The tenant, the seller, the closing that went sideways. No lesson required.
Take an investor building a small multifamily list who gets pitched a 24 unit property where the current owner needs a partner for the refinance. Partner often sounds like it mean…
Third house of the year, small three bed, bought at 96k, put 41k in it, rented at the number I underwrote. Appraisal came back where I wanted it. I was in the boring part of the f…
I've held land for eleven years and I've never had a tenant, so paper was always going to be the next thing I tried. Same shape as what I already do. Wait a long time, collect som…
A housing authority owner briefing is worth attending before a first Section 8 purchase, even if the room is mostly veterans. In one such session, eleven attendees, most already h…
Plenty of buyers hear a seller say that half his street is on vouchers and that it is the only reason the block has stayed occupied since 2020, then nod along on the phone with no…
Consider a flip near the top of its market, close to 8,000 square feet on a ravine lot, in a price band where maybe four or five houses trade a year in the whole submarket. The re…
A common situation worth understanding: eleven units, one owner since 1996, listed by a broker who has clearly never seen the inside of the books either. A request for two years o…
At an open house, a seller who stayed rather than leaving, as sellers are usually advised to, can end up asking the visiting investor a very different question than expected: woul…
Take a case where a tenant stays nine years in the same three bedroom rental, rent moving modestly across the whole stretch, and the landlord fields only a handful of calls in tha…
I've had six months of research and no deals, so to stay busy I've been going to open houses well above what I could ever buy, because I wanted to see what a finished luxury flip…
A useful habit shows up sometimes in conversations with landlords about what they actually want help with on unit turns and small repairs. Most say floors and paint. One story wor…
Refinancing a small rental I've owned a while. I had budgeted for the appraisal, maybe five hundred, and I'd blocked out an afternoon to be there. Then the loan officer emails and…
A useful way to picture capital stack questions is three boxes stacked on top of each other. The bottom box is the senior loan. That is the bank, the cheapest money in the stack,…
A pattern worth studying: a probate house with a wide spread because the family involved doesn't want to deal with the process, contracted at a number that would leave a strong as…
I went into a small bank branch to ask about a loan on a piece of land, which is my whole interest here. The officer was working from a script and kept using words I didn't know,…
It happens more often than people expect: someone mentions casually that they're raising for a bridge position on a small mixed use building and can pay 14 percent, said the way y…
Take a furnished unit portfolio serving corporate relocations, nine units across a few employers and a relocation firm. A common failure pattern looks like this: a project team of…
I went to a coffee thing where people talk about investing, mostly to listen. A man across the table asked what I was reading about and I said the buy, rehab, rent, refinance, rep…
Take an eleven unit infill project where a developer wants marketing footage before the last two buildings are framed. A shoot gets scheduled with the goal of making the site look…
I read two data center REIT annual reports over three weeks. Read each one twice, because that's how I do everything. Somewhere in the second pass I started counting words, and th…
