How to Short the Multifamily Market Without Owning Property — Richard McGirr
What if the best way to play today’s multifamily market is to bet against it?
On this episode of Carson’s Corner: Entrepreneurship & Investing, Carson Jones sits down with Richard McGirr of Property Llama. Richard is a serial entrepreneur turned real estate debt fund manager. He built and sold businesses in Hong Kong, worked in crypto venture capital, and grew a software services firm to 80 employees. He walked away from that firm with one lesson: income without durable assets is just a well-paid treadmill. That lesson led him into real estate, then into a fund of funds that raised about $45M in a single year. Then investor appetite for value-add equity dried up almost overnight.
What Richard found next changed his model. The credit fund was quietly paying for the whole operation. Today he’s positioned in short-duration debt, with hard money loans to flippers and a non-performing loan (NPL) strategy aimed at distressed multifamily.
In this episode
- Why selling his hours (or his team’s hours) left zero durable value, and why he went looking for compounding assets instead
- What a fund of funds is and why it appeals to entrepreneurs who don’t want to own or manage property
- The J-curve problem: why value-add deals make GPs wait years to get paid, while debt earns from day one
- How to “short” private multifamily by buying non-performing notes
- The big NPL misconception: the goal isn’t to take the property. About 90% of borrowers pay off once suit is filed
- Where the margin really is: accrued default interest the banks wrote off
- The three skills an NPL operator needs: distressed loan analysis, a taste for litigation, and in-house property management
- Where the risk sits: hostile bankruptcy filers, legal costs, and judicial vs. non-judicial foreclosure states
- Why distress could run another five years, with over half of CMBS loans reportedly below 1.0x DSCR
- Carson and Richard debate rates, deficits, AI capital demand, data center power, and whether “lower rates” really means higher prices
- Why Richard keeps both funds intentionally short-duration in an uncertain economy
If you’re an entrepreneur, a passive investor, or a CRE professional trying to make sense of high rates and multifamily distress, this conversation shows how one operator is positioned for the downturn.
Learn more about Richard’s performing debt fund at Property Llama, and catch Richard hosting the Monday show on Best Ever CRE.
Richard McGirr is a serial entrepreneur turned real estate debt fund manager and a co-founder of Property Llama. He built and sold businesses in Hong Kong, worked in crypto venture capital, and grew a software services firm to 80 employees before moving into real estate, a fund of funds, and short-duration debt: hard money loans to flippers and non-performing notes on distressed multifamily. He also hosts the Monday show on Best Ever CRE.