In this episode of Multifamily Unpacked, we sit down with one of the industry’s most thoughtful observers and storytellers: Matt Slepin. As a longtime executive recruiter, former lobbyist, and host of the “Leading Voices in Real Estate” podcast, Matt has had a front-row seat to the evolution of multifamily real estate over the past four decades.

Tyler and Matt dig deep on the past, present, and future of the industry—covering everything from the institutionalization of multifamily as an asset class to the slow but necessary shift toward centralization and tech-enabled operations. They unpack how the REIT era rewired expectations for leadership, why talent pipelines are still too shallow, and what it means to “play the long game” in a space defined by relationships, reinvention, and relentless change.

What You’ll Learn:

Links + resources:

Leading Voices in Real Estate Podcast
Matt’s firm: ZRG Partners

 

Episode transcript:

0:00: Multifamily Unpacked: Matt Slepin

Matt Slepin: Multifamily has both more of a community dynamic within the industry. It sounds a little bit like Pollyanna, but it’s an industry where we share a lot of information and we compete with our friends versus kind of brutally compete with each other. 

First of all, when I started in the industry, multifamily was not an institutional investment class. Let’s pause on that. It’s a long game, play the long game. Every day. Just remember that.

0:40: Introduction

Tyler Christiansen: Welcome back to season four of Multifamily Unpacked. Today my guest is Matt Slepin. Matt is the managing director and global co-head of real estate at ZRG and host of Leading Voices in Real Estate. 

In his role, Matt has interviewed much of the industry’s top talent and execs at many of the biggest names in the business. He’s seen how multifamily teams have evolved from boots-on-the-ground generalists to centralized, tech-enabled specialists, and what it takes to lead through that change. We talk about the rise of AI, human-first leadership, and the career moves that open doors in a shifting industry. 

Let’s get into it.

1:20: Welcome Matt Slepin

Tyler Christiansen: Matt, thank you for joining us. You’re somebody who I’ve listened to for quite some time through your podcast. But for those who either aren’t familiar with your podcast or maybe don’t know your day job, why don’t you give us a little bit of your background and also lead us into how you made your way into this world of multifamily.

1:40: Slepin career overview 

Matt Slepin: Yeah. First of all, my day job—I’m a managing director and co-head of real estate at ZRG Partners. ZRG is one of the ten largest talent-oriented firms, headhunter firms, recruiting firms, human capital firms, in the world. And they bought my company, Terra Search Partners, three and a half years ago. So I’ve been part of ZRG for three and a half years. 

So in my day job, I’m a recruiter, executive recruiter, headhunter, whatever word you want to use for that. I’ve been in the business—I’ve had a career for 45 years or some scary number like that—and I started my career in the multifamily business. Right out of college I was a multifamily lobbyist. And so that’s what got me into this. 

Then about seven years ago, along with the Urban Land Institute, I started a podcast called Leading Voices in Real Estate. You were my last guest, of course, and it was one of my favorite shows. I’ll explain why later on. I have a lot of favorite children though, but you were definitely one of them. So that’s the overview.

2:49: Multifamily lobbying

Tyler Christiansen: I can’t help but double click on that then, because I don’t know that I knew that detail of multifamily lobbying. Obviously today I can imagine a lot of topics where lobbyists may be involved, and we’ve got a lot of legislation in the news in multifamily. But what were the topics du jour when you came into the industry?

3:06: Low-income housing co-ops

Matt Slepin: First of all, I was a lobbyist for co-op housing. So even more specific than multifamily generally. And co-op housing is a small niche in the multifamily world. It was an older model to create new multifamily housing with ownership by the resident. Condos came after co-ops. There are a lot of co-ops in New York and all over the country. Maybe a third—I’m going to make up a number—are low-income housing co-ops. So the part that I lobbied for most was low-income housing co-ops. 

That got me started on the pathway toward multifamily. I found that I didn’t like lobbying that much. I wasn’t purely a low-income housing person, but I was really interested in the business, and that got me into a business career in multifamily. 

After a brief career in lobbying, I started at the National Housing Partnership, which was then the largest owner and manager of multifamily properties in the country. This is back in the mid-eighties.

4:20: What lessons from those days do you take with you?

Tyler Christiansen: Interesting. Yeah. I think folks who listen to this podcast understand the nuance, but I’m sure like me you often describe to people that you’re in real estate, and then within that, residential, and within that, rental. And then within that, there are additional slivers as you articulated—each with its own nuanced opportunities and challenges. 

