Pod Insights The Pomp Podcast #792 The Insane Real Estate Market Today w/ Ben Miller About this episode Ben Miller is the Co-Founder & CEO of Fundrise, America's largest real estate investment platform. In this conversations, we discuss real estate market, interest rates, and the different trends for investors in the real estate investment asset class since the start of the global pandemic. ======================= Today’s episode is sponsored by Abra. Based in California and backed by top VC firms, Abra is an all-in-one simple, secure app that allows you to trade over 110 cryptocurrencies, get 0% interest loans using your crypto as collateral and earn interest with up to 14% APY on stablecoins and 8.15% APY on Bitcoin. Join nearly 2 million users by downloading Abra from the Google Play or Apple App store. If you download the app today, you will get $15 in free crypto once you fund your account. You came, you invested — now conquer. ======================= Unstoppable Domains is THE #1 provider of NFT domains. These aren’t traditional domains, these are domains with superpowers. With your unique NFT domain such as pomp dot crypto or pomp dot nft, you can replace your long complex wallet addresses, verify ownership of your NFTs and join the 10’s of thousands of people who are now using their NFT domain as their Twitter and Discord usernames. Go to unstoppabledomains.com and get YourName dot crypto, dot x, dot nft or a range of other endings for as low as $5 and never worry about gas or renewal fees because with Unstoppable Domains you pay once and own forever! ======================= Nasdaq-listed BTCS was the first US-public company to secure today’s top layer one protocols. Recently, BTCS launched the beta version of its digital asset analytics dashboard! From across multiple exchanges, the BTCS Data Analytics Dashboard lets you evaluate your entire portfolio’s performance with plans to add year-end reports and yield earning on your crypto through linking to staking pools. Test out the BTCS Data Analytics Dashboard today at BTCS.com. =======================
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Anthony Pompliano? What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Ben Miller is the CEO and co-founder of Fundrise, America's largest real estate investment platform. In this conversation, we talk about the real estate market, we talk about interest rates, and we talk about all of the different trends for investors in the real estate asset class since the start of the global pandemic. I really enjoyed this conversation with Ben, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by Abra. Based in California and backed by top VC firms, Abra is an all-in-one, simple, secure app that allows you to trade over 110 cryptocurrencies, get 0% interest loans
0:46 Anthony Pompliano? using your crypto as collateral, and earn interest with up to 14% APY on stablecoins and 8.15% APY on Bitcoins. You can join nearly 2 million users by downloading Abra from the Google Play or Apple App Store. If you download the app today, you will get $15 in free crypto once you fund your account. Go to abra.com to learn more. You came, you invested, now conquer. Abra, conquer crypto. Abra.com. Go check it out today. Today's episode is brought to you by Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains is the number one provider of NFT domains. These aren't traditional domains, these are domains with superpowers. With your unique NFT domains such as pomp.crypto or pomp.nft, you can
1:28 Anthony Pompliano? replace your long, complex wallet addresses, verify ownership of your NFTs, enjoy the tens of thousands of people who are now using their NFT domain as their Twitter and Discord usernames. Go to unstoppabledomains.com and get your name.crypto.x.nft or a range of other endings for as low as $5. And never worry about gas or renewal fees because with unstoppable domains, you pay once and you own it forever. Head on over to unstoppabledomains.com today to check out more about what they've got. Again, go there and you can get any domain with any ending for as low as $5. UnstoppableDomains.com. Today's episode is brought to you by BTCS. BTCS is a NASDAQ listed
2:10 Anthony Pompliano? Company. It's the first US public company to secure many of the top layer one protocols. This quarter, BTCS just launched the beta version of a new digital asset analytics dashboard. From across multiple exchanges, the BTCS data analytics dashboard lets you evaluate your entire portfolio's performance with plans to enable year-end reports and yield earning on your crypto by linking to BTCS sneaking pools. This groundbreaking dashboard is currently in beta mode. Test out the BTCS data analytics dashboard now by visiting BTCS.com. Again, that's BTCS.com. Go check it out.
