Author: Moses Kagan

Long-time readers know we never had real mentors, nor worked elsewhere in real estate. Instead, we’ve built our investment and property management businesses from first principles. We ask: What is the problem we’re trying to solve, and what is the best way we can think to solve it, taking into account what we’ve learned about … Continue reading “Why we don’t have in-house maintenance”

Just like everyone else who owns property in Los Angeles, my phone rings all day with brokers calling me, trying to get me to list my properties for sale. No one likes receiving cold marketing calls, including me. But I do my best to be kind to the people calling.  Why? I’m not a seller, … Continue reading “Why we’re nice to cold-calling brokers”

In general, I dislike real estate crowd-funding. My beef is that the lack of connection between the sponsor and the faceless equity providers makes it easy, psychologically, for the sponsor to justify to himself screwing over the investors. That said, RECF sites do provide a very valuable service to new investors and sponsors: They have … Continue reading “Learning from the crowd-funding sites”

At Adaptive, we’re always looking for ways to serve more partners, whether those partners are investors, property owners or tenants. We’ve noticed recently that more and more owners of single family homes on the Eastside are choosing to rent those homes out, rather than sell them, once they’re ready to move. This makes sense. The … Continue reading “Announcing the launch of Hyperion Property Management”

Want to take moment to explain and decry a move I see a lot of syndicators making (particularly on crowd-funded deals): Making distributions using investor capital, rather than free cashflow. Heres’ where the problem comes from: Syndicators need capital from investors. Investors generally want both regular distributions AND high forecast IRRs. It’s a seller’s market … Continue reading “One way syndicators con investors”

Just finished Stephen Schwarzman’s new book What it Takes, which is a kind of a combination memoir and business advice book. Regular readers know I idolize Schwarzman, who founded Blackstone and built it into, by far, the largest manager of alternative assets in the world. As one of the co-founders of a tiny speck of an alternative … Continue reading “Learning from Stephen Schwarzman (again)”

Have been listening to Tim Ferris’s interview with Charles Koch, which pairs nicely with Sons of Wichita, which I read last year. In case you don’t know, separate from his efforts to bend our country’s politics to the right over the past 40 years or so (or, maybe, not so separate!), Koch is an extraordinary business … Continue reading “Learning from Charles Koch”

For the last few months, we have been chasing a deal in a neighborhood we know well. The owner finally gathered offers from a bunch of potential buyers, including us. As usual for us, we gave our bottom line number and a commitment that we would not chip price. The broker knew us and, as … Continue reading “The pain of losing out to a price-chipper”

Last week, I had three different, current investors separately ask me if I could take more of their capital. Sadly, right now, I can’t. While we’re deploying a fund, we’re fiduciaries for that fund, so I’m not going to take any capital for rivalrous deals (5+ units, LA County). And, while I can see some … Continue reading “The surreal experience of turning down capital”

Was just reminded by a Curbed article about a mind-bogglingly stupid trend in real estate investment and figured I’d share why I think it’s so dumb. Here’s the deal: Many people working in big, coastal cities feel locked out of the property market, both for owner-occupancy and also for investment Online platforms have sprung up … Continue reading “Businesses to avoid: Remote, single-family home rentals”