In light of the UCLA shootings, thought I’d spend some time today writing about an under-appreciated problem in property management: Dealing with tenants with mental health issues. If you supply rental housing in Los Angeles, your tenant base will skew towards people in their 20s and 30s. Unfortunately, the mid 20s is usually the time in … Continue reading “Dealing with tenant mental health issues”
Author: Moses Kagan
A management lesson I relearn every day
Here’s something I learned years ago about management of a growing organization but seem to keep learning over and over again: It’s mainly about the number of reasonably high quality decisions you can make each day. Why? Well, let’s take the sentence above apart. The “number“: If your organization is growing, it means that you are confronting new challenges … Continue reading “A management lesson I relearn every day”
A minor epiphany about valuations for larger buildings
Just had a minor epiphany while walking over to the office from breakfast that I thought I’d share with you. It’s kind of embarrassing, in a “slap-myself-in-the-head-for-not-recognizing-this-earlier” kind of way, but I’m all about honesty on this blog, so here goes… Regular readers know I spend a lot of time thinking about the components of value. … Continue reading “A minor epiphany about valuations for larger buildings”
How do you make money flipping land?
For today’s post, I answered another Quora question: How do you make money flipping land? It’s not a very detailed question, but it raises some interesting issues around price volatility, holdings costs, and regulatory delays. Click here to read the whole answer. Meanwhile: I’m taking the boys up to Yosemite for the holiday weekend. Hope … Continue reading “How do you make money flipping land?”
How to get more affordable housing for free
Further to my last post, here’s a pretty bad idea being proposed to help with the homelessness problem in LA. To lazy to click? Basically, two council-members are proposing a ballot initiative to increase various fees paid by developers to pay for bond which would pay for $1Bn worth of housing for the homeless. Sounds like … Continue reading “How to get more affordable housing for free”
Bravo, Governor Brown
Wanted to take a moment today to tip my cap to Governor Brown, who is (as usual) advocating a really smart response to our state’s housing affordability crisis. Here’s a link to the proposed bill. In case you’re not an expert on deciphering legalese, here, in a nutshell, is what it says: If a developer … Continue reading “Bravo, Governor Brown”
A novel explanation for the slowdown in single family home starts
Buried in Paul Krugman’s column today was an interesting fact, of which I was not previously aware: As a result of action/inaction by President Obama, the income tax rate paid by the top 1% of earners is back up to where it was in 1979, before President Reagan took office. Weirdly, upon reading the above, … Continue reading “A novel explanation for the slowdown in single family home starts”
Dealing with leasing anxiety
We’re going through a period of intense leasing, with multiple new buildings opening up over the course of, say, 3-4 months. Long term, this is a good thing. It means we’re finishing projects we started, in some cases, years ago, fulfilling the promises we made to investors. And, in a lot of cases, it means … Continue reading “Dealing with leasing anxiety”
The money coursing through Adaptive
Yesterday, in the afternoon, I signed seven new residential leases for an average of roughly $2500 / month. It got me thinking about how weird it is that we consider leases on a monthly payment basis and about how much money is actually going through our office each month. After all, those seven leases represented … Continue reading “The money coursing through Adaptive”
The difference between being opportunistic and systematic
For the past year or so, we have been putting out a lot of capital on behalf of one major investor. Sure, we’ve sprinkled in a few other deals with people able to write checks for $2-3MM. But we’ve mainly got into the habit of opportunistically finding deals, then bringing it to one capital source. And … Continue reading “The difference between being opportunistic and systematic”