And… I’m back

Going to try to get back to writing, both because it brings new people into our world and also because it helps me clarify my thinking.

Figured I’d start with an update on Adaptive.

Long-time followers of our company know that we started Adaptive in 2012 with one employee, $0 in assets under management, and 36 units in our property management portfolio.

As of right now, we’re at 12 full-time employees (plus a bunch of really talented contractors, etc.), ~$125MM in assets under management, and ~650 occupied apartments in our management portfolio.

In general, in the real estate business, you can grow in two ways: Do bigger deals or do more of them. In LA, doing bigger deals generally means sacrificing returns.

So, because we want to continue to generate supra-normal returns, what we have done is build an organization capable of executing many, smaller deals at once. And that strategy has born fruit: We currently have 11 projects in our pipeline.

How have we done this? By obsessively focusing on one asset class (sub-institutional scale multifamily) in a few neighborhoods and treating the people with whom we do business (counter-parties, contractors, tenants, investors, and employees) well.