Bridge Young Creatives to Moderate Politicians' Social Media
Small business idea: Marketing consulting for moderate local politicians in Blue cities / states (I know this sounds nuts, but hear me out.): - Local politics, in particular, are more and more about social media (both for branding and as top of the funnel for email and text lists) and less and less about TV ads and mailers - Left-wing pols, who tend to be younger anyway, are TT / Insta natives who "get" social. They also have access to tons of young, under-employed creatives who lean their direction politically and are willing to work for ~free - More moderate, business-friendly candidates tend to skew older and less comfortable with, and fluent in, SM. In my experience, they are vastly under-exploiting these mediums. - But moderate candidates have (or can raise) $$ from donors The opportunity: - Create an agency bringing together talented (probably younger) story-tellers who are naturally moderate to help moderate candidates with messaging... videos, X posts, email and text list building, etc. - Use each campaign to test themes, messaging, formats, etc. - Apply lessons learned across campaigns - Scale up (Am so confident the need for this exists that I am trying to make my oldest son volunteer on a campaign this summer, to see if he might want to do this as a career.)
Over‑prescriptive Zoning Stifles Growth; Let Developers Build
Want to expand on this a bit: There is an area of LA called the Cornfields, NE of Downtown. It was rezoned in ~'13 into an urban planner's dream... they got rid of parking minimums but decided to dictate all *kinds*...
Those with Skin in the Game Feel Satisfied
Everyone wants to judge, but the people with skin in the game (the developer who paid to build these homes and the buyers who pay to buy them) seem satisfied
Partial Stair Repairs Avoid Code, Full Rebuild May Fail
Have to be *really* careful about these in LA. Often, the existing stairs are too steep to meet current code. DBS allows you to do partial replacements of rotted wood without bringing to code. But, if you demo the whole staircase (for example,...
Deal Stabilizes at 8.5% Unlevered Yield
Spent the day yesterday touring investors and potential investors through one of ReSeed's San Francisco deals. Take-aways: 1. I need to get someone else to take pictures 2. We think the deal will stabilize at around an 8.5% unlevered yield on cost...
Helping Seniors Transition Building Management with Trust
Over the past few years, we have developed a bit of a specialty in taking over management of buildings owned by older people who have been self-managing for long periods of time. Typically, what happens is that they start needing to...
Higher Rates Raise Investors' Opportunity Cost in Value‑add Real Estate
Don't think I appreciated the full impact of higher interest rates on the heavy value-add real estate business when rates increased initially in '22. The problem for operators isn't just the higher exit caps. It's the increased opportunity cost for investors of...
Risking Savings to Open Store Amid CA Retail Vacancies
~Every day on here, I read someone complaining about vacant retail spaces in walkable areas in their cities in CA. Let me ask you a ?: How much of *your* personal life savings and time would you be willing to risk...
Statutory Cure Period Lets Owners Fix Issues Before Lawsuits
The answer is a statutory cure period: Business owner gets a shot at fixing the issue identified and lawsuit can only proceed if s/he doesn't. This would fix the problem ~instantly.
Never Let Tenants Bypass Your Team
Cardinal rule of property management: Never allow tenants to go around your team to get a different answer from you. - Undermines your team’s credibility w tenants - Demoralizes them - Guarantees you get a lot more, similar calls going forward (If you...
Virtual Inspections Shine, Yet Implementation Remains Critical
Just read ED 19 Overall, pretty good... particularly the virtual inspections piece. As always, the devil is in the implementation. Here's a link to the text: https://t.co/JfLfdFW6r8
Uniform Regulations Inflate Costs of Small Housing Projects
The main reason more so-called "missing middle" housing doesn't get built: In most states (including CA), there is little regulatory distinction between a 5 unit building and a 500 unit building. Despite posing 1/100 of the risk, the 5 unit building is...
High Salaries Justified for Uniquely Valuable Positions
[Deleted a comment I made last night about the advisability of govt paying high salaries for certain jobs to workers who would not be able to get anywhere near those salaries anywhere else. There are circumstances where the value of having...
LPs Prefer Lending at 12%, Not Borrowing
If you're considering a real estate strategy that would require you to use high octane bridge debt, consider this: Some potential LPs are likely to give you a version of the following feedback: "We don't *borrow* at 12%; we *lend* at 12%"
ReSeed Deploys $125M, Launches Cohort 3 GPs
ReSeed Cohort 3 Launch Week: Boulder, CO Rhett came to me with the idea for ReSeed ("y-combinator for real estate GPs") in '22. We started the business with a fantastic team of co-founders and an incredible anchor investor in early '23. Since...
