Long Shot Leaders with Michael Stein

The episode is dominated by personal biography, lifestyle commentary, and generic real estate advice (buy a rental, then short-term rental, then multifamily). A handful of concrete market observations exist but are underdeveloped and surrounded by filler.

“the entitlement process, we call it rezoning to take this piece of land and rezone it so we can build townhomes on it. It took us nearly four years. In San Antonio we just completed that process. It took us less than four months”

“commercial loans are really pinned off the 10 year treasury in most cases. And 10 year treasury is really organic. The Fed can reduce the Fed's funds rate but that's not going to affect something that's in an organic market”

Most arguments - Texas is business-friendly, rent control harms tenants, Gen Z prefers renting - are widely circulated in real estate investor circles. The 'subscription-based generation' framing is mildly interesting but is dropped immediately without development.

“they're more of a subscription based generation than new generation. So we feel that the rental demand will continue being there”

“a lot of experts have discussed how rent control is detrimental to tenants themselves”

August Biniaz is a genuine operator who co-founded CPI Capital, structures cross-border syndications for Canadian investors in US multifamily, and is actively developing ground-up projects - real skin in the game. However, he is mid-tier in scale and the conversation never surfaces enough deal-level detail to fully demonstrate depth.

“co founded CPI just over five years ago. CPI's mandate was to allow Canadian investors to have access to US commercial real estate through a syndication model”

“it took us a couple years to create the right vehicle which allows Canadian investors to use their retirement accounts and then for us to be able to funnel those funds into our syndicated deals”

The guest drops some useful comparative data points (Vancouver median home $1.7M vs San Antonio $350K, 4-year vs 4-month entitlement timelines, 40 million Americans in apartment communities) but never goes deep on his own portfolio size, deal returns, equity raised, or underwriting assumptions.

“median home price is $1.7 million. If you look at like a place like San Antonio, median home price is around 350,000 and median income is close to a hundred thousand”

“Texas has a larger economy than the whole country of Canada. It's got a larger GDP than Canada does. If Texas were a country, it would have the 8th largest economy in the world”

The host asks almost exclusively biographical and lifestyle questions, misidentifies the guest's credentials (inventing a Harvard Business School degree), and never challenges a single claim or pushes for deal-level specifics, returns, or lessons from failure. The conversation reads as a warm PR conversation throughout.

“Okay, good. Okay. So I don't know where I got Harvard Business School from.”

“I'm totally confident that your bhags will come to fruition. So I think it's awesome. Awesome.”