Suggestion to my YIMBY friends:

Consider becoming developers.

Whatever obstacles you have in mind have been conquered by plenty of other people no smarter or richer than you.

If you turn out to be good at it, you get to spend your life making $$ adding value to society. For those wondering how to begin, my friend Sean writes a good newsletter:

https://twitter.com/seandsweeney/status/1834577264501023100

Business idea for those living in areas with lots of for-sale real estate development:

- Create thoughtful video / text reviews of each new development coming online

- Post on social

- Drive social traffic to website, where you capture emails

- Use email newsletter to educate prospective buyers re the buying prices & thereby recruit clients for buy-side brokerage

- Over time, become the authoritative voice on new developments in your area & build a huge list of potential buyers

- Leverage the above into listings for new communities I’m as close to certain this would work as I could be, fwiw

[Warning: Non-real estate post]

Have been thinking a lot about 21st Century media platforms recently.

Here's how I think you can build a pretty valuable one with ~zero $, from a cold start:

1. Identify an emerging field which is growing in importance but about which there is relatively little information online. Ideally, the field would be one where the audience is relatively affluent (think operating co-living buildings five to seven yrs ago, AI two years ago, or the social / economic implications of Ozempic now). The reason you want it to be an emerging field is that you don't want a lot of competition in your quest to establish yourself as an authority.

2. Use Google, X and LinkedIn to identify leading experts in the topic. Cold email them, asking to conduct recorded interviews about the topic.

3. Prepare for interviews by reading everything you can get your hands on about the field

4. Conduct the interviews over Zoom, using a recording tool that can produce transcripts

5. Pick a name for your asset, purchase relevant domain & reserve relevant channel name on Youtube & handles on X and LinkedIn

6. Create landing page for your domain w bullet points about the topic & offering access to your content archive in exchange for a valid email address

7. For those who input an email, give access to the video, audio & transcripts of the interviews

8. On a regular basis, publish the interview videos to your YT channel, the audio to a podcast stream you create on Spotify & Apple Podcasts, & post links to them on your X and LinkedIn accounts

9. Whenever you publish a new interview, send links to the videos, audio & transcripts to your (hopefully) growing email list, along w analysis &, possibly, links to relevant news stories

10. Post clips & text excerpts from the interviews on your X & LinkedIn feeds daily, tag the interviewees, and ask them to re-share with their audiences

11. On both X & LinkedIn, identify large accounts w authority on your topic & make a point of posting thoughtful replies to their posts… over time, these people will become your allies and help to spread your content

12. Keep doing interviews and publishing them week after week, for years

13. As your platform (email list, Youtube channel, social accounts) grows, you’ll establish yourself as an expert in your topic. Cold message others w podcasts on your topic or related topics & offer yourself as a guest to further grow credibility and also expose their audiences to your content

14. Monetize your growing platform in some or all of the following ways: (i) Selling ads, (ii) creating a paid job board matching people interested in the field to relevant jobs, (iii) doing more in-depth research on the field, which you package and sell as premium content, (iv) once you have achieved sufficient credibility, create a credential identifying those who hold it as experts and sell courses leading to that credential, (v) a book deal, (vi) paid speaking, (vii) creating one or more paid events, and (viii) partnering with an operator in your field to start a business leveraging your credibility & reach (I'm so confident this would work that I've been kind of itching to try it myself... which would be a terrible use of my time.)

Here's who pays more than one month security deposit at our mgmt co:

Applicants w marginal credit &/or income, who don't have a strong co-signer.

If we can't charge more than a month deposit, then we simply will not accept those applicants.

Hope #CALeg pays attention.

https://twitter.com/ZavalaA/status/1660767107083288576

@RussellLowery10: Too late to do anything about this?

Started a new biz & hope you can help spread the word:

You all know I love RE deals & teaching. Have tried to combine my passions in different ways over the yrs, including on this feed.

The new biz, @reseedpartners, is by far my most ambitious try:

A strong group of… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… @ReSeedPartners Just want to note that I'll be plugging along building Adaptive at the same time... RS is kind of a way to leverage what I've learned doing deals in LA across a much wider geographical area.

*These* are the pictures being used to market a $4,000 / month 2 bedroom apartment.

(And I don't mean to pick on these guys. This is pretty normal in LA.) Contrast this with how, for example, @seandsweeney’s new project is marketed:

https://twitter.com/seandsweeney/status/1630628350464073728

In retrospect, one of the dumbest mistakes we made:

Not taking enough “before” pics of our projects.

Am not a particularly visual person, so I dramatically underestimated the importance of “before & after” shots in marketing. Probably the highest value reply I’ll read on here today.

Youngs: Pay attention!

https://twitter.com/cachedeposits/status/1629169464687177728

The longer you manage apartments, the better you understand the old owners who refuse to provide even a fridge (let alone a dishwasher or AC). The counter-argument is the “accretive to yield” one, where people do a little calc, like “it cost $500 and adds $50 to rent”.

And that argument is usually correct… but, man, does it complicate management.

A fantasy I sometimes entertain:

Buying or building a property management (long & short-term rentals) plus brokerage biz in a reasonably quiet beach or mountain town.

With patience & integrity, can build a pretty serious reputational moat & a nice life.

https://twitter.com/moseskagan/status/1601615670436802560

1/ Why I despise amortizing loans:

Unlike interest, which is tax deductible, there is no tax shield on amortization payments. So you & you investors pay tax on $$ that you don't even get (bc you have to give it to the bank).

(continued) 2/ Every $ you give the bank is a $ you can’t give your LPs. Since you owe a pref on that $, when you amortize, you’re basically borrowing $ from you LPs at whatever the pref rate is and handing it to the bank. Ouch.

Some "greatest hits" selected from the list of questions we have learned to answer BEFORE buying an apartment building:

1. Was the building EVER permitted by any relevant governmental authority? 2. Was the structure constructed on sub-standard fill, and is it now sinking?