The tenant, the seller, the closing that went sideways. No lesson required.
A useful way to understand how private capital actually evaluates a wholesale assignment is to look at a typical intake call between a short term lender and a flipper buying an as…
Here is a collateral file worth studying, of the kind that turns up on a performing note somebody wants to sell a piece of. The borrower looks fine. Forty-one payments, never thir…
A useful example of investor communication done well, worth studying regardless of which side of a syndication someone expects to sit on. Picture a quarterly investor call for a m…
Learning how private money and creative acquisition moves often means working through fund documents that read dry on the page. A sharper way in is a real pattern seen in the fiel…
A cautionary pattern worth knowing in wholesaling: a small three bedroom house, tired but nothing dramatic, gets locked up under contract with an assignment fee around 9,000, reas…
A pattern worth noting from time spent in kitchens right after a wholesaler locks up a house: two sellers in the same month made the point clearly. The first, an older man whose w…
A useful case for anyone holding property subject to an existing mortgage: a rural county house acquired subject-to eighteen months earlier, purchase price 71,000, seller's loan b…
Scope creep story, since people keep asking me for one. Upstairs bath had no fan, just a window. Cheap fix, cut in a fan, run four inch flex to a roof cap. My guy opens the ceilin…
Two weeks into all of this and I sat down at a coffee thing where four people were talking about buying notes. I assumed they meant something like a letter of intent. Some kind of…
Anyone weighing rental income without wanting a second job would benefit from shadowing an operator who does this full time, four or five houses a year, buying rough and refinanci…
A useful case study in why underwriting off someone's stated project cost is risky: a detached 640 square foot ADU where the general contractor's signed contract said $160k, but t…
I hold six raw parcels, all in one county, all bought over about nine years. Two are farmed on a handshake lease, one has a billboard easement, the rest just sit there and cost me…
A seller reviewing paperwork with a neighbor who happens to enjoy reading contracts, and being reminded that a warm body at the table is not a substitute for her own attorney, is…
Worth noting a distinction ag lenders often draw that generalizes well beyond citrus. An appraiser will typically separate two numbers on income producing land: the bare land valu…
Take a house that goes up with nine photos, clearly shot on a phone, held vertical. One frame catches a thumb in the corner. The kitchen shot sits at knee height for no obvious re…
Take a $2.4M subordinate slice on a value add multifamily recapitalization, structured two ways to compare directly. A mezzanine version might run 12 percent, paid monthly, secure…
A rent to own contract is worth reading past the number that stands out first. Take a case: eleven pages, one staple, lease and option jammed into the same document. Rent is 1,900…
I went to a local real estate meetup mostly to figure out what jobs exist in this business that aren't buying houses. Ended up next to a woman eating the free pretzels who said sh…
First rental, small place, nothing exotic. The appraiser flagged the roof, which meant a repair and a reinspection, which meant the roofer's calendar, which was three weeks out in…
A common scene at a listing appointment: an older seller has a number in her head, heard secondhand from a neighbor whose house sold a couple of years earlier. The agent walks the…