I’m curious though, Matt, if we turn back to those earlier days in your career, are there any lessons that you take from that? We do have a lot of folks listening. Part of the genesis of this podcast is that we bring a lot of younger individuals into the rental housing space. They often ask, because the way they learn is through podcasts, “What podcasts are there for multifamily?” So of course we point them to you. What lessons early in your career do you take that you still keep with you today?

5:04: Dig deep and focus on the long game

Matt Slepin: Yeah, a bunch of lessons. One is: there’s a lot of luck in business. You wind up in places you didn’t expect. I was lucky to enter the apartment business as a sector of the commercial real estate world. That was interesting to me. I didn’t know about the rest of commercial real estate. So one is synchronicity—how do you find the place you’re going to wind up in? For me, that was apartments. In my search career it broadened into all forms of real estate, and my podcast covers all forms of real estate. 

Multifamily is one of the most networked sectors in real estate, and one of the warmer sectors. It’s about people. Industrial is not about people—it’s about other things. I love industrial, I love retail, but multifamily has more of a community dynamic within the industry. It’s more cooperative—that’s the wrong word, but it sounds a little Pollyanna. It’s an industry where we share a lot of information and compete with our friends, versus brutally competing with each other. That’s one lesson. Luck for me was apartments, and I love it.

The second thing is digging deep. When I joined the National Housing Partnership, I dug deep into congregate care. I was an early mover, and I was too early a mover. I didn’t know anything about seniors housing—which we then called congregate care. I spent five years in that business. It was fascinating, but when it failed at NHP, I left and didn’t come back. I always somewhat regretted that, because if I had stuck with it I would’ve been successful, and it would have been an interesting career. 

So one thing is: dig deep. Another is the long game. That’s a theme throughout my career. The wisdom I’ve developed is: you’re going to be here for a while, so treat people well. Use your network. Build a lasting network, because the folks you work with today, you’re going to know for 40 years. Maybe that’s the biggest lesson.

7:39: How has multifamily talent transitioned over time?

Tyler Christiansen: That’s a great lesson. Especially to your point, you and I—and folks listening—fell into a portion of the sector, but like you said, it’s warm and networked. I certainly didn’t think I’d stay in it, much like most folks, but here I am and I can’t imagine leaving. Therefore those relationships are really investments. Every single one of them—you’re going to circle back and find the same individuals. Their titles may have changed, yours too, but it’s important. 

Maybe if I unpack that a bit: in your role as headhunter, executive recruiter, you’re constantly working through that network of individuals. You mentioned you work broadly in real estate, but keeping an eye on the past here, I’m curious how you’ve seen multifamily as an asset class—and even just how attractive it is to talent—transition over time. When I was on your podcast, I talked about growing up in multifamily. My father was an asset manager. He and I talk about how multifamily as an asset class has become more attractive—at least from institutional capital flowing into rental housing. 

I’m curious from a talent perspective, if you’ve seen macro trends across industrial, office, retail, how that’s shifted over the 40 years you’ve been in the industry.

9:00: How multifamily became a premier investment class

Matt Slepin: Let’s go into this, because it’s a great question. First of all, when I started in the industry, multifamily was not an institutional investment class. 

Let’s pause on that and let that weigh down. There was hardly an institutional real estate investment class back then. The two property types that were institutional grade—whatever that means—were office and shopping malls. That’s because a big investor could put an office building or major shopping mall on the cover of their annual report and say, “Hey, we did this.” 

Multifamily didn’t have a property type with national awareness. Those were the two institutional classes. It took a long time for the business to change. Eventually people realized multifamily was a safer investment—more predictable. The capital dynamics of multifamily were more aligned.

I wound up running an organization called the Multifamily Housing Institute prior to becoming a recruiter. It came out of the S&L crisis. It was an industry effort asking: how does multifamily become more of a respected investment class? This was right before the REITs. They wanted to create a database for transparency in multifamily performance. 

My job for three years was to try to create that database—this was 25 or 30 years ago—to show Wall Street and other capital sources that multifamily was a safe investment. Reality eclipsed that effort—we didn’t need to do it, plus technologically we couldn’t. 

But it got me thinking about what multifamily meant as an investment class. Over time, multifamily became the premier class. Industrial has come close, but those two have been the darlings for the last 20 years and are predicted to go forward.

11:28: What about multifamily makes it a good investment class?

Tyler Christiansen: You did this when I was on your show, so I’m gonna go off script for a minute, Matt, you just keep piquing my interest. I’m gonna put you on the spot. What are those financial dynamics that make multifamily so attractive?

Where my brain goes, and I don’t know the answer to this, I’m not leading the witness here—but where my brain goes is lease terms. Because in hospitality you can go from full occupancy to zero overnight. In office, obviously with COVID, we’ve seen this overhang where, yeah, a 15- or 30-year lease term gives you some protection, but it also leaves you really exposed, because at some point there’s a cliff coming.

