Moses Kagan
@moseskagan
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Owns many apartment buildings w investors. Manages many more for other owners. Co-founder: @reconvenela & @reseedpartners. Join my mailing list here ⬇️
Joined February 2008
Our strategy is simply to do what smart families have always done:. - Acquire great assets in supply-constrained mkts. - Leverage them conservatively. - Steward them well. - Refinance them opportunistically to return capital tax-efficiently. - Hold them indefinitely.
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Shoutout to my wife, who has paid our mortgage for the calendar year to date by renting the house out for two TV commercials for a total of 4.5 days.
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Learn from my very expensive mistake:. Do not, under any circumstances, plant bamboo anywhere on your property.
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Extremely difficult to open a wood-fired BBQ restaurant in LA, due to air quality regulations. But you *can* burn garbage on the corner, whenever you want. Anarcho-tyranny.
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The hardest part for her was convincing me that doing so was a good idea (she was correct).
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The guy I know who is the best at friendships (also a spectacular salesman) keeps proposing plans. I asked him why once & he told me:. People get busy. If you want to be their friend, don’t take it personally & keep asking. He did this with me & he eventually became one of the
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A rule I've followed, with great success, my entire life:. Tolerate odd behavior in highly-intelligent friends & acquaintances.
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In my mid-forties, I’ve now been paying attention long enough to be able to feel the compounding effect of 2% national GDP growth. All aspects of material culture are better than when I was a kid:. - Everyone has an Internet-connected computer / camera in their pocket.- Medicine.
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Don't mean to be too harsh, but:. Life is passing this person by, while she's sitting around her parents' house at 31, waiting for the perfect opportunity. If she had chosen *almost any full-time job* and worked reasonably hard at it between '21 & today, she would be *so* much
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Until you’ve visited a ton of American cities & driven around their suburbs, hard to truly grasp how rich this country is. Millionaires by the million.
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$44,000 ***PER TENT***. Is the City of Los Angeles joking?
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Failure state where I’ve seen men get stuck:. - Hit 30 w no real accomplishments.- Compare themselves to peers who have achieved.- Decide race is lost.- Give up / tread water.- Hit 40 even further behind. (I hit 30 like this, too, but buckled down & worked instead of quitting.).
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@primalpoly You have no idea how calming it is to know that, if you went back & examined any of the countless decisions your partner makes every day, you would find that decision to have been made intelligently.
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Property listed for 6 months at $4.6MM. We finally offer $4.2MM. Seller wants to think about it for a few days. Seller comes back at $5.2MM. Have a good weekend everyone.
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@atrupar I nominate Howard Lutnicks' kids to spend their waking hours screwing in little screws.
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Walkable neighborhoods.
If you were in charge of making America healthy again, what is the first policy you'd implement? (please don't say ban seed oils).
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One of the sadder experiences I’ve had in real estate this year:. Driving around a very prosperous, fast-growing city & realizing it’s making all the same land-use mistakes LA made from the 1950s & onwards, with predictable results.
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What's the nicest thing a non-family member has ever done for you?. I'll start: On the night before my college early application was due, a girl I was not even particularly friendly w took it upon herself to edit all of my essays. (She's now an English professor; I got in.).
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Let me share a secret that has worked in my family & will work in yours: . Your goal in raising subsequent generations is to get them to see themselves as links in a chain, rather than as individuals free to do whatever they want.
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Genuinely one of the worst public policies I’ve ever encountered. (It’s so unfair to citizens that, when I first read about it, I thought the story was concocted by someone trying to discredit CA Democrats.)
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The best way to cut outdoor drug dealing in SF:. Simply subject the dealers to the same permitting rules every other business there navigates.
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To hear about more ways we’ve screwed up while renovating ~110 buildings over the past ~15 yrs, join my mailing list via the link in my bio.
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My 10 year old son just told me he’s selling our company (my life’s work) as soon as he’s in charge, so that he can start a better company. How’s your morning going?.
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An observation, as my peers & I move into our 40s: . People who “don’t care about $$” often begin to care very much about $$ when they realize, sometimes too late, that their lives have become constrained by its absence.
