The essential passivity of the rehabber

By far the most annoying part of my business is this: I am at the mercy of the market.

We’ve got every trick in the book for maximizing the rents, and therefore the value, of apartment buildings.

We can take the ugliest building in the world and turn it into the kind of place that people will spend a lot of money to live in.

The problem is that the process costs us a lot of money.

To justify to the expenditure, we need (1) to be able to get high rents when we’re done; and (2) to buy the building cheap.

We know, with a very high level of confidence, the rents we can achieve in the areas in which we are active, because we do so many deals there.

So, the main issue for us is: Are there cheap buildings to buy?

And that is why we’re at the mercy of the market. We have to sit around and wait for brokers to go out and find owners who want to sell.