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I sat in on a webinar for a deal I wasn't even in

aaron_fitz10Get yoursPRO6
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A friend is an investor in a mid size apartment deal and forwarded me the link to their quarterly investor webinar, mostly as a joke because I've been asking him a hundred questions about how this all works. I muted my camera and watched the whole hour.

The first twenty minutes was slides. Fine. The last forty was Q&A and that's the part I keep thinking about.

Somebody asked why turnover costs had gone up so much. The answer took eleven minutes. The woman answering never once said the property management company's name, never blamed anybody, walked through what changed in the make ready process, what they'd tried in the first quarter, what they were doing now, and what number she'd be showing them next quarter so they could check. Then she said if that number doesn't move by then we'll be having a different conversation about the manager.

I'm still trying to work out which strategy fits me and I don't know if I'll ever be on either side of a syndication. But I watched somebody take a genuinely bad number and give a room of forty people something they could repeat to their spouse at dinner. That's a skill. I didn't know it was a skill until I watched somebody do it.

3 replies

mikeoconnell7SP2APRO6
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The line about giving them something they can repeat at dinner is exactly right and I'm stealing it. Half of investor comms is writing a sentence that survives being retold badly by someone who wasn't paying full attention.

mitchell_ray4Get yoursPRO6
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Same thing on job sites. If I can explain why the panel needs replacing in a way the homeowner can say back to their wife that night, I get the change order. If I can't, I get a week of stalling.

wendy_park48CapitalPRO7
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The part I'd hold onto is that she named a number and a date. Anybody can talk for eleven minutes. Committing to show a specific figure at the next call means someone can hold it up in ninety days and say you said this. Most sponsors avoid that on purpose, and the ones who don't are usually the ones whose numbers are moving in the right direction.

kestrel, if your friend forwards you the next one, watch whether that number actually shows up on a slide. That's the real test of the whole hour you sat through.