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Let me give another concrete example from my own life:. My custody arrangement for my older kids post-divorce meant that I had to auto-decline ~50% of weekend social invitations I received for like 10 yrs. So grateful for the people who kept inviting me, anyway.
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0% chance CA solves our housing crisis by building affordable housing at $1,000,000 per unit.
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Take this from someone who learned it the hard way:. If you text your buddy asking how he’s doing & he replies “I’m in a dark place”, you don’t text back “Sorry dude, let me know if I can help”. You get in your f’ing car & go find him immediately.
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Something I wish every legislator, regulator & housing court in the country would internalize: . The harder you make evicting a tenant who dishonors his lease:. 1. The harder it is for owners to justify renting to marginal applicants, &. 2. The less appealing it is for developers.
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@HiCaseyV I met him while he was falling down drunk at Cheetah’s. He gave me a fist bump & said “Kiefer respect”. One of the weirder interactions of my life.
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People have this weird blindspot, where they assume life in other countries is like life in America. It’s not. In China, if the government doesn’t like you, you just disappear. No warning, due process, no nothing. Are TikTok’s key execs or their families still in China? . If.
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If you leave rent control in place for decades, you get families of adults crammed together in tiny apartments meant for 1-2 people & single people floating around in apartments meant for families.
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Driving me crazy this AM:. The parade of people arguing that, bc the federal governments taxes and spends so much, reducing waste by a few billion here & there is irrelevant. If you take $ from citizens under threat of prison (taxation), you have a special obligation, exceeding.
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Can't believe I have to write this, but:. Separation of powers. Due process. Rule of law. Vigorous, impartial law enforcement. The right to an attorney. These are not just empty words. They form the foundation upon which our collective freedom and prosperity rest.
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Something no one tells you about getting into your 40s: . Your friends start getting into positions of authority in their chosen fields, massively strengthening your collective network, creating interesting new opportunities for everyone.
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Can’t believe I have to write this:. People who work hard & accumulate enough $$ to live through retirement without burdening their families or society, then pass what remains on to their offspring are to be praised, not vilified.
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~2 years into Covid, and ~18 months since we learned the disease is transmitted through the air, the Los Angeles Department of Building & Safety still requires all submitted plans to be quarantined for several days before a plan-checker can review them.
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Am writing w incredibly sad news:. Our friend @ArtemTepler is no longer w us. Will post a link to GoFundMe below to help his partner & young daughter. Hope you will join me in giving what you can. Pls like, RTs, etc. for distribution, so we can raise as much $ as possible.
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@SP1NS1R There are location companies that do exactly what you suggest. The old owner of the house kind of explained to us that this was possible if we wanted to do it, but we didn’t totally believe him, so it’s been a nice surprise.
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This is the kind of thing that happens, even to rich people, in countries where there is no rule of law:
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Almost every time:. 500s credit score applicant picks the more expensive unit that would stretch his monthly income. 700s credit score applicant wants the cheaper one, well within his means.
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Our policy on employees who leave:. If you give us 2+ yrs of good work & enough notice for us to find & train a replacement, you get added to our unofficial "alumni network", which means:. We do whatever we can, within reason, to help you along in your career.
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All of my richest acquaintances (none of whom had a huge exit, which is sort of like lightning striking):. 1. Attended elite universities, then. 2. Spent their early-to-mid 20s grinding at the big investment banks, then. 3. Left, either to join smaller, more meritocratic orgs.
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In light of what the fires have revealed about the disfunction in LA city government, want everyone to remember how one of our city council members spends her time & our $$:
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The NY Times published a very long story today abt Houston’s relative success in re-housing homeless people. ~No mention of the fact that Houston’s unusually lax approach to zoning means more supply & therefore lower rents, making re-housing people *much* easier.
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Sign of a disordered society:. Local advertising dominated by personal injury attorneys.
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Have dealt with this at least twice now. My advice?. If you can: Pay off what she owes, treat it as a bonus, speak with her about it once & never again, and earn an enormous amount of loyalty.
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Just spoke to a guy in the following situation:. - Owns two homes, one in LA, one out-of-state. - Tenant in out-of-state home just vacated. - Owner would happily move to out-of-state home and rent LA home (thereby adding a home to the rental market, at a time when fire victims.