Multifamily, the lease length has always been, to me, something that institutional investors must like. You can participate in the upside when rents are growing, but you’re also protected a little bit on the downside.

What other dynamics are you referencing when you talk about why multifamily became the darling that it is?

12:19: The business of necessity

Matt Slepin: I think it’s just demographics actually. There’s a need for housing, right? And interest rates and the kind of relationship between single family and multifamily which has—I’m gonna get this wrong—like 35 to 45% has been multifamily within a band, maybe 33%. And what part is institutional multifamily versus mom-and-pop multifamily, which is a whole ’nother conversation.

But the dynamics between single family and multifamily have driven this to be a business of necessity.

Grocery-anchored retail is a necessity business. You’re gonna have grocery stores, right? So that driver’s just not gonna go away and was really saved through COVID for the same reason. But multifamily has a long-term investment thesis, and it’s going to be required. We could see the demographics, you could predict the demographics. The question is, do we overbuild at various points in time?

13:15: Did you see this coming in property management?

Tyler Christiansen: So your role in various forms, definitely as somebody who finds and allocates and places talent—is really thinking about how do we manage, run, invest these assets. 

I’m curious, just segueing into kind of the theme of all of our content around role specialization, centralization. If you go back in time, and now it’s becoming an institutional investible class—you mentioned obviously the emergence of REITs, which I would highlight.

I think actually, Matt, the way I found you was you did a great podcast with Camden. I have to think that it must have been, was it Keith Oden or Rick Campo? It was Keith, the dean of Camden, and Rick Campo. So yeah, Keith Oden. And in that I found that fascinating, and there’s some really great observations for folks to listen to about the innovation of the REIT and the ability to invest from a single balance sheet. Love that podcast.

But take us back then to the staffing needs. When you would be called up and somebody was saying, “Hey, this is what I’m looking for,” who were the people we were striving to get on our team? Were they coming from the REITs, were they coming from the asset manager side? And then even down to the property level, did you see this early emergence of really standardized property management proliferating across the industry?

14:34: Thinking about multifamily as a business, not an asset

Matt Slepin: So let’s think about a couple different trends together. You and I talked about this somewhat, although I was teeing it up for you to answer the question. So now we’ll flip this and we’ll go back to NHP because it was interesting.

NHP was then the largest owner of apartment buildings, and they hired a guy—I mentioned this on my show when we did our show together—named Lindsey Crump. And Lindsey Crump was the first head of property management for NHP. And again, they were the largest owner. There were not that many other really large owners.

And Lindsey came, I think, from the bowling alley business. The model was: you put three people on the property, or four or five people on the property, and they report to district people, and they report to regional people, and they report to management people who report to a central office. So it was this massively decentralized model.

And let’s play with two different thoughts here. That’s property management, and if you make that better and better—then oh, we were scared to put computers on site. I remember this. We were terrified to put computers on site. They didn’t have phones where they could already do it, so it didn’t matter, but whatever the deal was.

So how do you perfect the model of decentralization, which was what it was all about? At the same time, the most successful people in the business were like the merchant builders. They were deal people. There was nothing more than deal people in the business. So the merchant builders, Trammell Crow Residential, Lincoln Property Company—these people were the behemoths of the industry and they knew how to build.

So there was a transaction version of this, and there was also the property management version, which we just talked about. Those two models—all of a sudden REITs came along. The REITs flipped that on its head. And the flip on its head was: I don’t have 70 properties, I have one balance sheet. I don’t have 70 balance sheets, I have one balance sheet that might include 70 properties or whatever it is. Now I have to think about it as a business and not as a group of assets.

That changes both the attitudes towards the deal people, because once you’re big enough the next deal doesn’t move the needle very far. What moves the needle is how you own and operate this portfolio that you wind up keeping for a while. And between that and then technology breakthroughs, the concept of the fully decentralized model got flipped on its head.

And it hasn’t been worked through yet. We’re still in the middle of that. You’re a lot in the middle of that, because your technology is one of the ones that helped move that needle. 

So then the question is: what kind of people run these companies that are largely a big pool of existing assets versus deal people? Now we need CEOs who know how to run a business, and then we need people up and down that organization. And the nature of those people will change over that period of time.

17:42: Multifamily’s homegrown talent

Tyler Christiansen: I think folks need to understand that impetus, that starting point. And again, I’m very grateful for the REITs. And unsurprisingly, to your point, as we’ve unpacked, the REITs were the first ones to really push Funnel into that centralization journey.

