Category: Uncategorized

Am not a huge stock market guy by any means. The vast majority (I mean, vast – like 98% or something) of my personal net worth is in LA real estate. Still, I am interested in the public equity markets because they’re fascinating. And today’s Brexit-related market gyrations put me in mind of Benjamin Graham’s famous … Continue reading “Brexit is making Mr. Market nuts”

You’ll rarely hear us asking a company to take our money. But we’re doing it today. As you probably know, we’ve been hit by a rash of scammers posting fake Adaptive ads, hoping to steal money from naive potential renters. This scam works because the cost of customer acquisition is basically nil. All the crooks need to … Continue reading “Adaptive to Craigslist: Take our money, please”

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”

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”

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”

Today, instead of writing a post from scratch, I answered the following question on Quora, a Q&A site that I like very much: Question: What are the pros and cons of crowd-sourcing real estate platforms like Fundrise or RealtyShares compared to traditional REITs? Can see the difference in projected returns but what makes them different … Continue reading “What’s the difference between investing in a crowd-funded deal and buying shares in a REIT?”

Pretty much every day, I’m confronted by the following question: How much is too much to share on the blog? The reasons for not sharing are pretty obvious: We have tons of competitors, many of whom read this blog and (try to) copy what we do. Within reason, I don’t mind this… it’s a free … Continue reading “Reminder about why I write this”

Met with a potential new agent for Adaptive yesterday who asked an interesting question: What differentiates Adaptive from other brokerages that he might join? The answer is actually pretty simple: Unlike pretty much every other brokerage I can think of, Adaptive specializes in advising buyers of investment property (as opposed to sellers). Representing sellers is definitely … Continue reading “Why work with Adaptive”

Sorry for the limited posting last week; I was up in SF at the EisnerAmper Real Estate Private Equity Conference. At the conference, heard a talk about building an “excellent, enduring organization”, which is obviously what we are trying to do here at Adaptive. The talk included several good pieces of advice, but one really stood … Continue reading “Passing on some great management advice”