Exhaustion from 40 logins and AI: Results from a 20for20 white paper

Those totally resonate.

One thing that really caught me, not by surprise, but it definitely caught me in reading the 2026 paper is that you, the word of the year was exhaustion.

And I think that came through in a pretty clear way throughout the research and throughout the entire like writing of the paper, just the high rates and low transactions as you articulated it in the paper that operators are just really grinding on NOI and why org fatigue is finally becoming a consideration.

And I also think that this like tech bloat that comes through quite consistently year over year to me fed into exhaustion.

I'd love for you to unpack this one a little bit.

Maybe we can have a discussion about what exhaustion looks like and how we undo that to a degree to bring some of the energy and momentum back in.

Yeah, it's something I didn't really notice until I started reviewing the collective responses.

But that specific word kept coming up.

And whenever an unusual word keeps coming up in interviews, there's usually something behind it.

And basically, the voiceover behind exhaustion is that we're a balance sheet.

business, right? Most of what we do is to do with the building, trading, upgrading of real estate assets, right? And so everything that we do in operations plays out in that context.

And it means the cadence of work is different from most businesses, right? So the stuff when the property trading slows down, it means that people are hanging on to properties longer than perhaps they anticipated.

And there's this big focus on the P&L, right, on NOI, right? And the thing is that's countercultural.

And so if we think about what people have been saying about performance each of the last, or at least the outlook over each of the last three years since the interest rate thing really started to bite, People have basically been looking forward to the year ahead in more or less exactly the same way.

It's, oh, it's going to be rough because there's all this extra supply on the market, but things will get better probably second half around Q4.

And it's been exactly the same prediction for the last three years.

And while there's good reason to think third time might be a charm in this case, This period is a grind, right? Because it's not, certainly if you weren't around at the time of the global financial crisis in this industry, you haven't had this experience of multiple years of just really sharp focus on the bottom line of every property in your portfolio.

Most companies in most industries, that's what work is normally like, but it's just, that's not what multifamily is like because it's this balance sheet industry.

So on the one hand, you've got all of these eyes on every controllable expense decision that you make, and there's no rent growth to cover the margins like there normally is.

And at the same time, you've had this very productive period of changing stuff.

You know, back in 2024, for example, or 2023, people were saying, okay, well, if property trading is going to be slow this year, we've got a bit more bandwidth to change some stuff about how we operate.

And that sort of helped move centralization along.

But if you think after multiple years of constant focus on the bottom line and also changing a lot of stuff about my business, generally people are ready for the next cycle to start.

Oh, for sure.

No, well said.