2:44 Speaker 01 Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.
3:08 Anthony Pompliano? Ben, how are you?
3:09 Speaker 02 Excellent.
3:10 Anthony Pompliano? Dude, I'm super excited to talk with you. So you got myself, you got my brothers and you've got Bill Pulte here. And maybe let's start with, over the last two years, there's been immense chaos, uncertainty, change in many financial markets. But obviously in real estate specifically, what are some of the differences in the investor behavior or consumer behavior that you see on your platform over the last two years?
3:35 Speaker 02 Right. So real estate, people woke up to it as after the pandemic when they saw housing prices go up 20% in 12 months. There's been this huge influx in demand for real estate as inflation has picked up. People started looking at real estate as a hedge and we've seen more investors this month than any time history of the company.
3:55 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah. And so when you see that, I know that Fundrise reported that the client account, so Fundrise is a investment platform where everyday people can go ahead and actually get access to real estate. But you guys recently announced that there was a 22% return, the average annual return. And I think that one of the things that people have a hard time kind of wrapping their head around is the CPI number, the Kind of inflation measurement officially is around 7% right now, but obviously being able to drive a 22 or more percent return in real estate. Some people say like, well, that's a better measurement of what we're seeing. It's kind of the devaluation of a currency against a hard asset like real estate. How do you think about that 22% number on the Fundrise
4:40 Anthony Pompliano? platform and how that goes ahead and actually intersects or relates to inflation itself?
4:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's a great question.
4:48 Anthony Pompliano? That's all we do around here. It's the best business show. We've got the greatest questions as well.
4:52 Speaker 02 Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Well, just to split that apart. So we have like a fixed income part of our portfolio and we have equity or growth. And so our fixing, so the 22 is an average of us like a 7% fixed income product and a high growth equity. But if you just look at the equity, you know, if your own residential, you know, the returns more like 30, 40% last year. And so, and what drove that was we saw rent increases of about 20% starting in May, rents increased like throughout the sunbelt by about 20%. And that is driven by inflation, right? That is, I think rents and, and real estate are much better gauge of inflation because you don't
5:35 Speaker 02 have technologies often driving down the cost of things. And so that will, will mix into the, the overall gauge and sometimes mask what's happening in people's day to day lives. So
5:49 Speaker 02 the government printed something like $9 trillion of the last 10 years. And that's finally now making its way into the real economy, driving up prices in a way we haven't seen in 40 years.
6:01 Anthony Pompliano? So when we think about this, we've got Bill Pulte here and Bill obviously is very focused on democratization of access and kind of financial empowerment as we are as well. One of the things that's interesting about the Fundrise platform is you guys are using technology to do the same thing for real estate. So help us understand kind of how that works and what the impact on the average investor ends up being in terms of giving them access to asset classes or assets they might not have previously had access to.
6:30 Speaker 02 When we started Fundrise back in 2012, I went to Wall Street, I went to the number one, or arguably the number one law firm on Wall Street and said, this is what we want to do, we want to democratize access to real estate investing. And they literally said back to me, why would you bother with a little guy? And that's basically the mindset of the real estate industry, financial industry, like why bother with individuals, why bother with like normal investors? And, um, and so it just wasn't, if you wanted to invest in like real estate, the way a large institution would, it wasn't possible. And we spent like a decade working in the SEC, using technology to sort of break, break down that barrier. And now people can invest in it. We have a, for $10, like that's the minimum, if you want to come into the starter product.
7:14 Speaker 02 So it's, it's the, the democratization of finance has been like a hundred year trend. You know, people used to not be able to invest in stock markets. These are stock market used to be, uh, only limited to basically insider sophisticated investors. That changed. So over, you know, over history, that's been the arc of history, arc of change. And, and it always the status quo institutions, you know, resisted, can't believe it, don't think it's a good idea. You know, think that you need the, you know, sophisticated professional to make the decisions.
7:48 Speaker 03 What's the liquidity like in your funds?
