The tenant, the seller, the closing that went sideways. No lesson required.
Got called out to quote signage and lobby refresh for a mid-size office building that had just changed hands on paper. Not a sale. A recap, whatever that meant. The guy walking me…
I don't build anything myself, I put money into other people's deals, so my ADU education came secondhand and by accident. I was walking a small property with an operator I was co…
Side work I picked up last year: a small bridge lender pays me to drive out and photograph job sites before they release draws. Two hundred a visit, sometimes three sites a day. I…
About a mile and a half from my nine units there's 300 acres of soybeans that a developer wants to turn into three big single story boxes. I showed up at the county hearing with a…
1960s ranch, bridge loan, rehab budget around 84k on the submitted scope. We opened the kitchen wall on day three and found knob and tube running to a subpanel that had been added…
Spent a week with an offering package on a permanent-crop deal, roughly 300 planted acres of nuts in a hot inland valley, and the thing that reordered my whole view of it was one…
Small strip retail center, five bays, one of them empty for as long as I've serviced the place. I was up top swapping a condenser fan motor and the owner came up the ladder to com…
A friend runs a two person commercial shop and let me sit in on a buyer call last month, mostly because I wanted to hear how the money side actually talks when nobody is performin…
I'm still building a list rather than buying, and one of the things I do is drive the same six streets on Sundays. Last spring a guy started buying on one of them. I could tell it…
I got invited to a closing table last spring because I was funding the equity check. Small number, nine thousand dollars, which is why I said yes without much thought. The buyer w…
I was replacing a blower motor in a fifty year old furnace, house in a working class stretch of town, owner in his sixties. He's standing in the doorway talking the whole time the…
I sat in on a call because a friend from my land group wanted a second set of ears. He owns a piece of a small industrial park and the senior loan was coming due. The new lender w…
Not really my story, it's my parents'. They converted the back half of their garage into a one bedroom in 2019 because my aunt's rent went up and she couldn't cover it. Permitted,…
A friend sent me her appraisal report from a purchase because she wanted help understanding why the value came in where it did. I'd never seen a full one. I expected a page with a…
I'm passive in a couple of things and I read documents for a hobby, so when a sponsor I follow opened a hotel fund I got on the diligence call. I expected an hour about markets an…
Full gut on a 1920s four square, senior hard money loan covering purchase plus about 70 percent of the rehab number, and a gap position from a guy who does three or four of these…
I had a flight booked to look at a suburban office-to-medical conversion where I'd been offered a preferred equity slice. Sponsor was good on the phone, the market made sense, and…
Two years ago I sold a rehabbed house to a buyer who couldn't get a conventional loan. Decent down payment, I carried the balance at 8.5 with a twenty year amortization on a five…
I signed up for accounting software in January because everyone said get your books right from the start. I have one duplex. Thirty day trial. Day one I connected the bank. Day tw…
I'm not investing yet, I'm just trying to learn how private money actually moves before I put any of mine anywhere. Someone here told me a while back that the best thing you can a…