully.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's obvious because, you know, I'm talking about eliminating jobs, which eliminates office and office was already bad. No, I mean, I'm a big believer in industrial and in multifamily. I think you're high end for sale housing and then also rental housing in places that are not going to be overregulated. And then we don't do high end, super high end residential, maybe super even high end retail, where it sort of caters to that upper class. It's not something I think I want to do, but I think that it's a asset classes around like Greenwich and Sausalito and places that are extreme wealth would just get even crazier. And then, I mean, I'd be remiss not to talk about our AI product that we've been building.

• 31:20Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, let's do it. Because I mean, we talked a lot about AI. So tell me how you and Fundrise are using AI in your own investing.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we, for the last couple of years, have been building a real estate AI product called Real AI. It's not realai.com. It's still kind of in in beta, but you can go in there and it's pretty amazing.

• 31:43Dave Meyer?

  I've got to use it. It's really cool.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  It's amazing to me because I'm like, oh, I mean, it makes me understand the potential of AI in a different way.

• 31:52Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, it makes me glad that I'm a podcaster now and no longer a data analyst.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  I mean, it turns ordinary people into advanced data scientists.

• 32:02Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, it does. It's crazy.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  We built real estate, one called Real Estate AI, and that's basically to help you do analysis. We're building more things that you can like, if you take like, oh, I have an O M from a broker, I maybe have a T12, I have some information, I upload the deal, and I start using it to like, interrogate the deal, like, do you think these rents are realistic? What if tariffs get removed? And what if, like, you can do like, all this thinking, all this analysis with these tools and then have it produce like, Drafts for you that you can then edit. It both saves you a lot of time, but it makes you so much smarter. I mean, so much smarter.

• 32:39Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, I find myself doing the same amount of thinking that I used to. Like, I don't feel like I'm necessarily spending less time working, but it's like, I just get better information to consider so much faster. And ideas are like introduced that I would have taken me a longer time to come to. Or just like, you know, I'm an analyst. So like, sometimes AI will suggest a data set I didn't even know existed. And that means that I can now start thinking about something else. Or there's just framing it somewhere away. I wouldn't think of it. I still find myself working, of course, but it just seems it's just a much more robust and like rich set of information that I can work with. At least that's how I'm using it right now.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  That's a funny way to think about it. Cause I was on a podcast three years ago and I was on again this week. And they said, three years ago, you recommended a bunch of podcasts. What do you recommend now? And I was like, I think I spent all my time now in AI where I used to spend it like on listening to podcasts.

• 33:39Dave Meyer?

  Yeah, listen to podcasts. Right. Yeah.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Cause I just spend so much time essentially like it's a form of content.

• 33:44Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  Where I'm like, what about this? What about that? How is it? What? And I'm thinking about things and it's producing things for me. And so I want to ask you, cause you've, you've played around with real AI.

• 33:53Dave Meyer?

  Yeah.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  What do you, what do you have to say about it?

• 33:55Dave Meyer?

  I love it. I, I being sincere that like someone like me who analyze housing markets, you don't go into that career right now. Aggregating real estate data is a huge pain in the butt. And we don't need to get into why, but it's really disparate. There's MLSs, there's data source, you know, there's private sources, there's public sources. They're county and national. It's a lot of stuff. And what Ben and his team has done and create, allowed us to access all this information about a city, dig into comps, dig into migration patterns, dig into ARVs. Like all of it in one place, it's incredible. It just, this is like a true time saver.

• 34:36Dave Meyer?

  Like I felt like I could do this analysis before, but I was probably one of. Few people who could do it confidently. But now, not only can anyone do it, but you could do it in a fraction of the time it even took me to do it. And so I think it's going to be an interesting thing. But I can even feel myself feeling a little overwhelmed by it almost. Where if you're not an analyst, digesting just, you know, tons of data might be a little bit intimidating. But for people like me who are analytical, it's a playground, you know, it's super, super fun. And I'm sure what you and everyone else is working on is just like, how do you make this different levels? Like, how do you create a level for a beginner investor to understand things?

• 35:20Dave Meyer?

  And then a little bit more sophisticated, more sophisticated and have like different levels of communication. But the fact that it's all there is just fascinating. I am guessing, because I get messages from our audience all the time, people saying like, where do I get data about the housing market? And they're not even talking about anything like what you're doing. But it's frustrating for, for regular investors, even to go to Redfin, then to go to the BLS, then to go to the Fred website and just even get four or five data points, even if you're not trying to aggregate them, it's frustrating to do just that. And so I think the merging of all this information into one digestible place is going to make the job of an investor, I think, just more fun.

• 36:02Dave Meyer?

  You get to do more of the enjoyable part and less of the admin kind of backend stuff that someone like me does at least. I think it's going to become more fun.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Like I, my, my friend, I have a friend who's a very inappropriate person, but he, he says like, you know, wake up in the morning, I should have an omelet. There's the insight. The store, he's got to get these eggs, he's got to get the, you know, butter, you got to cook it. He finally, at the end, you get to eat it, right? But how much of the time was like not the insight, not the eating?

• 36:31Dave Meyer?

  Oh, my God. I'll spend an hour cooking in four minutes eating. I just inhale food. It's embarrassing.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  That's how I think a lot of work is, a lot. I don't think AI is going to get rid of the four minutes. I think that, that like, we're nowhere close to AI replacing people. There's so much of your work is just not valuable. It's just grindy, administrative, sucky work. That's the stuff AI is so good at.

• 36:57Dave Meyer?

  All right, let's end there because to me that is an optimistic out. I love that idea. That's a great positive view of how AI might impact all of us on our work. Well, Ben, thank you so much for joining us. It's always a pleasure. Yeah, thanks for having me. And thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast. We'll see y'all next time.

• 37:16Speaker 06

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