Was looking through some public records yesterday and came across this little bit of heartbreak:
1516 Micheltorena LLC was us, through our old entity, Better Dwellings. We purchased the property from Kinsling in September of 2010. We bled and sweated over that property, transforming it from a beat-up old dump into a beautiful place to live. Then, we got very high rents.
So far, so good. But Better Dwellings had a fatal flaw: All of the money came from one investor (one of my best friends in the world). Because he put up all the money, he got the right to liquidate the portfolio at the time of his choosing. And he chose the second half of 2012. I wasn’t happy with the timing, but he had both the legal and, even more important, the moral right to liquidate.
I found a buyer and rushed to get a sale done by the deadline, accepting an outrageous, last-minute price chip because I had promised to be fully-out by the end of the year.
Turns out I left $475,000 of totally unearned profit on the table by selling early. Ouch.