Fundrise

The following is from a letter we shared with investors on August 29, 2024 entitled "Interest rate cuts set to begin a real estate bull market." -- The Fed has now signaled that it intends to begin cutting interest rates in September. Our experience is that falling rates increase real estate values, which would lead to positive returns over the next several quarters. As we’ve covered at length, real estate values are inversely correlated with interest rates. Rising rates in 2022 and 2023 led to lower values and negative returns for real estate. Now, the opposite is underway. As the Fed cuts interest rates, it makes it more affordable to borrow, allowing buyers to pay more for property. It’s a market axiom: Rising rates drive down real estate values. Falling rates drive them up. These lower values, however, created a once-in-a-decade buying opportunity, into which we’ve now deployed approximately $1 billion since the start of last year. With inflation falling (and likely to continue to fall), the Federal Reserve has stated that they expect to begin lowering rates as early as next month. As we’ve said before, the activities of today translate to the returns of tomorrow. And so, we intend to continue actively deploying into this temporary period of attractive pricing and higher yields. And accordingly, we expect that investors who continue to buy and hold through this period are likely to see stronger returns as a result. This easing of monetary policy, coupled with lower supply and higher demand, has the potential to begin a real estate bull market and create a goldilocks period for many of the strategies we are most active in today. -- This content is not investment advice, nor is it an offer of securities. All investments carry risk which could include loss.

“Literally, you are a masochist” —Scott Galloway I loved spending 25 minutes chatting with Scott and Ed Elson on the Prof G Markets Podcast. We discussed the evolution of private markets, and why entrepreneurs have to “embrace the suck.” https://lnkd.in/exMHxnwu

Are we vastly underestimating AI? with Dwarkesh Patel On the latest episode of Onward, Dwarkesh and I explore the future of artificial intelligence. Dwarkesh is inside the very small community of people who may, right now, be on the cusp of inventing artificial general intelligence. What gives him a real inside view is not only his conversations with the leaders of every major AI company—including the founders of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google’s DeepMind—but also his close friendships with his peers, who are the next generation of tech leaders inside these companies. Dwarkesh pulls back the curtain so that the broader public can understand what people who are actually building AI think is about to happen. Onward, the Fundrise podcast: - Listen on Apple Podcasts >> https://lnkd.in/eepAxRib - Listen on Spotify >> https://lnkd.in/eUnCPhfy

🎧 World of DaaS this week 🎧 Benjamin Miller (CEO of Fundrise) talks public/private market convergence, real estate tech, future of office + commercial, recession forecasting, and much more

Bloomberg News TV: Fundrise CEO on Retail Investing In Private Markets https://lnkd.in/eYhEwKh7 Bloomberg: “Startup Fundrise gives everyday people access to commercial real estate equity and states it's America’s largest direct-to-consumer private markets manager. Co-Founder and CEO Ben Miller discusses the state of commercial real estate and the role of AI. He joins Abigail Doolittle and Sonali Basak on "Bloomberg Markets." (Source: Bloomberg) Big thank you to Abigail Doolittle.

Benjamin Miller joined Squawk Box this morning to discuss Fundrise's efforts to democratize access to private tech companies.

[This is an excerpt from our end-of-year letter to investors, published Dec. 30, 2023. Link below.] It’s the big things that matter. We live in a world that demands a constant stream of new and interesting content to digest. Financial news sites like CNBC or Bloomberg update articles multiple times a day with theories and predictions about why things are moving in one direction or the other. And, as a result, we are prone to over-extrapolating a lot of the noise caused by “little things” that eventually just fade away into the background. Ultimately, it’s the few big things (more obvious often than we’d like to admit) that really matter. The past several years have seemingly been a steady stream of one random unprecedented event after the next, when in actuality they are the logical and sequential consequences brought about by the pandemic — it was the big thing. The onset of covid led to a global shutdown. The shutdown broke supply chains along with decades-old patterns and systems that had become ossified within both society and the economy. The response to the shutdown was unprecedented government stimulus, vast amounts of newly printed money, and a 0% interest rate monetary policy. This simultaneous shrinking of supply with a rapid expansion of demand led to inflation, which in turn led to the first significant rate hiking cycle in nearly 50 years. And rising interest rates led to a fall in asset values because, as we’ve now stated ad nauseam, prices move down when interest rates go up. As the system continues to work through the domino effect of unwinding the past several years, we still expect tighter monetary policy to result in an inevitable dampening of the broader economy, including slower growth, rising unemployment, and potentially a significant decline in stocks. The irony is that in some sense regardless of the reason rates come down—either because the Fed was right about a soft landing or we are correct about a recession—it’s strongly positive for real estate values and, in our expectation, the Fundrise portfolio (again, remember that in the near term lower interest rates boost real estate values). Read the full letter: https://lnkd.in/eJyUum-N

Despite the optimistic headlines, there's growing evidence behind the scenes that a recession could still be on the way. [Clip from Onward, ep. 32: "Buying the Bottom" with Benjamin Miller, released 12/30/2023]

Interest rates have an extraordinary impact on the short-term valuation of real estate assets, often regardless of the underlying fundamentals. See all of our funds' active and past projects at fundrise.com/assets. This content is not investment advice. All investments carry risk which could lead to loss.

The pandemic was the "meteorite dropped into the ocean," creating ripple effects throughout the economy that are still playing out today. This clip is from our podcast, Onward, ep. 32: "Buying the Bottom"