7:52 Speaker 02 It's a quarterly liquidity. You just, it's like hitting a button. So you, we have liquidity for investors every, every, uh, every three months.
8:01 Speaker 03 And when you have to sell to get liquidity, do you have to, you know, take a discount in order to get the liquidity or how does that work?
8:07 Speaker 02 No, now we have zero penalties. So you can get out of basically with no cost. It's, we have lines of credit and we basically manage, we have X, you know, manage liquidity for, so that people can get out. Most people aren't trying to get out. It's, it's actually a very small percentage of people who, who, who, um, redeem every quarter, a couple of percent. If you're investing in real estate, you're not. Trading it, it's a long-term investment.
8:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's kind of like the Baron funds. Have you ever seen Ron Baron? Talk about his investors. He's like, yeah, if people want to get out, I don't want those investors.
8:40 Anthony Pompliano? Well, but it's also true, right? In terms of the fund rise, obviously compounding at a very high percentage, right? As you know, investing in real estate is
8:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, I'll have to check it out.
8:48 Anthony Pompliano? That there's a pretty long-term, you know, time horizon and it's one of these things where, was it Warren Buffett says, don't interrupt compounding unnecessarily, right? Like basically just let it continue. Ben, when you think about portfolio diversification, how much of the investors on the platform are buying just like one type of real estate versus they have exposure to multiple types of real estate? And then how do they look at their portfolio of real estate versus other assets?
9:13 Speaker 02 Let me just, I'll take it in reverse. So if most people are invested in stocks and crypto, that's very common. And then what they're looking for is something with a little more stability. Often people are saying, oh, I have like, you know, 99% of my money in crypto, I'm going to take some and bank some of it, just put it into a real asset. So
9:33 Speaker 02 everybody, almost everyone on the platform, I have some super net, high net worth investors who are just like all in. Multiple seven-figure investors on a platform, but mostly people see it as a part of their portfolio. And then inside that we have 20 different funds and the funds are focused on, you know, we build single-family rental housing for rent, which is, I think you guys were just talking about, and Pulte knows all about. We, you know, we have industrial, we build for, you know, which is e-commerce industrial. We have multifamily in Tampa and Austin. So we have a lot of different kinds of real estate and, and most investors end up with a fairly diversified pool because it's,
10:14 Speaker 02 you know, you really, it's generally picking like a building is just too, too narrow. And anything can happen to one building, but not to an asset class.
10:24 Anthony Pompliano? Got it. And then when you think about kind of the best way for people to learn about real estate, like what do you suggest to folks in terms of the actual education process before they actually become an investor or start to allocate capital?
10:34 Speaker 02 Typically, I mean, investor can put in $10 on a platform and so A lot of, one way to learn is you put in a small amount of money, like $10, right? And you can, we start sending you investment updates on every single property. So you'll get an investment update. It'll tell you, we bought this property. We have, here's investment strategy. Here's like the economics of it and, and you'll get probably an investor update on a deal that either you own or that we acquired every day or two. So you'll get what a real estate professional would think about, about like a specific real estate investment. So that's like one thing we've done a lot on a platform for education. Other sources is not, there's not a lot of great information out there. BiggerPockets has some good, good content.
11:18 Speaker 02 If you're looking for online content, it's, um, but I think the best way to learn is by doing, right? The best, like if you want to learn about Bitcoin, go buy some Bitcoin, right? That's like the, a good start.
11:29 Anthony Pompliano? And, and do you see people on the platform, they also own Bitcoin as well as like, almost like a virtual real estate, which some people hate hearing, some people love that description, uh, where they basically are saying like, I want some analog real estate. I want some virtual real estate or how does that look?
11:42 Speaker 02 Yeah. Huge, huge, huge part of our investor base is in, is in crypto. Definitely.
11:48 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah. It's pretty interesting. Joe, John, what questions you guys got?
11:50 Speaker 04 Ben, I just want to know like what growth you guys have seen during the pandemic. I think you alluded to it a little bit earlier with kind of just how much real estate has been up over the last year or two years. But from an investor side, like what are retail investors saying? What are they doing, et cetera?
