Data-Driven Investment Strategies: Don Mullen on SFR, Tech, and Housing’s Future

by Dean Wehrli

Diverse, tech-savvy, innovative—all fair when describing Pretium , one of the biggest real estate investment firms you may have heard of. Pretium has helped change how we invest in real estate. Pretium is impacting single-family rental (SFR), build-to-rent (BTR), fix and flip, mortgage originations, and even homebuilding through a menu of investment choices. Pretium Founder and CEO Donald R Mullen Jr has been the primary driver behind Pretium’s rapid growth. Don recently joined our CEO, John Burns, at our Rental Communities Summit, and our latest New Home Insights Podcast episode is the result.

Read the episode transcript

An SFR empire through technology

• Through its subsidiary, Progress Residential, Pretium has nearly 100,000 SFR homes under management and $52 billion in total assets.
• Don walks us through how tech has changed real estate investing. “In the ’80s, we took small objects, securitized them for the purpose of making them very investable by institutions.” Advanced technology means “we can actually take those small bits, and investors can directly invest in them.”
• Without the technological means to track such a vast and disparate array of assets, it would be impossible—or at least too costly—to effectively manage those assets.

Don’t call them fix-and-flip loans

• While many of us weren’t looking, the phrase “fix and flip” became real estate non-grata. The consensus is we are now calling it “Residential Transition Loans”—or RTLs because no one should have to say an 8-syllable phrase more than once.
• Pretium is big on RTLs. The term has made institutional investors more comfortable fixing and flipping, and Pretium helps lead the way. Rehab and remodeling are also attractive to Don as they are ripe for institutional investment.

Pretium’s other piece of the real estate pie

• SFR and RTLs, though, are just a part of what Don calls a “residential ecosystem.” The Pretium world also includes mortgage originations, homebuilder loans, purpose-built BTR communities, and construction finance. It is a sum of parts that builds to a greater whole.
• It comes back again to technology, to data. Pretium’s assets give it a trove of in-house data to leverage to make smarter choices.
• For instance, Don says within the SFR space, “Our data allows us to respond very promptly when a community comes up….We will get lists of communities and individual homes and we’re happy to buy either….We can respond within 24 hours about what we want to buy without any external data.”

There’s more, so be sure to listen to the whole episode, including Don’s take on the future of housing. BTR, rent-to-own, affordability challenges, and the housing market, more generally, are all fair game.

Want to Subscribe to the New Home Insights Podcast?

The New Home Insights Podcast is available on various platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify,?and YouTube Music. Episodes will be released every month. To receive email notifications whenever a new episode is released, fill out this form.

Join our email newsletter to receive curated insights and more every week.

Every week, we deliver analysis to over 40,000 subscribers with our Building Market Intelligence?(BMI) newsletter. Subscribe to our weekly BMI newsletters to stay current on pressing topics in the housing industry.

Subscribe to Our Newsletter