Hello, and welcome to another episode of Passive Real Estate Investing. I'm your host, Marco Santarelli. Thank you for joining me today. Today I want to talk about something that I plan to or intend to do on a regular basis, and that is a housing market spotlight, but it's not a spotlight, it's really just kind of the state of the union. It's what is going on in housing. In other words, let's look at housing, the economy, housing trends, and let me present that to you in a way that helps you understand what is going on and maybe where we're headed. You see, I spend literally thousands of dollars each and every month on data research analysis, and I take all that and I consume as much of it as I can, although that's actually pretty difficult given my schedule. I'm extremely busy. I'm running and managing and overseeing multiple businesses.

I travel a lot, and given whatever time I have, which is not much, I try to consume as much of this research and information as I can. My goal is to distill that down into nuggets of usable information that you can take to get an overview of what's going on, call it the 40,000 view of housing and the economy, high level stuff, but not stuff that you know is too data intensive or geeking out on the information so that way it's digestible and understandable by you. So my goal is to basically consume, consolidate, condense, and present or deliver this information to you on either a monthly or a bimonthly, bimonthly meaning every other month basis. So we'll see how it goes. And as far as the format for this, I'm not exactly sure how I wanna present it. I'm gonna experiment from episode to episode.

It will change, it will morph. I'll find a format and style that I like in order to present to you, and if you have any input or feedback, then let me know. Tell me if you like it, tell me if there's something you want me to change or something you want me to not discuss or something to add, but just feel free to provide me some feedback. But my goal is to basically provide you some useful information on a regular basis that I think you can take, whether you're a real estate investor or not. If you're a real estate investor, great. Doesn't matter whether you're seasoned and successful or a newbie and just getting started.

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So with that, let me begin by kind of setting the stage or the backdrop, if you will. So, Jon Gray, who's the president of Blackstone, the largest hedge fund in the world, this is a multi, multi-billion dollar company.

In fact, if I'm not mistaken, I should almost use the word trillions, but they have an unbelievable amount of assets under management. So Jon Gray, who's supposedly worth about 7 billion, and that's according to Bloomberg, started Invitation Homes back in 2012. Invitation Homes, I believe is the largest landlord in the country. They've literally purchased tens of thousands of properties. Now think about that. Imagine how how much capital went in to invitation homes in order to acquire tens of thousands of properties over the years. So they are the largest landlord and property owner in the country, and this was all driven by Jon Gray. So he obviously knows a thing or two about what's going on, and he's putting his money where his mouth is. And given what he knows, he's obviously making some pretty big bets. But in 2022 in the Wall Street Journal, he said, and I quote, never in his 30 year career had he seen real estate fundamentals stronger than now.

So that's a pretty strong statement. And if you think about it, if someone of this caliber and doing what they're doing is putting that much money behind acquiring tens of thousands of homes, and he's saying that the real estate fundamentals are that strong and he's talking about last year,