So thinking through that lens of, okay, we now need to have operators, not just deal makers, not just the transactional side. I’m curious, those conversations that you’ve had over time, what, and this is again maybe a little unscripted, but how many folks had that hands-on experience? And is that why perhaps we’ve seen a lot of homegrown talent? I think there are certain organizations like a Camden, like an Archstone, that I see them all over the board. Right? It’s not surprising to me on any given week that I’ll meet an executive on an intro call and it turns out they were at one of five organizations in the early nineties.

So I’m curious how you saw that talent, where it started. Because I would imagine, similar to centralization today—you were joking a second ago about property management being, you throw a couple people on site and there’s a regional manager. I was laughing because that still is 90% of how the industry operates. We’re still very early innings, to your point, of really moving to a centralized model.

But again, take me back to this time in which we moved from deal makers to actual kind of operational executives. More of the Lindsey Crumps of the world coming in and running multifamily. But I would imagine most folks in your job, when someone hires you, is to find the talent that exists inside of the organizations, inside of the NHPs, and move them elsewhere. 

So is that what the early dynamics were like? A lot of competition for a small group of folks?

19:12: Talent opportunities and challenges in multifamily

Matt Slepin: There’s both. Yes, there’s both competition to bring in those people from the other organizations—that’s better. I use this word all the time: I want to find a candidate who has a playbook from an organization that I really respect. And that also might be a different way of doing business than you have in a company.

So let’s explore a couple of themes. One theme at a company is that people love to have longevity of their senior staff. So I had this great meeting at one of the companies that we talked about in our last conversation. And when I go around the country, I’ll visit with a client, and this particular meeting was great. They brought me into their boardroom and the whole executive team was there.

And so we just had a chat: “Hey, let’s talk to Matt.” So it was really cool. And one of the things that these seven white guys—all of whom were over 50 years old—said to me in that meeting was, “We have a strength, but we also have a problem. The strength is our longevity and how long we’ve worked together, but that’s also our problem. Our investors are starting to get upset with us because… when you’ve worked together too long, you have no outside perspectives. That’s the part I care about, as well as some diversity of perspectives. Diversity of perspective—what does that mean for a company? So that’s thought number one in solving this.

But let me also—you’re making me think of another part in multifamily management. That’s another theme here. That’s both an opportunity and a challenge, and one of the themes in the apartment business. Old school, but still the same school today: where do people get started in this business?

A whole lot of people get seduced when they go to college and who take a job as a leasing agent on site. They get discounted rent and they start to make money, and it’s a lovely thing. And in the history of this business, in property management, three quarters of the people who I’ve interviewed in that multifamily property management business came into the business that way.

And of that group of folks, a bunch of them get a little bit lazy and seduced because the money’s good, the promotions are good. They either don’t finish college—half of them don’t finish college. I remember something that the Irvine Company did—this is now 20 years ago—and it was a big deal and maybe the wrong deal the way they did it. But it was: we’re not gonna promote anyone to vice president, or whatever the title was, who doesn’t have a college degree.

And that damaged a bunch of their people in hierarchy who came into the business. One of them is a good friend of mine—and might be of yours as well—who then got an MBA, not having gotten a college degree. Really interesting thing. I knew the pathway that one could do that. So that broke that rule for this person, who became an entrepreneur in the business and did an amazing job.

But that limitation—there’s a Peter Principle limitation—that we have a whole lot of really talented, really wonderful people, but then they don’t have the academic or intellectual background to know how to do management at a higher level. So then thinking through what that higher level looks like—we are still challenged in the industry.

22:50: Balancing organizational backgrounds

Tyler Christiansen: Yeah, that’s a really great point. And I think that transition continues to happen. You referenced earlier the pushback on bringing computers on site. Obviously we’re in an era now where technology is rapidly advancing. There’s AI, there’s—everyone recognizes, more than ever, the need to embrace it.

But similarly, the talent dynamic continues to be one I observe: this balancing act where we’re gonna bring in non-multifamily executives who have great consulting and educational backgrounds, but they may not understand or appreciate the operational wherewithal that’s required. And so often I see a disconnect within organizations, particularly large organizations, of professional management versus operational management.

And as you described, they often came from two entirely different backgrounds. I think where you see really great operational excellence and great cultures is when you can marry those two things: bring best-in-class hospitality-level experiences into our industry, and marry that with boots-on-the-ground multifamily operations.

23:50: Bringing in the cowboys

Matt Slepin: Hang on one second, because I interrupted the answer to your question with the story about leasing people. And the question really is: where do the leaders come from for our companies?

When I think about the leaders, a lot of the existing talent can’t get to the next level. That’s one of the limitations of the pool. And if you go back 20 years, a lot of that pool were deal people. I call them the cowboys—deal people, cowboys, whatever word you want to use.

