While our editorial team is taking some well-deserved rest, you guys are stuck with me and the keyboard.

Now, let’s get to it.

The BE LOUD Thesis (in the AI Age)

For most of my career, I was a quiet professional.

I believed that if you did good work, people would notice.
Close deals. Treat counterparties fairly. Pay vendors on time.
Return calls. Write thoughtful quarterly letters.
Perform quietly and let the outcomes speak.

I thought that was how serious operators behaved.

Self-promotion felt phony. A little desperate.
The real players, I believed, were under the radar.
They didn’t posture. They didn’t broadcast.
They knew who mattered and those people knew them.

I was wrong.

That model does not work anymore.

The uncomfortable truth

Here’s the bad news:

What you want professionally is almost certainly on the other side of that LinkedIn post, press release, or public visibility moment you’ve been avoiding.

The deal you never heard about.
The capital source that didn’t know you existed.
The partner who picked someone else simply because that name was top of mind.

You don’t lose deals because you’re incompetent.
You lose them because you’re invisible.

A lesson learned too late

I spent most of my professional life in multifamily.

When we started buying apartments in 2009, we had two enormous advantages — though we didn’t fully appreciate them at the time:

1. We weren’t burdened with over-leveraged legacy deals struck at peak pricing.

2. A generational bull market was just beginning.

In hindsight, you could have bought almost anything between 2009 and 2015 and made money. We happened to know apartments, so that’s where we focused.

It didn’t feel obvious at the time.

The economy was still shaky when we bought our first Freddie Mac foreclosure in 2009. In workforce housing, the tenant progression during the post-GFC years often looked like this:

Full-time job with benefits, living alone
→ Full-time job, no benefits, roommate
→ Part-time job, no benefits, multiple roommates
→ No job, living with mom

Those conditions forced banks to liquidate assets at almost any price. The lowest we ever paid was $7,500 per unit. Not a typo.

Over a decade, we built a portfolio of over 8,600 units. Investors did very well. We did very well. The outcomes were objectively strong.

And yet - we missed it.

The real miss

What did we miss?

Scale.

We should have owned 50,000 units.

We had broker relationships.
We had capital access.
We had pattern recognition.

What we didn’t have was gravity.

We weren’t loud enough to become unavoidable.
We weren’t top-of-mind often enough.
We didn’t control enough distribution.

The best opportunities tend to cluster around the people everyone already knows.

The AI age makes this unavoidable

The world has shifted, permanently.

Attention is no longer a byproduct of success.
It is a prerequisite.

There’s a reason the famous AI paper from Google DeepMind was titled “Attention Is All You Need.”
That wasn’t just about neural networks. It was a description of modern reality.

This is also why kids want to be YouTubers. (they know there is power in views)
Why founders build in public. (reps on stage, free product feedback, faster fundraising)
Why distribution now matters as much as product.

We are living through an arms race for attention - and opting out doesn’t protect you. It simply makes you irrelevant.

Be overt, not covert

This is uncomfortable for a certain personality type.

The competent professional.
The introvert.
The Type A-minus operator who just wants to do the job well and be left alone.

I’m one of those people.

But the currency of the current era is visibility. Whether you like it or not.

You don’t need all attention.
You need the right attention - from true peers, counterparties, and decision-makers. Not random internet noise. Not vanity metrics.

Why we built these platforms

That realization is what led to Med Office List and the broader Real Media ecosystem.

Our goal is simple: To be the sound system in the arena.

You are the talent on the stage.
You are the deal-makers, operators, brokers, and investors doing the real work.

We help make sure the right people are actually watching. We give you trust, at scale.

Because you never hear about the deals you never hear about.

Why niche beats broad

We focus on niche asset classes intentionally:

• Novelty attracts attention

• Fewer specialists means higher upside

• Growth rates are often higher and more sustainable than the primary asset classes

• Signal-to-noise is dramatically higher

Being known deeply in a small circle beats being vaguely known everywhere.

How to BE LOUD - quietly

Not everyone wants to post daily victory laps. That’s fine.

Here are some tactical moves to increase visibility while keeping a competent, professional tone:

• Handwritten thank-you notes on quality stationery. Almost no one does this anymore - which is why it works.

• Formal press releases (PR Newswire / PRWeb), followed by a concise LinkedIn summary.

• Feature articles in Bisnow, Commercial Observer, or sector-specific publications.

• Before-and-after deal stories shared privately with brokers, investors, and operators.

• Consistent liking and commenting on peers’ deal announcements. Frequency matters more than brilliance here.

• The “thinking of you” text: sending a relevant article or podcast with no ask attached.

None of these tactics are loud in a cringe way.
They are just intentional and effective.

The bottom line

You don’t need to become someone you’re not.

But you do need to accept that excellence without visibility has an opportunity cost.

In the AI age, distribution is leverage.
Attention is compounding.
And the quiet professional is no longer automatically rewarded.

Be louder than you’re comfortable with -
or accept smaller outcomes than you’re capable of.

Happy holidays,

P.S.
If this resonated, here’s the practical takeaway:

If you’re doing real work and want the right people to notice, our platforms are designed to help with that - quietly, professionally, and consistently. We are adding more tools, more posts, and more publications to bring more opportunities to your inbox.

Email me to learn how to dial up your exposure in 2026: Email Matt

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