Globest.com: How can those in the industry shift the attention to that point?

Faith: Part of it is just talking about it. We need to start the conversation about how renting can absolutely be a part of that American Dream.

Globest.com: Multifamily is doing relatively well compared with other property types, but it is definitely under pressure. What trends are you seeing?

Faith: Vacancies are definitely at an all-time high today. But the thing to recognize is that as an asset class, while vacancy may be at an all-time high, it's still only 8% in multifamily versus office, where it's 16% or 17%. And if you think about why that is, historical trends of multifamily absorption year-over-year show that when employment growth goes negative, very rarely does multifamily absorption go dramatically negative. Compare that to office and retail, where you see dramatic negative absorption when job growth goes negative. Multifamily demand is tightly correlated to job growth, so when you see the jobs come back, you typically see a spike in multifamily demand very quickly afterward.

It's usually the first product type to start seeing strong absorption because the people who would live in the units are still around; they don't go away like stores or office tenants do. So when they get a job, they move into their own apartments.

What has been particularly tough on multifamily this time is the job losses. We've lost about eight million jobs across the country in this recession, and well over four million of those jobs were held by those in the 18- to 34-year-old age bracket, which is the sweet spot of our renter profile. This recession has hit our renter population particularly hard.

Globest.com: It seems that for the most part, landlords are lowering effective and market rents to keep vacancies low. Are you seeing a lot of that?

Faith: Absolutely. Rents are going down in every single market we operate in and have gone down in the past 12 months. Obviously, the severity of the loss ranges from a few percentage points in markets like Washington, DC to 20% in a market like Vegas, which has been particularly hard hit.

Globest.com: With appreciation no longer skyrocketing, the focus has shifted toward asset and property management to increase income coming from properties. What strategies has Greystar been using?

Faith: In this part of the cycle, everyone is getting extremely focused on squeezing every last drop of cash flow out of the properties as they can. There's a whole host of things you can focus on to maximize the cash flow, such as rebidding vendor contracts to take advantage of economies of scale, and other expense-side controls. On the revenue side of the business, we've rolled out a rent-maximizing program that we've used on a lot of our properties.

In the end, it's all about cash flows. It gets back to the blocking and tackling of our business. It's no more creating value through financial engineering. Now, we've got to earn it.