July, 2024
Let’s say you really like a city and want to invest in it, but you see lots of new construction. They’re building apartments, retail, maybe even office buildings. That’s a sign of a healthy market, but it’s also a caution about competition. New apartments have to lease up quickly. They offer screaming deals to new […]
March, 2025
Have you noticed you haven’t been hearing many recent real estate success stories lately? I don’t read about too many, I don’t get those stories when I talk with other investors, and those aren’t the stories I hear at multifamily conferences. Instead, what I hear is people are waiting for things like interest rates to come down, bonus depreciation to be […]
February, 2025
How thorough is your due diligence when you’re investing in real estate? Those of us in the business for a long time have heard so many stories of how they got burned, and what they should have done to prevent it. I have, and I keep track of them. Fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, hail storms […]
December, 2024
The recent spike in interest rates has finally changed my perspective. Do you watch rates? Which ones do you watch? The rate I watch most closely is the 10-year Treasury yield. This is the interest rate that the government pays the buyer until the treasury note matures in 10 years. The reason I watch it […]
November, 2024
Our winter in Seattle started off with a power outage. Several days, no electricity. My first thoughts, keeping the house warm but my second thoughts, how do tenants get through something like this. No place is free of violent storms. My heart goes out to communities hit by hurricanes this year, as many of them […]
October, 2024
Are you chasing the high rent growth markets? That feels a lot like the shiny object, and I’m wary of falling into that trap. It’s like a syndrome. We see high rent growth and we think we’re going to make some good money here. It’s not always like that. High rent growth could be one of […]
August, 2024
Where do your tenants come from? Have you noticed it’s harder to track the source of tenants who want to rent your apartments? We use several channels. Most operators do, but if we want to know what works, it’s not easy to tell. You get a notification from Facebook Marketplace? Then they tell you they […]
May, 2024
The unprecedented spike in interest rates and now the disturbing trends in GDP and unemployment remind me of a time period around 2014 to 2015 when it looked like the economy was falling apart. Indicators looked bad! Politicians worried about losing their jobs, and the nightly news screamed Armageddon! For better or worse, my 4 […]
April, 2024
What does value-add really mean? I learned a long time ago to find properties that needed renovations. Light renovations, heavy renovations, whatever you feel you can take on. Big renovations means big investment but also big rewards. You invest $10K to $15K in renovating a unit and you can completely transform it. Then you hopefully […]
March, 2024
As you know, don’t look for political viewpoints here, just relevant opinions and observations. We have about 10,000 migrants crossing the Mexican border each day who don’t live in the U.S. and most are asylum seekers. That’s the number that is most widely reported. So 300,000 each month, 4 to 10 million over just the […]