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Used to think companies favored hiring athletes bc there was some kind of "old boys club" stuff going on. Having run small businesses for ~15 yrs, I now realize they're just looking for people who compete hard, take wins and losses in stride, and know how to be good teammates.
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@SMB_Attorney I'll take the other side of this. *Lots* of marriages going to be improved by cheap, 24 hr robot domestic help.
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Some Things I've Learned in Business (Sometimes the Hard Way), a thread:. 1. Wealth comes from solving problems - you can solve small problems for lots of people, big problems for few people or big problems for lots of people (avoid small problems for few people!).
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What every voter should know about housing policy. 1. Rents reflect the balance of supply of apartments and demand for those apartments in a given area. That’s it; there’s no magic. If you want lower rents, you can hope for a recession that destroys jobs and, therefore, demand.
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@VicVijayakumar It’s an LA thing. Previous owner of the house was in the business & got us on a bunch of location company lists.
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Young people:. You get invited into a senior person’s office for any reason, you bring a pad & pen.
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Before commit irrevocably to buying any particular piece of real estate:. Visit at like 9-10pm and walk around the block. You may be *very* surprised by how the "feel" of the area changes.
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Solution to LA’s housing shortage: . Designate a few ‘hoods w good transit access for Manhattan-like density: .- No parking .- No side setbacks at grade.- No height limits .- Mixed-use by right .- No conditional use permits req for food & bev . Let it rip & get *actual*.
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If I were in government, I would simply not tax people busting their asses to make $40k to pay for $1MM apartments at the beach for people who choose not to work.
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Our policy on employees who leave: . If you give us 2+ yrs of good work & enough notice for us to find & train a replacement, you get added to our unofficial "alumni network", which means: . We do whatever we can, within reason, to help you along in your career.
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Recently met a guy who started two different businesses ~50 yrs ago. Now, they're both v successful & run by his adult children out of an office building he also owns, where his foundation has an office and his grandchildren have a fully decked-out playroom. He won life.
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The people I most want to reach probably don't read novels, but:. Entrepreneurs; I urge you to read this book, to get a sense for what entrepreneurship is like, absent the rule of law.
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Unpopular opinion: . The American credit scoring system is one of the under-appreciated marvels of the modern world. It enables trust among strangers at scale, and therefore reduces costs & increases commerce, to everyone’s benefit (even those w low scores).
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Credit where credit is due:. Newsom vetoed the insane bill that would have offered down payment assistance loans to undocumented immigrants, at a time when funding is way too scarce to provide loans to all the citizens who want them.
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The reason I worded this so harshly:. I genuinely believe policies like this undermine our civilization. If people who do nothing all day get better housing than people who bust their asses, eventually the people who bust their asses rightly start to wonder why they’re doing so.
If I were in government, I would simply not tax people busting their asses to make $40k to pay for $1MM apartments at the beach for people who choose not to work.
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Very sad I have to write this, but:. Selling goods or services to willing customers at a profit isn’t evil or even icky. It’s admirable & the root of most human progress over the past few hundred years.
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Last yr during @REconveneLA, @realEstateTrent offered to donate $20 / RT to a charity of my choice up to $15k. I matched & we raised $30k for @BTSLosAngeles & Prep for Prep. Shoe’s on the other foot now :). $1/like of this tweet (to $16k), to “Trent”’s fav charity. Let’s go!.
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Results of a totally unscientific poll of my high-achieving, all-male, prep school friend group:. Everyone who heard his parents fighting about $$ devoted his career to making $$. Everyone who didn’t, didn’t.
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Central irony of the modern American housing market:. Renters blame developers, who add to supply, for high rents, rather than the politicians who restrict supply.
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Like many of you, I'm having a pretty crappy day. But here's a little good news:. The Real Estate Twitter community just raised enough $$ to put @ArtemTepler's 2-yr-old daughter through college. (If you would like to contribute, the link is below.)
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Something I wish every legislator, regulator & housing court in the country would internalize: . The harder you make evicting a tenant who dishonors his lease, the harder it is for owners to justify renting to marginal applicants.