If Rent Controls Block Profits, Repurpose Land for Higher Returns
Long-term real estate ownership is basically speculating on the increasing value of land. If local government demonstrates to you that it will not allow you to monetize the growing value of land devoted to multifamily (for example, by imposing rent controls),...
Secure Deal‑Specific Commitments, Skip Discretionary Fund Hassles
You think you want to raise a small discretionary RE fund, but you probably don't.* 1. Much harder to raise $$ without being able to point your investors to the specific assets you're going to buy, and 2. Your promote (the piece...
Industrial Deals: Buy Low, Wait, Re‑lease, Then Profit.
Industrial real estate in a good area: 1. Figure out roughly what tenants are willing to pay 2. Buy a building for a price where that rent will generate a reasonable return 3. Once the existing tenant(s)' lease ends, re-lease at market rent 4....
Six‑year‑
My 6 yr old not satisfied with a verbal agreement (swear we didn't put him up to this) https://t.co/eZiWETKn86
Hire Juniors Without Experience—They Can Be Rockstars
The person we hired for this position turned out to be a rockstar. Strongly recommend other business owners consider opening up junior positions to promising people with no experience and/or no college.
From Refugee to Licensed LA Contractor: New Construction Firm
Update on the Ukrainian refugee family we helped get situated in LA: As you may recall, the husband, Oleh, had run a successful construction business in Ukraine before coming here. But he was a business guy who had never really worked...
Operators Favor Legacy PMSs Over Risky AI Startups
Appfolio and the other "legacy" PMSs are racing to build AI agents before the new AI-native startups can build their own PMSs. For the record, all the operators I know (from people running 100 units to people running thousands) are rooting...
Update Insurance: Rising Construction Costs Leave Owners Under‑insured
Often, long-term real estate owners set their insurance coverages when they buy, then fail to review them as the policies renew annually. That's a mistake. Construction prices have soared over the past 10 yrs. If you...
Mandatory AC Mandate Overloads DWP, Triggers Panel Replacements
Good post And, by the way, the local politicians pushing mandatory AC have no idea of the tidal wave of work they would be sending to our already totally overloaded DWP (I bet ~25% of the main electrical panels in apt buildings...
Brokers Earn Full Lease Commission Upfront, Not over Time.
Why do commercial brokers get paid their commission on the full lease at move-in, rather than getting paid over time, as the tenant actually pays rent? Feels like it would be fairer for them to bear the risk of default alongside...
Turn Job Hunt Downtime Into a Value‑Building Venture
Without meaning to be insensitive: Really find it hard to get inside the brain of someone sitting around applying for jobs for six months, waiting to be hired. It for sure doesn't take all day to apply. You have unbelievable amounts of...
From LA Rehab Success to Bootstrapped Bend Property Management
After doing a *ton* of successful home / small apt building rehab deals with his family in LA (his mom actually spoke at Reconvene years ago), Jonathan in now bootstrapping a property management business in Bend, OR. Really enjoying following his...
Co‑Living Experiment Crashed by Tenant Overstay and Eviction Freeze
In late '19, we made the decision to experiment with running a few of the 4/4 units we own as co-living (rather than conventional rentals). An apparently young, single person applied for a room. We vetted and approved him and signed...
AI Judges Could Bridge Small Claims‑Arbitration Gap
Problem: The large gap in commercial dispute resolution between small claims court (capped at like $10k damages in CA) and arbitration (where you're going to spend $20k+ on legal, which you may or may not get back). Proposed solution: A neutral AI...
Combine Cost Seg, Depreciation, RE Pro to Slash Taxes
Cost seg + accelerated depreciation + RE pro status (so you can use the losses to offset active income) a v powerful combo (I actually looked into starting a business helping non-working spouses get and maintain RE pro status, but couldn't...
YIMBYs Overlook Investor Struggles, Developers Become Landlords
Sincerely do appreciate YIMBYs, but: Their seeming blindness to the impact on development of the hostile operating environment experienced by the investors who own and operate rental buildings in CA is really starting to grate on me. **Every developer is either a...
AI Makes Generalist Skills More Valuable Than Ever
Changed my mind: I used to think it was dumb for young people to think of, and describe themselves as, generalists, bc the world tends to reward specialization. However, due to AI, the future of the economy is more uncertain now than...