12:03 Speaker 02 Yeah. Well, so the platform Fundrise is growing about a hundred percent a year. So we're growing, uh, it's, it's, we had to create the category. So people, everybody owns stocks, they're Robin Hood and, and you know, basically crypto is not a category, but most people don't own things outside of the stock market. Actually, it's just not, it's, it's not an idea that individual investors had, had known about before we started the company. You have that institutional investors, obviously invest in venture capital, they invest in private equity, invest in real estate, but individuals didn't have that. And so we've had to kind of create the category as we've, as we've actually built the business. So that's been probably the biggest challenge is getting.
12:41 Speaker 02 You'll understand that you want to be in hard assets, real assets, not just in financial assets like stocks. And and so and then the real estate itself, it's it. Reason why you like to be in it is it's just a lot more stable. My returns, you know, it are just way the yield and that stability of it are not like the stock market where the stock market could be down. And this year it could stock market go down forty percent or that's possible. And and real estate is likely to clip away seven, eight percent in in like, you know, stable markets like like. I mean, twenty twenty, March twenty twenty, when the stock market went down forty percent, we were flat. We didn't have any losses. We didn't. We didn't grow that month, that quarter, but we didn't lose.
13:26 Speaker 02 So there's just a stability that people who are trying to preserve their wealth will often look to real estate for.
13:33 Speaker 04 Ben, when you talk about how real estate is up twenty to thirty percent in some instances around the country. Is a correction coming? Are we going to see kind of a ten, twenty percent correction? Do we see something like two thousand and seven or eight? Or are these sustainable levels and do we keep growing?
13:48 Speaker 02 This is my opinion. I think we're in inflationary. We're inflationary. Ten years of inflation or or seven years of inflation. The government can't stop printing money. They're stuck. We have too much debt. And so and there's not enough labor. Like to build a building, like to build a house, like we build, you know, thousands of houses. You can't get labor. You can't get hinges. You can't get refrigerators. You can't get stoves. There's just such a shortage. And it's not just because of the pandemic. It's because the system is is is. There's not enough people. We lost two. Two million people left the workforce during the pandemic. So I think we have. Like a a long period of inflation. Inflation is going to drive up.
14:29 Speaker 02 Real estate. If you look at the nineteen seventies, when there was inflation, the stock market from nineteen seventy, nineteen eighty, down thirty six percent. Years went down thirty six percent and real estate tripled unlevered. So if we're in an inflationary period, real estate is one of the better places to be.
14:47 Anthony Pompliano? What do you think about interest rates before we let you go in terms of what do you think is going to happen here? You think rates end up going up? You think they're going sideways down? You think we get multiple rate hikes? What was the thought process?
14:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, I interest rates are we're borrowing at negative interest rates today, negative real interest rates. Right, we inflation seven percent plus and and we're borrowing at two, two or three percent. And so we're obviously getting negative, we're negative, we're literally paying negative real interest rates today. I think that the Fed stuck, they can only raise rates, maybe like seventy five bips. And then they just can't raise it any further because the economy can't. It will push it into a recession if they go much higher than that. And so they'll blink like they did the end of twenty eighteen and they and they're just, they won't be able to end quantitative easing. They've just trapped themselves in a, in a period of low interest rate, high inflation, you know, monetary expansion.
15:40 Speaker 02 And and we're just in this like, we're going to be in this inflationary, reflationary period until essentially some sort of probably late, late this decade, some sort of collapse. I mean, just some point, the bond market can't continue to basically provide negative interest rates to, to, to the economy. It's just, it, it does right now. We literally have negative real interest rates by huge, huge measures, right? That hasn't happened before. And I think that's like a sign of unhealth.
16:12 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah, it's really interesting. I think Bill's thought process, my thought process is all very similar in that the ability for them to actually raise rates and keep them high is almost non-existent. And I do question how much of the current rhetoric is them trying to talk markets down and basically signal this really strong stance. And then they're going to basically, you know, wave the white flag and say, hey.
