What's Goin On with AI interest rates in CRE? | Ryan Freedman, Co-Founder Alpaca Real Estate

In this episode of The Jess Larsen Show on Innovation & Leadership, Jess sits down with Ryan Freedman, co-founder and chairman at Alpaca, to explore the intersection of artificial intelligence, venture capital, real estate, and investing during one of the most unusual market environments in recent memory.

Ryan has spent his career across real estate development, asset management, and venture capital, with teams involved in billions of dollars of transactions. Today, he is focused on building an AI-native approach to asset management and using technology to improve how investment firms research opportunities, evaluate risk, and make decisions.

Jess and Ryan discuss what higher interest rates could mean for real estate, why distress may continue emerging as loans mature, and where Ryan is still finding opportunities. He breaks down his thesis around build-to-rent housing, infill industrial real estate, luxury residential markets, and why certain markets continue to stand out despite broader uncertainty.

They also explore one of Ryan’s most important investing principles: liquidity creates optionality. When markets become dislocated and other investors are forced to sell or cannot access capital, having cash available can create opportunities that simply do not exist during periods of optimism and easy money.

The conversation then moves into how Ryan is using AI inside his investment organizations. His team is building systems that can analyze research from across the market, preserve institutional knowledge, track previous investment decisions, and compare assumptions against what actually happened. Rather than replacing investor judgment, Ryan sees AI as a way to help firms ask better questions, identify patterns, and become more intellectually honest about their decisions.

Ryan also explains why some of the greatest opportunities come from combining an existing area of expertise with a rapidly emerging technology. His background is real estate, but his growing knowledge of AI creates a new intersection where relatively few people have deep expertise in both. He believes entrepreneurs across virtually every industry have a similar opportunity to rebuild old businesses with better technology, better margins, and better decision-making.

Jess and Ryan also discuss emotional discipline, conviction, staying liquid, separating signal from noise, and why being early to a major trend can look almost identical to being wrong.

This episode is a wide-ranging conversation about real estate investing, artificial intelligence, venture capital, market cycles, capital allocation, decision-making, liquidity, entrepreneurship, and finding opportunities before the rest of the market recognizes them.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices