Untamed Equity at CRE Converge Conference

I was excited to have a booth at the CRE Converge conference and debut our new banners.  NAIOP always does a good job of allowing for true networking within a conference.   The audience ranges from tech real estate companies, property management firms, title companies, architects, builders, to developers and investors.  This conference also had over 1500 attendees and personally I actually got to see one of my friends from the NAIOP George chapter there too!  The hosted reception was a great place to start the event and meet people and I had the opportunity to explain what the fun name of Untamed Equity actually was. 

I enjoyed listening to the keynote speaker, Marci Rossell, Expert Economic Forecaster, say optimistically that this crazy interest rate environment should calm down in 6 months…let’s hope for the sake of getting deals done!  She believes we are still in a transition period, which in her words will be “incredibly painful”.  The Federal reserve is front-loading interest rate increases and that sometime in the first or second quarter of next year, if inflation declines by 1% every 2 months and gets from 8.5% down to 5%, the Fed will stop raising rates.

Marci also talked about the bad word “recession” and if we can truly classify the economy that way today.  Put simply, recessions occur when economic activity declines, but we are actually seeing consumers still spend money.  Also, by definition, a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP, which we have yet to see.  So, let’s take that as a positive that we are not in a recession and the economy can transition itself out of this funk in the next 6 months…no pain, no gain.  We all could use some positive thoughts today.