16:34 Speaker 02 It's just, I just say one thing that Paul Volcker, right? He did this in the, in the, in eighty one. And like he, the people, he had death threats, people were trying to kill him. And like the idea that there's an individual in politics today with integrity, willing to risk their life to raise interest rates? No way. There's no way.
16:54 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah, it's a it's kind of crazy when when you really think about the game that goes on. It's a confidence game, right? At the end of the day, and there's a lot of people who say, hey, the more you talk about inflation, the more inflation happens. Also, the thought process is, can you do the opposite? Can you basically talk it down? I don't know. But what do you think?
17:13 Speaker 03 I think interest rates don't lie. It's like a it's like a poison to inflation. So I think they're trying to scare the market, then they'll get maybe one hike, and then I think they have to cut. We'll see.
17:25 Speaker 04 Well, raising those interest rates really cause prices to go down in homes?
17:29 Speaker 03 Yeah.
17:29 Speaker 04 Yeah. People will in turn not take on they want to be more liquid. They won't take on borrowed money, leverage.
17:35 Speaker 03 Exactly.
17:37 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah, I think it's very clear if they raise interest rates. I mean, you already see it too. Like, there's some cooling off in some markets already, just on the fact that they may raise the rates.
17:45 Speaker 03 Look at the commodities. They're all down. Look at Bitcoin.
17:47 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah.
17:48 Speaker 03 I mean, do you believe Bitcoin's a currency or a commodity?
17:50 Anthony Pompliano? Yeah, I think it depends on who you're looking at. And I actually don't put it commodity currency as the breakdown. The way I look at it is, I think that there's a lot of Bitcoiners that treat it as their reserve asset, which would be more akin to like a currency. And so they think of their wealth denominated in Bitcoin, etc. The Wall Street firms that have been buying Bitcoin over the last two, three years, they look at this as their most, you know, high risk asset. And so they're going to treat it like that risk asset whenever rates end up getting rose, risen, whatever. Then basically, they'll go ahead, they'll sell that thing off, just like they will their, you know, growth stocks and tech stocks, etc. But the Bitcoiners, they look at it as their reserve asset. They buy more when it goes down. The question is just who's got more money? And obviously, you know, Wall Street's got quite a bit of money in this game now. And so they've got a
18:35 Anthony Pompliano? different way to to kind of treat the asset. And so they're overpowering the retail investor who's dollar cost averaging or whatever at the moment. Ben, where can we send people to to learn more about Fundrise? And if they want to learn more or participate?
18:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, fundrise.com, F U N D R I S E. And I'm Bennett. I'm Bennett Fundrise. If you want to email me and just share your thoughts.
18:59 Speaker 03 You're gonna get thousands of emails now.
19:01 Anthony Pompliano? What was the email?
19:03 Speaker 02 Right. Yeah, Ben at Fundrise.
19:05 Anthony Pompliano? Ben at Ben at fundrise.com?
19:09 Speaker 02 Yep.
19:09 Anthony Pompliano? Oh, Bill.
19:10 Speaker 03 Send him an email and say, pump.
19:12 Anthony Pompliano? Says hello.
19:15 Anthony Pompliano? Bill and I just tweeted that whoops.
19:19 Anthony Pompliano? Awesome, man. Listen, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. Anyone who wants to learn more about real estate, learn about real estate investing, go check out Fundrise. I really like what they're doing. And frankly, I think that the key piece to me is just this idea of the ethos of bringing democratization and access to an asset class that, you know, I think a lot of people understand, hey, look, there's wealth that's built here over long periods of time, but it's hard for people to get into is pretty good. I see people in the chat saying, I need this for my wife.
19:55 Anthony Pompliano? So, all right, my friend, thank you so much for joining us. Good stuff. I'll see you guys. See ya. Later.
Previous #789 Bitcoin & Philanthropy w/ Bill Pulte Next #793 Why Is Bitcoin Is Crashing?! - BTC On-Chain Analytics Page updated October 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