So who knows how to run a $20 billion public company? Who has that skillset? Some of them have come up inside the industry, and now we’ve grown people like that. But we’ve also brought in leaders from other sectors with similar behavior patterns.

For example, there were more sophisticated people in hospitality, which you mentioned earlier. Aimco was famous 20-some years ago, when they were the biggest—they bought NHP, the company I worked at. Aimco brought in a lot of people from the rental car industry. These were more educated people who knew how to work in a very hierarchical organization, but they also brought a different kind of sophistication and different experiences that added to our toolbox in the apartment business.

25:13: First impressions of centralization and role specialization

Tyler Christiansen: I think it’s why you mentioned before—the demographics of multifamily continue to support it being a great asset. I think for the line of work that you’re in, we’ll continue to have talent management challenges where individuals are trying to find that unicorn hire with just the right degree of experience in all the fields.

And now I want to unpack this. Still looking in the past, let’s look at the more recent past—when you first heard about this new concept of centralization and role specialization. Tell us about that, and how it was described to you as novel or unique, or how it was shifting away from traditional property management.

25:46: You will always need humans on site

Matt Slepin: So if you take that old hierarchy, the question is: what can be centralized?

The first places I heard about this—let me suggest some disconnect, and then some early seeds. Some disconnect was a bunch of the organizations I mentioned before, like Trammell Crow Residential. They had regional partners. Lincoln had regional partners. All the regional partners had a regional CFO. So the accounting and reporting would come up through the regional office. Someone might be sitting in Philadelphia, or DC, or San Francisco, and that regional partner would manage their management people. Then somehow it might be rolled up to a central company at TCR, Lincoln, or whoever. But everyone did it their own way.

That drove me nuts. It didn’t make any sense. Even then it didn’t make any sense. So that’s story number one—things that had to be fought through to make the changes that have since occurred in the industry.

Then there were early seeds of companies getting ready to do this. One was BRE years ago. I was sitting with Connie and Ed, who were kind of president and CEO of that organization. And the concept was, “Okay, we’re gonna start some hubs here.” And they ran toward that on an early basis. That’s now Essex.

Essex is one of the early adopters of this. Archstone was one of the early adopters—“let’s figure out how to do this.” EQR, early on, they had three regional presidents as their way of decentralizing. “We can’t be this big and know how to do it.” So they had three regional presidents. I’m assuming they then had centralized accounting.

So the first thing that centralizes is accounting, because people use one of the two, three, or four accounting systems to make that work. That would’ve been the early part. Then past accounting, maybe revenue management would be early. So you’re now taking little pieces of this and centralizing them.

Not everything can be central. We know you need humans, and you need humans on sites. The balance is still being discovered.

28:08: AI + humans = the future of multifamily 

Tyler Christiansen: A hundred percent. Yeah. And just to point to something you said—I think we’re swinging a little far toward “AI’s gonna do it all.” And I think the organizations that are leaning into, “Okay, yes, we’re gonna embrace AI, but humans are still necessary.”

So maybe let me use that as a segue to this question. You’ve now been part of multiple disruptive technologies—whether that was bringing computers on site, then in the early 2000s moving to cloud-based systems, and today, AI.

Matt, as you think about these disruptive technologies, first I’d like to understand: what are the reasons not to change? What are the headwinds or impediments that might cause somebody not to embrace a new disruptive technology right out of the gates?

28:54: The headwinds embracing new technology

Matt Slepin: So let’s think of a couple things that are traditional in our business. I already spoke about the regional partner model that Lincoln and Trammell Crow Residential had. That makes it pretty difficult if you have a regional partner who’s empowered. And part of their compensation—which drives a lot of these things—compensation, power, and control—is decentralized in a lot of these businesses.

Taking more control, while still enabling your local partners to be entrepreneurial, is a balancing act and a trick.

We talked about it in the recent podcast with the new co-CEOs of Lincoln Property Company, who are finding a new balance within their organization where everything had been decentralized. So that’s place number one where it’s difficult.

Place number two is third-party management, which drives a lot of the apartment business—as well as other forms of commercial real estate. If I’m serving 30 different owners in my portfolio, will those owners all agree to the same technologies? The same tech stack? The same accounting software? The answer’s no.

So I have to have some diversity among them. And will they accept going through a call center, where the person answering the phone might send a caller to five different properties, only one of which is owned by me? That’s a headwind.

And then the final headwind is: I’m a sole owner, but I have everything in different partnerships. So I have 50 different partnerships for my 50 properties. That’s 50 different owners, even though I’m one entity. How do I both account for that and justify that kind of sharing?

