The tenant, the seller, the closing that went sideways. No lesson required.
A woman from my book club refinances houses for a living, and when I asked how the appraisal part actually works she told me to come watch one instead of reading about it. So I sa…
I've been at this maybe four months and mostly I go to open houses to hear people talk. There was a lender guy at the table with a bowl of candy and a stack of business cards nobo…
Here is a modeling mistake worth studying. Picture a passive investor in a small portfolio of scattered single family rentals, mostly three bedroom, mostly voucher tenants, run by…
Take a raw land scenario worth studying: 41 acres at the edge of a small city, priced as future residential lots, rough ground, one road frontage, a transmission line cutting the…
Take a garage conversion, 380 square feet, the kind of project that looks like the easy one on the list because the slab, walls, and roof are already there. A plumber cuts two tes…
A friend runs the food side at a u-pick orchard about an hour out and she was short people for the first big October weekend, so I said yes because I'm trying to figure out where…
A pattern worth noting for anyone asked to mentor someone starting a turnover cleaning business. Pricing depends heavily on the unit and the market, but in most areas a two bedroo…
I'm in one small fund, a modest position, mostly because I wanted to see how the other side works after years of owning land where nothing ever needs reporting to anyone. First Ma…
I have four units across three buildings and my books have been one bucket since the beginning. Rent in, expenses out, a number at the end of the year that I hand to my tax person…
Consider a house that sits across a ravine from a neighbor with an unusually clear view of somebody else's deal for two years, which offers a useful case study. It sold in the fal…
I'm changing careers and had exactly nothing to offer anybody, so when a small fund manager at a meetup mentioned he needed help moving his investor records off spreadsheets and i…
A useful way to understand how the legal picture around assignments has shifted is to look at how a disciplined operator actually documents compliance. Rather than a general answe…
A common reason people buy one or two rentals instead of taking on a second job is precisely so they don't end up with a second job. When bookkeeping starts eating a Sunday a mont…
There is a listing worth following for what its marketing did while it sat. It went live in March with fourteen photos that were clearly shot in bad weather. Flat gray sky, standi…
The sponsor I do part time admin work for paused distributions on a 190 unit value add in the second week of the quarter. I'd been hired to keep the investor CRM tidy and to forma…
Here is a pattern worth studying, because the comparison at the center of it gets skipped constantly. Someone gets a call about a data center deal from a friend who knows the spon…
Free weekend workshops follow a familiar shape worth understanding before attending one. A typical morning session, ninety minutes or so in a hotel ballroom, often delivers genuin…
I was buying the land. Eleven acres, decent road frontage, the kind of parcel I sit on and don't touch for a decade. There was a house on the corner of it, a small one, and in my…
Consider a small operator planning to drop three prefab units on three lots he already controls in a first ring suburb, and an investor sitting in on the manufacturer's sales call…
My uncle has four houses he bought between 2008 and 2014, all in one small city, all rented long term. He's not sloppy about money. He's just been doing it the same way since the…
