Since I’ve decided to make my career in one little corner of Los Angeles, I spend a lot of time thinking about how best to preserve and enhance my reputation among the brokers, owners, and tenants who participate in my market. The most important thing I do to get and keep a good reputation is … Continue reading “On being a real estate mensch”
Category: Brokerage
Here’s a bad selling strategy
Take a look at this listing on Silver Ridge in Silver Lake: http://takesunset.com/2013/03/2338-silver-ridge-avenue-in-silver-lake/ Absolutely beautiful example of modernist design in an A+ location. So, why am I complaining about it? Take a look at those rents. They’re getting $2595 each, which implies they were rented pretty recently (if they’d been rented more than a year … Continue reading “Here’s a bad selling strategy”
Don’t buy apartment buildings if…
1. You don’t like confrontation. Inevitably, you are going to have tenants who screw things up and need to leave your building. No one is going to care about it as much as you do, so you’re the one with whom the buck is going to stop. If you can’t stick up for yourself / … Continue reading “Don’t buy apartment buildings if…”
Bad miss
Rookie mistake today. Saw a deal on the MLS priced at $299,000. Looked pretty good, so, without waiting to talk to the listing broker, I threw together an all-cash offer for $260,000 and sent it over, figuring we’d settle at $280,000 or something. Got the following email back from the broker: “Sold for 340k just … Continue reading “Bad miss”
Wading through crap
Regular readers know I deal mainly in apartment buildings between 2-20 units. In doing so, I run across all kinds of issues, including missing financial records, bad leases, lack of estoppels, un-permitted construction, city violations, etc. Many of these problems just don’t exist when you deal with larger assets. That’s because larger assets tend to … Continue reading “Wading through crap”
Deadlines and documents
When we write offers for apartment buildings, we usually want a 17-21 day loan contingency. The concept is to give us some assurance that we will be able to get the loan we want before we irrevocably commit to doing the deal. Pretty standard. But lately, I’ve been running into the same problem over and over … Continue reading “Deadlines and documents”
Why I don’t love 1031 exchanges
We’ve talked a bit about 1031 exchanges before, but here’s a re-cap: 1031 is a tax loophole designed to allow a seller to avoid paying capital gains tax on a property when he sells To do so, seller sells his property and has escrow transfer his equity to a so-called 1031 facilitator Then, seller has … Continue reading “Why I don’t love 1031 exchanges”
Brokers… can’t live with ’em
Just ran across a listing which has been sitting on the market for a month in Northeast LA. The listing puts the price at $1,250,000 and the square footage at 2,170 sq ft. That’s $576 / sq ft, which is ridiculous, even in today’s inflated market. I decided, on a whim, to look the property … Continue reading “Brokers… can’t live with ’em”
A vote of confidence
Had a great phone call today that I’m going to brag about. Sue me. A guy who runs a fairly large brokerage office called me asking for advice. He has a client who wants to list a medium-sized apartment building and the broker doesn’t really know anything about doing multifamily sales. He got my name … Continue reading “A vote of confidence”
Growing the team
An update for those of you following our progress in building the Adaptive Realty team: We’ve added a new property manager, Ignacio, who will be responsible for overseeing all of our existing apartment properties and assisting Jon with the properties we have under construction. We’ve added a new leasing agent, Bana, who will be handling … Continue reading “Growing the team”