So those headwinds make it difficult.

One other: it’s relatively easy in a concentrated portfolio—either a very large one, or concentrated in one region. But if I have a portfolio scattered across the country, I don’t know what to do with it. It’s harder to centralize.

Oh, and last point: what do you do about affordable housing, which has yet another set of dynamics? That might be a third of the portfolio of institutional-scale real estate.

31:19: Opportunity to centralize is too great to not figure it out

Tyler Christiansen: Yeah, great point. And we’re seeing those turn up as real-world impediments—blockers and headwinds. But like any challenge, there lies the opportunity.

I think the opportunity is too great today with the mega managers to not figure it out. You go back to your story related to Lindsay Crump and the size—you just look at it and think, there’s got to be some economies of scale here.

I completely agree that it’s similar to what’s happening in the automobile industry right now. The structure itself is impeding the Fords and GMs of the world from mirroring the Tesla or Rivian sales model. Because they make their money from the franchises—the dealerships. It’s ingrained.

But I think these mega managers—there’s just too much incentive for them not to figure out how to centralize. So we’re seeing that in some inside baseball. But you’re right—there are real impediments. It’s much harder for them than for Camden, who owns everything. For Camden, cross-selling is great, shared resources are great.

32:23: The answer is a balancing act

Matt Slepin: The answer’s not going to be either one-size-fits-all, or full centralization is the answer. The answer is a balancing act, and that balancing act will be bespoke to each company. You have to be flexible to figure that out. That’s point number one.

Point number two—a story I tell often. I was on a bike trip, we were climbing the Canadian Rockies with a Backroads trip, with my wife Diane. And there was a couple from Pittsburgh. They rode a tandem bike. They were older—probably my age now. Back then, they were in their sixties.

They were a really interesting, quirky couple. I said, “Where do you live? What do you do?”

The guy goes, “I own apartment buildings in Pittsburgh.”I said, “Whoa, okay. I’m Matt Schlepian, I’m into apartment buildings. Let’s talk about this.”

So we talked, and he owned—let’s say—five pretty big apartment buildings in Pittsburgh.

I asked him about turnover. “What’s your turnover of residents? What’s your turnover of staff?” Which we know is about 50% for both staff and residents, average in the industry.

“No.” His resident turnover was maybe 20% per year. His staff turnover maybe 5% per year. You go to work for him and you die in the job. He had efficiencies and pricing power that beat anything you could do. 

So what does that mean? What’s the right answer there?

For him—he was centralized, right? Because he had five properties in one area.

But anyhow, the answers aren’t always what they seem to be. And the trends don’t just go blindly in one direction. At the end of the day, it’s a balancing act. That’s my belief.

34:09: Centralization, AI and human-centric leadership

Tyler Christiansen: I think those trends you referenced—if we come to the modern day and what we’re seeing in the market… Again, highly recommend everybody listening to your podcast Leading Voices in Real Estate.

And in listening to the episodes this year, there are some clear themes: centralization, AI, and also a very human-centric leadership style from the guests you bring on.

As you talk with these leaders, how do you land on those themes? And maybe tying that back to your last statement about nuance—it almost feels the same way I’ve described technology. Right now, it’s an amazing time to be running a business. It’s a scary time, it’s a hard time, but AI gives you so many new opportunities. It’s a challenge, it’s a threat, it’s also an opportunity.

To me it feels similar in real estate. It’s a very trying, difficult, hard, but also exciting time, with the changing operating model and the introduction of AI. And that third theme, human-centric leadership, seems more important than ever.

And the example you just gave validates that, you don’t have to be a mega-manager. Even a five-property manager might have a unique opportunity to outperform.

35:16: Career opportunities

Matt Slepin: Absolutely true. And if you think about where money is to be made—the person who has five properties and sells them all, they’re gonna make a lot of dough.

A middle manager in another company may have a 50-year career and never get to the place of that person who did five great deals.

35:34: Advice for multifamily career opportunities

Tyler Christiansen: That, to me, feels like an opportunity. So you get to help fill executive roles. And often, as we discussed, those executive and leadership roles are people who’ve proven it, who’ve done it, who’ve earned their way up in the industry.

What advice would you give to folks who are maybe mid-career, as they’re navigating these different opportunities?

35:55: The key to finding your role in multifamily

Matt Slepin: A couple different comments here. First, it’s not about money. We were just talking about money in that example, and money is really cool. Some people are gonna get really rich. Other people are gonna be really comfortable and retire well. But what does that mean?

There are folks who chase getting rich as their career goal. They should be brokers, let them do that. Or they should be massive entrepreneurs, that’s gonna work for them.

