Published on July 25th, 2025
By Marc Frenkiel

What do three seasoned real estate leaders think about buying in today’s market, raising capital in a cautious environment, and using artificial intelligence (AI) to gain a competitive edge?

AppFolio recently hosted a panel of real estate investors for its Market Trends Roundtable: Top Investment Strategies in 2025. The conversation, moderated by Michael Sebastian of AppFolio, tackled the biggest questions facing investors this year — from interest rates to investor sentiment to the rise of AI.

Against the backdrop of lingering tariff uncertainty, elevated operating costs, and persistent questions around the timing of interest rate cuts, the discussion offered real-world insights into how investors are optimizing operations and staying ahead.

Why Industry Experts Are Buying in a Down Market

Despite headlines about economic uncertainty, all three panelists — Amanda Brown (Mag Capital Partners), Heath Binder (LBX Investments), and Kevin Conway (Ideal Capital Group) — agreed: they’re actively buying.

“We’re definitely net buyers in this market,” said Conway. “There has been a lot of dislocation. The last few years, prices have decreased 20-30%, depending on your market.”

Brown, focused on industrial real estate, emphasized a similar approach:

“We have continued to acquire real estate, regardless of the current market sentiment, over the past 10 years. We feel that it’s a good time to buy industrial right now. We have around 100 million dollars in industrial real estate set to fund in the next 60-90 days into [our] industrial Fund 3, which continues to attract investors as an immediate cash-flowing investment as a hedge against inflation with its triple net structure.”

Binder added that volatility creates opportunity for contrarian buyers such as LBX:

“We’re a little bit contrarian, and we’re value investors. So we like it when things are choppy. When it’s really smooth sailing, it’s a little bit harder for us because you go to bid on an asset, and there’s a bunch of others with cheap money and, I’d say, less stringent underwriting standards.”

Capital Raising in 2025: It’s All About Trust

Each panelist reported ongoing success with capital raising, but all noted that investor behavior has changed. 

Conway highlighted the strength of individual investor relationships:

“Last year, we raised a couple hundred million dollars exclusively from individuals. We didn’t raise institutional capital last year. We did that deliberately, though we probably could have raised institutional capital. And the reason is because, in our experience, a lot of times, institutions want to wait until the coast is clear before investing, which seems intuitive. But if you do that, then everybody else has already done that, and the price of the asset you’re purchasing reflects that amount. So we’ve been able to purchase a couple of things, a couple of deals, with friends and family money that we think were purchased at very good prices.”

Brown added that while capital is still available, investors’ due diligence processes are “a little bit longer, a little more cautious. That doesn’t mean that they’re not investing. We have a significant number of people who have capital to invest, but maybe they’re just a little more cautious in their due diligence and vetting out deals.”

Binder seconds this:

“Investors are looking at the sponsor first, before the deal, in a lot more cases. People rightly feel burned by suboptimal experiences.”

Interest Rates? No One Knows — But the Strategy Stays the Same

If there was one consensus on interest rates, it was that no one really knows what’s coming next. But all are building strategies that work either way.

Conway broke it down simply:

“One of two things will probably happen: Either we have this 37 trillion dollar national debt, and there’s pressure to keep interest rates lower, in which case it makes sense to buy real estate today because rates will be cheaper in the future, and your asset value will correspondingly be higher, or we are going to inflate our way out of this debt problem, in which case it makes sense to own real assets as well.”

 

Brown noted that they’re confident in their positioning as long as their acquisitions maintain a spread of 150-200 basis points over borrowing costs.

Operational Efficiency: The New Competitive Advantage

With cap rate compression no longer doing the heavy lifting, operational efficiency is now the key to outperforming. 

From staffing to construction oversight to investor communications, each panelist is investing in ways to do more with less:

• LBX hired a senior construction executive to control costs more tightly.
• Mag Capital expanded its internal teams and standardized systems to support consistent growth.
• Ideal Capital leverages platforms such as AppFolio to reduce time spent on admin, freeing up the team to focus on value creation.

AI in Real Estate: From Hype to Help

All three panelists shared how they’re already using AI — and where they’d like it to go next.

Brown says, “If you’re not using [AI], you should be. What would take me an hour now takes me a couple of minutes … It allows me to be more efficient in my day.”

Binder envisions an AI assistant for investor follow-up: “I would give it some information … and the AI would help remind me of something I need to do or just do it for me.”

Conway proposed a tool to surface local data for investor reports:

“Every quarter, we make investor reports, and as part of the investor report, we grab some data on what’s happening in the market. It could be a recent sale that we find favorable relative to our basis in the deal that we acquired. It could be a new office that opened that is going to house a thousand Deloitte employees next to a building. Whatever the case is, it’s some newsworthy thing that is out there on the internet and can be scraped and grabbed, takes us time to go do it, and an AI tool could easily do that instantaneously.”

Final Takeaway: Invest With Intention

Whether you’re in multifamily, retail, or industrial, the message from this roundtable was clear:

• Stick to your strategy.
• Focus on sponsor credibility.
• Use technology to scale and stay lean.
• Don’t wait for perfect timing — opportunity is now.

Brown summed it up:

“We owe it to our investors to be operationally efficient. We are stewards of their investment.”

Although the panelists primarily mentioned using generic AI tools — like ChatGPT — for tasks such as drafting memos or accelerating content creation, the most transformative impact will come from embedded AI: tools built into the core of real estate software.

When AI is native, not bolted on, it can drive smarter workflows, reduce errors, and surface insights in real time, without requiring your team to constantly switch between apps or build new processes around disconnected tools.

That’s the difference between using AI as a helper and running an AI-powered business.

Thousands of real estate businesses trust AppFolio to automate workflows, streamline operations, and achieve sustainable growth. Outdated systems and processes create inefficiencies, but AppFolio Investment Manager eliminates them, providing firms with everything they need to operate smarter and grow faster. Explore how AppFolio Investment Manager helps real estate teams grow smarter and operate more efficiently. Schedule a personalized walkthrough here.