During my visit to Troy, NY, I was enchanted, as usual, by the large number of stunning old brick industrial buildings sitting vacant along the Hudson River. These buildings are the kind that developers die for… brick (in an area with no earthquakes!), high ceilings, original casement windows, etc. You can take buildings like those and
Periodically, I write pieces on here about how our knowledge of achievable rents cycles back into our acquisition process. Wanted to give you a concrete example. There’s a deal we looked at several months ago that sold in the $700-750k range. At the time, not knowing as much about achievable rents, we thought the deal
Recently, I’ve found myself repeating the same piece of advice over and over, so I’m going to share it here. The context is as follows: Someone comes to me for help in optimizing her real estate business. He wants to figure out how to generate more revenue per deal or how to do more deals in
From time to time, I check in at Gawker, where the editors have recently taken to publishing anti-gentrification screeds. Yesterday’s piece about Detroit is a classic, a model of the art. Peter Moskowitz, the author, spends a bunch of time criticizing Detroit for allocating its scarce resources to the downtown area at the expense of the
We got a deal that I think I really like over the weekend. However, the diligence period is only three days. There’s an unbelievable amount to cover in these three days: Physical inspections Reviewing leases, estoppels, rent roll, etc. Reviewing the permit records Compiling a construction budget for the rehab Confirming our pro forma rents