But for most of us, the role is: find a place where you have passion and where you love the business. Find a role where you have passion and where you’re really good.

I had trouble finding that role for myself within this business. It took me years. I became a headhunter—which is kind of a weird role in the business. This is not the average role people think about. Most people think they need to be a deal person or an investment person, because that’s the sexy part of the business.

But for others it might be asset management, it might be property management. The key is: what fits your personality, your skillset, where you’re gonna thrive and enjoy yourself? And it might even be the technology side. It just depends.

37:25: Detours can help

Tyler Christiansen: I would say to that point—just briefly to interrupt you—I think right now many operators I talk to are looking for folks with technology experience. And to your point, that probably historically would’ve been viewed almost as a demotion, like, “Oh, you went to tech.”

But now, many of the people who took a detour into technology are the ones being elevated to operations leadership. So I just wanted to validate that comment.

37:45: Stay curious

Matt Slepin: And you can’t be technology-backward if you want to be successful in your career. You just can’t.

So let me give a couple things that I’ve loved. For me, I have a lot of curiosity, thank God. I’d never get through the podcast otherwise, or the interviews I do. I’ve interviewed 10,000 people. I’ve done the 10,000-hour thing. Luckily I’m curious, instead of just goal-oriented.

Let me double-click on that for a minute. This is one of the mantras I tell people: I do 90-minute interviews as a recruiter. Most recruiters do 30, 45, maybe 60 minutes. And yeah, you can get it done in 30. I could figure out in 30 minutes if someone’s a candidate. And if they’re not, I should just hang up, hit the red button and say, “Sorry, you’re done.” But I don’t. I do 90 minutes.

Now, people tell me I waste time, because that extra 60 minutes isn’t helping the client. But in that extra time, I learn as much as I can about their organization, their prior boss, what they loved, what they learned, what they did. And even if they’re not a candidate, I walk away with all this data that’s really valuable.

Plus, I’ve made a relationship. And I’ll talk to them again.

So find the area you love. Take the time. It’s not about the direct hit or the straight line to success. It might be a more circuitous route. For me, that extra 60 minutes was a commitment I made, and after 20 years, it paid off. It’s just the way I do it.

39:27: Advice for a career in multifamily

Tyler Christiansen: Yeah. That’s wonderful. And if I were to then ask, as a follow-up, Matt, thinking about something you’ve invested in for the last, what, 40 years? And really, to your point, this 20-year ROI. What advice would you give to somebody newer in the industry, who’s just coming in? And maybe in particular, as you think about the leadership opportunities that will be presenting themselves, where would you encourage them to focus their efforts?

Is it learning from individuals? You have this unique opportunity—not everybody gets to interview folks for 90 minutes all the time. So is it about being open-minded to lateral moves? Or is it more about focusing on the areas where the industry is headed, like technology?

I’m just curious, if someone were to start their career in multifamily today, and even if you put yourself in those shoes, what would you do differently to align with where the industry is headed?

40:15: Finding success in multifamily careers

Matt Slepin: So a couple different thoughts. First, once you say, “Okay, I kind of like this industry,” then don’t dabble. Dig deep. Stay with it. Have the realization that you’re probably gonna be in this industry for the next 30 years. What does that mean for you? For your relationships? For your learning? For your behavior? Because you can spend more time investing in those early years. 

Find the role within the industry that fits your personality, your skillset, your intellectual capabilities, all the rest. What’s the role that’s gonna fit? Then, how can you keep learning every day on the job, and get better at that job? Don’t rest.

One of the things I’ve found in conversations with amazing leaders in this business is, they’re ambitious, they’re smart, they’re relentless. Not everyone is ambitious, smart, and relentless. You don’t have to be all of that. You can be half of that.

But how are you pressing your career a little bit harder, with a little bit more ambition than you might naturally have? Go to your areas of discomfort. That’s another thing I tell people. Learn in the areas you don’t know about. So you have a broader perspective.

Context is really important. Versus: “I know my job, I do it really well. I don’t know how it fits in, but it doesn’t matter, I do my job. I’m a widget.” Don’t be a widget. If you’re a widget, you’re in danger.

But most of the listeners to your podcast are already curious. They’re going somewhere. They wouldn’t be spending the time listening to this if they weren’t.

41:57: Understand your role

Tyler Christiansen: Yeah. Well said. I love that last point, because that’s something even at Funnel I struggle with. One of my leaders recently told me he needed help connecting some of the team members to the company goals.

And I thought—wow, I’ve never had that challenge in my career. I’ve always intellectually wanted to understand how important what I was doing was to where the company was going.

