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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
February, 2024
I watch for new builds closely. It’s easy to see when they’re going to hit the market because once they’re under way and progress is visible and their development schedule is easy to determine. It’s public information and Costar shares this. Your buildings are class C and this new one is class A. No threat, […]
January, 2024
Real estate is one of those areas. Even as a passive investor you decided to invest in real estate, you found the people you wanted to invest with, and you decided on an investment. Today the hunt is on. We’re emerging from a very difficult year and deals are trickling back to the market. Everyone […]
December, 2023
After a few out-of-town trips from summer into fall, I’ve been actively nagging my broker friends. They haven’t been selling a lot of properties this year so they’re eager to do a deal. They’re contacting owners, nurturing them along in their process, and bringing properties to market. I have been seeing a lot of them, […]
November, 2023
As we know the Fed Funds Rate does not directly drive commercial lending rates. Those are driven more by the bond markets, and the 10 year Treasury yields are the best measure of that. They peaked and are heading down. Look for it not to be a steady drop but there’s more reason to see […]
October, 2023
I just came back from Norway. It is a gorgeous country, extremely friendly people, and I can’t gush enough about it. It also is very expensive to live there. I’m not going to pretend to know all the reasons why but they choose to support a deep social safety net and they tax themselves heavily. […]