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Let me share a secret that has worked pretty well in my family & will probably work in yours: . Your goal in raising subsequent generations is to get them to see themselves as links in a chain, rather than as individuals 100% free to do whatever they want.
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Am posting this, from my friend Eric Weatherholtz, as a pic & not tagging him, in order to maximize distribution from the algorithm. It’s a ~priceless insight.
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[Warning: Non-real estate post]. The vast majority of humans who have ever lived lived under the heels of tyrants of one type or another. What we have in the United States of America - government restrained by a written constitution, with regular elections & (until recently).
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The game, in case no one took the time to explain it to you:. As quickly & efficiently as possible, transmute your labor into ownership of scarce and / or productive assets. (Hence: “capital”-ism.).
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Huberman a reminder of two eternal truths:. 1. Most men placed in positions of “spiritual” authority will be tempted to use that power to have s*x w many women, . & . 2. (In part, for this reason) If you make any man into an idol, you are very likely to be disappointed.
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If a couple earning $150k / yr can’t hope to buy a decent home in LA without parental help, why would they come here in the first place?. And, if we’re not the kind of place ambitious young people move to to chase their dreams, what are we?.
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Am divorced. My ex & I have the two older boys alternating Thanksgivings. This is an “off year” for me & I already miss them terribly, even tho I’m w my wife & youngest & will be surrounded by family & friends. Thinking of other folks in the same position & sending good vibes.
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A msg for children of immigrants (like me):. Those weird businesses your parents had (ours was small apt buildings)? The old cars they drove to save $? That pressure they put on you to get good grades? . 1. That experience was *deeply* American. &. 2. Your parents are heroes.
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I hope all you builders will internalize this:. The kind of person who can make a building appear from nothing, despite the many obstacles in the path of that happening, is also the kind of person who can rebuild a good life after going broke.
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My motivation for writing the above is to give younger people a little bit of perspective. Things can feel bad or hard in any given moment, but we live in an incredible country & we should appreciate it & seek to maintain & improve it, not burn it down.
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For those entering their 30s having taken a couple swings in start-ups w/o having made life-changing $$:. Maybe take those tech skills & use them to build wealth in a more traditional business. Really want to avoid hitting 40 with nothing to show for ~2 decades of work.
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For those tuning in recently:. Last yr, we helped a Ukrainian refugee family settle in LA & start a handyman biz:. Had them over for 7/4. Happy to report:. - they’ve stopped advertising, bc they & their employees are so slammed w work, &. - all 3 sons now speak perfect English.
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Take Peter Thiel’s key idea from Zero to 1 and invert it: . Consciously go into a niche where many fairly mediocre people do well & just outcompete them. Pretty much guarantees you won’t be a billionaire. Pretty much guarantees you’ll end up ~rich.
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Started a new biz & hope you can help spread the word:. You all know I love RE deals & teaching. Have tried to combine my passions in different ways over the yrs, including on this feed. The new biz, @reseedpartners, is by far my most ambitious try:. A strong group of.
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Financial crimes go unpunished -> trust in capital markets reduced -> cost of capital goes up -> fewer projects capitalized -> we're all worse off.
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UK in the final stages of conducting the following experiment:. Over how many generations can you push your most ambitious, profit-motivated people to emigrate, before you destroy your economy?
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Want to add that I really fucked up here. We texted yesterday, he told me he was in a dark place and I offered help but didn't follow up aggressively. Going to carry that one for the rest of my life. If you're in a dark place PLS REACH OUT to people who love you or, if you.
Am writing w incredibly sad news:. Our friend @ArtemTepler is no longer w us. Will post a link to GoFundMe below to help his partner & young daughter. Hope you will join me in giving what you can. Pls like, RTs, etc. for distribution, so we can raise as much $ as possible.
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Recently heard of a pretty devious grift in the student rentals space:. - Landlord *way* over-prices student rentals.- Landlord offer student-tenants kickbacks, in the form of gift cards.- Student-tenants convince parents, who don't know the market, to pay the over-priced rents.
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@emanumiller Sincerely appreciate the journalists who attended, did not look away, & will now tell the world what they saw. I would not have the strength.
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@Art444Star Fragility Culture. The only person responsible for improving your life is you, & the sooner you internalize this, the happier & more successful you will be.
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