How One Developer Has Stayed Afloat During the Pandemic

When he was planning for 2020, Tom Shapiro, President, founder and CIO at GTIS, expected a lot of headwinds. What he (and everyone else) got was a full-blown pandemic that has some people mentioning the word depression.

“Nobody could have predicted COVID and a complete shutdown of the country,” Shapiro says. “But there were a lot of clear signs of an economic slowdown, including pricing starting to decelerate in a lot of areas. We saw a lot of data points that the economy was slowing down.”

While the economic situation has deteriorated in a way that few imagined, Shapiro thinks his preparation has helped GTIS Partners, a New York-based real estate private equity firm, with about $4.5 billion in commercial and residential assets both in the US and Brazil, stay afloat. 

For starters, the company reduced risks by slowing development. 

“We were really just dialing down risks in a lot of ways,” Shapiro says. “We were more conservative and really focused on growth markets, which we felt would endure even in downturns. That has paid off really, really well for us in our US portfolio.”

GTIS also pushed sales as much as it could in existing projects by offering concessions or reducing prices.

“We wanted to reduce our inventory,” Shapiro says. “We started to get lower in the capital stack, and we started to take a lot less risk.”

So far, Shapiro says sales have remained strong in GTIS’ home building projects, even in Houston, which has become a hotspot for Coronavirus outbreaks. 

“Interest rates have dropped to historically low levels, and buyers are taking advantage of that,” Shapiro says. “The home sale market has been very good.”

The rental housing portion of GTIS’ portfolio has also held up well. “Both our single-family rental homes, which we’ve been active in, as well as multifamily, have done really well,” Shapiro says.

Shapiro says the company hasn’t needed to start giving large scale concessions in its rental properties. So far, occupancy is holding up.

“We looked at the [concessions], but we never implemented them,” Shapiro says. “We saw our collections end up being dramatically better than what we anticipated.”

While Shapiro says his revenues have grown to this point because of a healthy home building, apartment and even office (collections are at 100 percent in his small portfolio) performance. His portfolio is mainly A and B assets, which wasn’t hit as hard.

The government’s support of the economy during COVID-19 with The CARES Act was also invaluable.

“There was so much defense played through the government stimulus programs that mitigated what probably would have been a devastating effect throughout ours and everyone’s portfolios,” Shapiro says.

Still, Shapiro thinks more government action will be needed going forward. 

“I think it [the level of distress] has a lot to do with what happens to unemployment benefits and where we sit with unemployment,” Shapiro says. “If we don’t do anything, our unemployment numbers are going to be well into the double digits. What I worry about is small business. Half of the people in America work for small businesses. If the government doesn’t keep providing unemployment benefits, I think we’re going to see a very different level of collections on a go-forward basis.”