Assertion Supported
Mullen: Institutional rentals invest billions annually in new home construction
“We're putting billions every year into building new houses that during a cycle like this wouldn't take place.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mullen: TPG-Angelo Gordon deal marks the start of a massive M&A wave
“I think you're going to see what Angelo Gordon did with TPG is the beginning of a massive wave of this. There's a lot of mergers that are going to take place.”
Opinion
Mullen: Bear Stearns was a sales firm, not a trading shop
“And Bear Stearns wasn't a trading firm, despite the image of it. It was a sales firm.”
Disclosure
Mullen: Pretium pivoted to buying owner-occupied 21st-century homes
“We ended up having to map the industry out by only buying owner-occupied houses, so houses that homeowners are choosing to sell, and therefore, we're buying high-quality assets, not distressed assets, and by driving homogeneity in the earliest phases, similar …”
Assertion Supported
Mullen: US housing shortage is between 3 and 7 million homes
“And whether you look at Stanford, Harvard, Fannie Mae, almost any economic analyst will tell you we're short somewhere between three and seven million houses.”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Mullen: Pretium will likely acquire 15,000 to 20,000 houses in 2023
“And now in portfolios, as an example, we'll probably buy 15 to 20,000 houses this year. But almost entirely in portfolio form.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mullen: Internal operations drove Pretium's rental NOI margins to 65%
“When I owned houses and those folks serviced my house, you had NOI margins of like 30%. When we put an asset management layer and create a federation of them and force tech on them, we were able to get to 45%. Once we built our internal structure where we did …”
Insight
Mullen: Smaller SFR operators lack scale to run internalized operations efficiently
“The next tier down just doesn't have the scale for owning your own workforce, owning the strategic purchasing, being able to rent houses because of your advertising budget in a more efficient way.”
Assertion Contradicted
Mullen: Pre-COVID data shows Americans stay in single-family homes until age 74
“If you went back to the data, you turned 60 years old, and you moved out of a single-family home, and it was like a rock dropping out of the sky how fast the curve goes down. And you looked at that same curve in 2019 pre-COVID, which is gonna make this even mo…”
Opinion
Mullen: Acquiring asset management teams is currently far better than organic growth
“I think that acquiring people right at this moment is far more attractive than it is doing it organically. 24 months ago, it was all about organics. Now it's about acquisitions.”
Insight
Mullen: Institutional allocators find unconstrained absolute return mandates unappealing
“While a lot of people like to be absolute return people, most of the investors that I've come in contact really find that abhorrent. Just like, how do I allocate that into my broader portfolio that the mandate is do whatever the hell you want.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mullen: Private credit will experience a default cycle impacting distressed investing
“I think some of the categories that will morph private credit's going to change a lot over time, and we're going to have a default cycle in private credit, which will have a impact on distressed investing,
They'll have a new round of expertise required.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mullen: Office real estate faces massive restructuring spilling into other sectors
“It's going to be a massive restructuring of that space. I suspect it'll spill into others, and so the debt part of that market is going to be great.”
Insight
Mullen: Allocators face no penalty for choosing consensus giants like Blackstone
“The infrastructure of it is a little bit reminiscent of the Apple, IBM computer debate of the nineties, where it's like you were never incented to buy an Apple product if you were a corporate purchasing person, because you got no penalty for buying IBM and you…”
Disclosure
Mullen: Goldman Sachs initially rejected him as a cultural misfit after 56 interviews
“I then spent, must have been 56 people or something crazy, A person who's pretty well known from Goldman Sachs reaches out to me and says, listen, after 56 interviews, we come to the conclusion you just don't fit here. You're culturally a bad fit. We think you…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mullen: Goldman's leveraged finance desk took less risk than 1980s Salomon
“When I ran Goldman Sachs' leverage finance trading desk businesses, we weren't as big in some things as Salomon Brothers had been 15 years earlier. The scale of risk-taking was extraordinary.”
Disclosure
Mullen: Invested $25 million of personal capital to test single-family rentals
“And then eventually invested twenty-five million dollars on my money and bought houses, put a small asset management layer on top of it, For people to manage local property managers.”
Opinion
Mullen: Jon Gray is arguably the best real estate investor of all time
“John Gray is arguably the best real estate investor of my lifetime, right? And I say arguably because somebody may disagree with me, but I, you'd have a hard time finding someone who would disagree with that statement, I think, generally. One of the best real …”
Assertion Contradicted
Mullen: Pretium bought its first 59,000 homes individually
“Our first 59,000 houses, we bought one at a time.”
Insight
Mullen: Single-family rental sector required modern off-the-shelf tech to exist
“The ability of off-the-shelf technology to create a lot of the things I'm going to describe is one of the reasons this industry exists.
The technology wasn't ready and cheap enough to build it off the shelf using things like Salesforce and basic modifications …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mullen: Single-family rental will permanently remain an asset class like multifamily
“Framing it broadly is I think this will always be an asset class that people invest in like multifamily. It's never going away, right?”
Assertion Supported
Mullen: Office real estate has the greatest dispersion in its history
“I mean, office has the greatest dispersion today ever in office history.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Jun 2033
Mullen: Pretium aims to scale to $250 billion AUM within 10 years
“So our aspirations are to be a two hundred billion or two hundred fifty billion dollar alt manager, hopefully faster than 10 years.”
Assertion Supported
Mullen: David Solomon was hired from his team before recruiting him to Goldman
“That person they'd hired away from me was David Solomon, and so David Solomon was recruiting me.”
