Good morning. It's Sunday, May 31st, and in this week's edition, we're covering Canadian institutional capital pulling back hard from U.S. CRE, PCE hitting 3.8% with rate hike odds jumping from 3% to 40%, two video picks worth your time, and a Deep Dive on the LOI workflow I've been running for almost a year - 30 to 45 seconds from property walk to sent offer.
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Bisnow reports Canadian investment into U.S. CRE dropped 32% year-over-year to $5B for the 12 months ending March 2026 - less than half the five-year annual average of $10.7B.
Canada has been the single largest source of foreign capital into U.S. real estate for three consecutive years, deploying $73B from 2019 to early 2025. Last year, Canadian funds raised $13.4B to invest abroad but directed only 37% toward U.S. assets, down from 54% the prior year. Tariffs, trade tensions, and a new Canadian sovereign wealth fund explicitly designed to reduce U.S. dependency are all pulling the same direction. Despite the pullback, overall foreign investment in U.S. CRE rose 24% YoY to $25.9B - other sources filled the gap.
"My $90M Shopping Spree": Ben Mallah walks through a 1031 sprint across South Florida - a distressed marina and mobile home park in foreclosure, retail strip centers, and multifamily. The standout lesson is on retail: second-story space is nearly impossible to lease today, and if you buy a center carrying that vacancy, your entry price needs to be low enough that you don't need it to work. Watch here
"Wall Street Missed This Bitcoin Real Estate Play": Grant Cardone breaks down his real estate-Bitcoin hybrid fund model - buying assets below replacement cost, layering in Bitcoin at roughly 33% of deal size, targeting 10-year holds with monthly cash distributions to retail investors. He makes a clear case for why the REIT structure underperforms and how this model sidesteps those constraints. Watch here
CBS News reports April PCE came in at 3.8% annually - the highest reading since May 2023 and the first inflation report under new Fed chief Kevin Warsh.
PCE jumped from 3.5% in March and 2.8% in February, driven primarily by energy costs tied to the Iran conflict. Core PCE hit 3.3%. Personal income grew just 2.5% annually - below inflation - while the personal savings rate dropped to 2.6% from 3.6% in March. Some households are drawing down savings just to cover the gap. As recently as the June Fed meeting, traders put the odds of another rate hike at just 3%. That number is now 40%.
CRE Impact: Six months ago, almost nobody expected rates to go up. Now there's a real chance they do. If you have a loan with a variable rate, or a loan coming due soon, don't assume rates are dropping to save you. Run your numbers again with rates staying high or going higher.
From an Hour to 45 Seconds: How I Generate LOIs From My Phone While Driving
I want to give you something tactical this week. Not a mind-bender. A tool I've been using for almost a year that has saved me 2 to 3 hours every single week.
Here's the scenario. You just walked a property. You talked to the broker. You're in a multiple-offer situation, and you're driving. You need to get that offer out - now.
The old way: wait until you get to the office. Sit down at the computer. Download the OM. Dig through it for the correct address, PIN numbers, square footage, broker contact info. Open the Word doc template. Fill everything in. Double-check it. Save. Attach. Send. Best case, that's 30 minutes. Sometimes it takes closer to an hour. Usually longer, because you miss something and have to go back.
And here's the thing - this process has barely changed since the fax era. We stopped faxing, but we're still sitting at a desk, manually filling in a Word doc, and sending it as an email attachment. The medium changed. The process didn't.
Speed matters in this business. The first offer sets the tone. Verbal offers are a workaround - better than nothing, but not the same as a written LOI with your signature on it. I've lost track of how many times the old process made me slower than I wanted to be.
So I started tinkering with Claude. I was trying to figure out if I could get it to spit out a formatted Word document - not just text, but an actual .docx file ready to sign and send. Took some experimenting. Then finally - it clicked. It worked.
Here's how the workflow runs now.
I built a prompt that lives in Claude as a saved thread - bookmarked in my browser as "LOI Generator." I loaded that thread once with two things: the prompt itself, and my LOI template in Word (with my digital signature already embedded, and the fields that typically change - address, date, broker info, earnest money - highlighted so Claude knows what to update).
That's the setup. You do it once.
When I need to generate an LOI, I open that thread, upload the OM or property flyer, and tell Claude what I'm offering and what the earnest money is. Everything else is pre-populated from my template. If there are special terms, I dictate them by voice into my phone. Claude generates the LOI on my template, in a Word document, ready to download and send.
Start to finish: 30 to 45 seconds.
I write two or three LOIs a week. The math is simple - what used to take an hour or more now takes under a minute. The LOIs are accurate, they're on my template, they go out fast. No typos from rushing. No sitting at a desk.
The competitive edge isn't just time. When you lower the friction on writing an offer, you write more offers. You stop talking yourself out of it because you're tired or in the car. The barrier drops, and your volume goes up.
Here's the full prompt - grab it here. Upload it with your own LOI template, bookmark the thread, and you're set. If you've been sending verbal offers because writing the LOI felt like too much work in the moment, this fixes that.
I'm curious what other prompts you're using for CRE.
Reply and let me know.
I read every one.
LET ME HEAR IT
Until next Sunday.
Be well,
Saul
P.S. Missed my podcast with Shay Yakubovich? Here is the full episode.
Videos & podcasts: I publish them weekly. Subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcast or Spotify.
Random Saul Fact: Chicagoland delivered another great weekend - blue skies, green trees, and good weather all around.
