Blog

Los Angeles is in the midst of an un-precedented housing shortage. All over the city, there are vacant, obsolete commercial buildings. City law prevents these buildings from being easily re-purposed for residential use, due mostly to parking and set-back requirements. Yet the city waived these requirements for re-purposing of obsolete commercial buildings in specific Adaptive … Continue reading “An obvious way to quickly add lots of housing to LA”

Am in the process of going through Carol Loomis’ Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything 1966-2013, which is spectacular. Have taken away two nuggets which are relevant to our business, one great and one not-so-great. The first comes in the form of a comment Buffett made to a bunch of MBA students, … Continue reading “Learning, some more, from Buffett”

Last week, a fellow investing geek and I journeyed to Columbia, MO to take part in the inaugural Capital Camp, a three day meeting of vaguely weird people like us. Aside from various tornado-related travel snafus, the trip was excellent. It turns out there is a small but vibrant community of finance geeks, mainly to … Continue reading “What I learned at adult nerd camp”

Probably the most important job for the leader of any organization is to establish and communicate a simple strategy for that organization. Maybe that’s easy for other leaders. But I like to “Hamlet” things… go back and forth, see the positives and negatives of different courses of action, and generally fail to be decisive. So, … Continue reading “Strategic clarity, at last”

Just like everyone else who owns property, my phone rings off the hook every 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 I’m nice to cold-calling brokers”

Pretty much everyone who gets into doing real estate deals starts with a single deal that looks good to her. If she manages to raise the money, close the deal, and execute, she probably gets opportunities to do more deals, and that’s how a career in real estate deal-making is born. But one of the … Continue reading “Managing a network of capital providers”

Recently, a guy I see almost every day asked me about potentially investing with us. To be nice, he caveated his request by making it clear he would understand if I preferred not to take money from someone I have to see all the time, in case things go wrong. Because I’ve never solicited capital … Continue reading “Carrying the weight”

Read an article today (on LinkedIn, so I can’t easily provide a link) by a guy who had trouble finding work after taking a few years off to raise his children. Should start out by acknowledging the irony of me noticing an article about this topic by a guy… this is a problem that women … Continue reading “How we think about talent”

Want to give you a sense for where pricing is, right now. We look at literally every deal that comes on the market in our target neighborhoods, and everything that looks close to working in other neighborhoods. For us, the renovated stuff is an obvious pass. We’re value-add buyers, so we focus on the most … Continue reading “Where pricing is right now”

Can’t tell you how often I read / hear brokers say “Values are really going up in X neighborhood”. This drives me crazy. Why? What those brokers mean is that they have examined recent sales and concluded that prices are going up. A price is the amount of money someone pays for something. It’s objective; … Continue reading “Price and value”