The deals I’m proudest of

People often ask me where I get my deals.

More and more, we get them off-market, from agents with whom we have pre-existing relationships.

But those aren’t the deals I’m proudest of. After all, it doesn’t take a genius to decide to buy a building for $235 / sq ft when it would cost $350 to build it, if the land were free, and everything in the neighborhood is at $350+.

The ones I’m proudest of are the deals that we buy on market, where everyone else had a crack. Why?

Our return requirements are higher than other buyers’. That has to be true, because our deals need to be good enough that investors can pay us our fee / ownership stake and STILL come out ahead of where they would have been if they bought a building themselves and handed it to a management company to run.

If we need materially higher returns than other buyers, we’re all seeing the same deal, AND we are the high bidder, it means that we’re looking at the deal differently than the other buyers.

I love being different. It means we’re either crazy or smart.