Vacant Space Gets No Tax Break; Fix Crime, Homelessness
Contrary to what many people seem to believe, there is no tax incentive to keep space vacant. If you want more retail in Downtown LA, focus on the forces preventing entrepreneurs from opening new businesses there: Crime, disorder, homelessness, and so...
Growth Requires Homeownership Path, Not Just Rent Control
One thing I think a lot of YIMBYs miss: It's not just about the rents. If you want a growing city that is attractive to upwardly mobile people and the companies that employ them, you need to create a viable path to...
Negotiated Garage Reduction Restores Blocked Alley Access
Once built a 4plex where the design required parking access through an alley like this. The problem was that the neighbor on the other side of the alley had illegally expanded his garage to annex like ~50% of the width of...
Housing Crisis Needs Collective Action, Not Solo Hero
One of the things that bug me about how he uses language is this insistence that *he* is going to build all the homes. In fact, if we are going to build hundreds of thousands or millions of new homes in...
Dallas Rents Dip, Homes Stay Affordable—Perfect Buyer Window
I toured some Dallas buildings recently. Was *shocking* how nice of an apartment you can get for $1200-1300. Combine that with the fact that you can still buy a house in the suburbs for $400k, and you can see why so...
Cut Medicaid Fraud, Not Add Wealth Tax
The expressed rationale for SEIU's proposed wealth tax is to replace the roughly $20b / yr in Medicaid $$ the federal govt recently stripped from CA. Maybe instead of enacting yet another tax, which is already driving our ~most productive residents...
Tenants See NNN and Base Rent as One Cost
Want to clear up this common misconception about commercial leases. It is true that NNN leases put responsibility for paying property taxes on commercial tenants, and that increased property taxes will initially be passed through from landlords to tenants. However, from the...
Study Claims 5% Tax Won’t Curb LA Housing Supply
Remember when those idiots at UCLA published the paper showing that taxing away 5% of the gross sale proceeds of every piece of real estate in LA >$5MM wouldn't impact housing production?
Closed First Industrial Deal, Now Seeking Next Partner
Closed our first industrial deal with some long-term partners of ours a few weeks ago. Now on the hunt for another. [Apologies to the broker whose backside is prominently featured below] https://t.co/nHz7lw2qqf
If You Hate Raising Money, You Hate Real Estate
Early in my career, hated raising $. Thought it was beneath me & that the deals should speak for themselves. Dumb & self-defeating. Real estate is among the ~most capital-intensive businesses. Unless you're @loganjrankin, if you hate raising $, you hate the...
Management's Complex Systems, Low Margins, No Excuse
Management is *so* hard... you need to create like 50 different systems, make sure they keep running ~perfectly month after month, then deal with the exceptions to ~all of them that randomly crop up, all w very low revenue per...
Launching Phoenix Property Management: Hiring First Team Member
Getting more serious about a potential expansion of our property management business to Phoenix. Looking to hire our first employee there, who will help me launch and grow the business, while also managing our initial batch of properties. Link to the job...
Twitter's Memetic Power Fuels Policy; Toxic Bots Profit
The daily discussion on X helps shape the national mood, which in turn shapes purchasing decisions, corporate capital allocation, votes (and, thereby, economic policy, war and peace, etc.) and so on. (This is a big part of Elon's rationale for buying...
LA Housing Authority Launches Active RFP for Management
This is from an active RFP for managing housing on behalf of the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles https://t.co/9nka8Quvyt
Lead Magnet Finally Tried, Email List Grew
For >10 yrs, I have been reading advice in various places to put a lead magnet on my personal website, in order to capture more email addresses. I finally took this advice approximately one month ago and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it worked. Follow...
Free Due Diligence Checklist for Multifamily Rehab Deals
Reminder: The due diligence checklist we developed over >100 multifamily rehab deals is available for download for free (bc I'd like to grow my mailing list). What's a due diligence checklist? It's a list of the potential risks you need to...
New Bill Threatens Rental Development, Spurs Fraud Concerns
Perfect example of a bill introduced in the CA legislature that would make running apartments more difficult, and therefore slow housing development (bc every developer of rentals is either a landlord-in-waiting or hoping to sell to one.) When we briefly allowed...
Developer Incentives Drive Unwise Construction, Fueled by Investor Money
What ~everyone in this debate misses: Institutional developers, who build most new supply (at least in large metros), aren't using their own $$. They are using investor $$. And the terms of the deals give them large developer fees, which are generally...