42:17: Become strategic, know what’s next

Matt Slepin: And one thing I say to my team, which fits the same theme. So, easier for me to talk about: we have a search. We have to fill a job. We have to get five candidates who are worthy of the job to the client. Then we move on to the next thing. That’s pretty straightforward.

But if we push it harder, and we play two-, three-, four-level chess… Every conversation we have with everybody—not just the two, three, four candidates the client sees, but the other ones I’m spending 90 minutes with—how are those valuable? How are those adding to your knowledge about the business? What are we learning through doing this search? What are we learning so we get the next search, and the next one, because we’ve become the experts in that vein of the business?

If you always approach your job that way—always looking at what’s next—you become more strategic. You’re looking for context, you’re looking for wisdom. And if you’re always pushing toward those things—those are soft words, but I think everyone will understand what I mean in the context of their job.

43:22: Invest in relationships

Tyler Christiansen: Yeah. Love that. And I also want to reiterate something you said: if you’re gonna be in the industry, in my experience, if someone lasts more than 18 months, they’re probably in it for 30 years.

And too many people underestimate that fact. They don’t invest in the relationships, they don’t invest in the knowledge, especially as you just articulated.

It’s remarkable to me how many people I know who’ve been in the industry 10+ years, and they’re still not experts. They’re still not curious about the latest laws, the latest supply impacts, and so on.

I think there’s a common thread with top performers, whether in technology, operations, or asset management, they’re passionate and curious about the vertical they serve. So I loved that advice. You might as well, you’re gonna be here, you might as well invest in it.

44:08: Know the business

Matt Slepin: And if you’re in sales, which I guess I am, people say, “Hey, you must have a great network.” And sure, that network is part of it. And being able to connect with people and remember them, that’s a bit of it. But I’d say only a bit.

For the best salespeople, and I’m sure it’s the case at Funnel, they know the heck out of their business. So when they’re talking to a client, they’re not just saying how great Funnel is. They’re problem-solving for that client.

And to problem-solve, you have to understand the heck out of operations, or whatever it is you’re working on. You have to understand the perspective of the person you’re selling to.

Engage at that level. Not, “Hey, what did you think about the baseball score last night?” That’s not interesting. Some salespeople think, “Oh, that’s how I warm them up.”

I say, let’s dive into the substance. Let’s discuss it deeply, intellectually. We’ll have so much fun. That’s my version of it.

45:06: The future of multifamily is long

Tyler Christiansen: I love that. Really well said.

Matt, we could dive in and keep discussing for hours. But we’re at time. So what I’d like to do is let folks get to know you a little better. We like to end with a few quick rapid-fire questions.

First one: we’ve got this little billboard out here—I’m in Tampa, Florida, right outside my window. What’s an opinion you feel so strongly about that you’d put it on a billboard? Could be multifamily-related, or otherwise.

Matt Slepin: Yeah. It fits what we’ve talked about. It’s a long game. Play the long game. Every day. Just remember that.

Tyler Christiansen: Love that. Alright, if you could retire and work on a philanthropic cause, Matt, what would it be?

Matt Slepin: At the moment, I’d say two. One is hunger. I’m co-founder of a food recovery organization in Northern California, so hunger is one. Housing, of course, would be another.

But also right now, we’re doing two podcasts in a row on disasters. And gosh, we have an increasing number of disasters because of climate. It just keeps coming. What happened in Texas last week? It could be an earthquake in California. We’ve had fires in California, fires that came to my back door years ago.

Those disasters, we’re just ill-prepared to deal with them. So those come to mind.

Tyler Christiansen: Amazing. If you wouldn’t mind sending us some info on the hunger organization, we’d love to put that in the show notes.

Last two: finish this sentence. The future of multifamily is…

Matt Slepin: Long. It’s gonna be there. Future. It’s demand. It’s need. It’s housing.

Tyler Christiansen: That’s really great. I love how you tied that together—from the beginning to the end, Matt.

And what’s a value or principle—you mentioned playing the long game. What’s a value or principle that you refuse to compromise on?

Matt Slepin: I’m pretty transparent. And transparency cuts both ways. It can scare people. Being direct and transparent scares people. It’s not always “nice.” But usually, it is—because it’s the truth. So I won’t compromise on that.

Tyler Christiansen: I love that. That’s great.

Matt, I’ve enjoyed our conversations. We’ve actually talked more on podcasts than in person at this point. But I really enjoyed getting to know you, and I’m grateful for the work you do in this industry that—as we both said—we both love, and we’ll be doing for a while. So thank you, Matt.

Matt Slepin: Thank you. Back at you. And we’ll do this over a meal sometime soon, I hope.