At least with investing, indexing is a solid - albeit very long term - assured way of creating a strong nest egg with consistent contributions. Real estate tourism - getting distracted by every submarket and strategy - is a sure fire way to lose your money.

The market for folks that just plop into a chair and mash on the keyboard every day is shrinking. With AI, it will soon be a relic of an inefficient past. Average employees won’t be able to hide anymore behind corporate bloat. Pick something and become a master at it.

The best RE investors master a strategy and understand their submarkets deeply. The few investors that beat the indices master a niche and study it deeply. The highest earning employees master a specialty and understand it deeply. Specialists will always crush generalists.

My sons won’t care that I wasn’t invited to the Twitter gala, right @credealjunkie?. They’ll be proud of their Chili’s dad 🌶️.

I really don’t care if it’s cliché. It’s the foundation of my purpose and my greatest joy. Providing for and being a dad these boys can be proud of is everything to me. So I’ll share away. Greatest calling there is.

This as an absolute truth:. When I’m on my last days, I won’t be looking at photos from trips. From bars. Or football games. I’ll be looking at photos like these, the most special moments of my life. Doesn’t get buzz. No likes or follows. But for me, it’s all there is.

Now for what it’s worth, we have never seen terms from a preferred equity shop that we would accept anyway. They want ridiculous amounts of control - and many will bleed your LPs dry the first chance they get. I’d rather grow low and slow than do a deal with the devil.

And instead of going through our underwriting to see how conservative we are, they just flash their Rolex Presidential and say “come back when you’ve got a real deal, kid!”.

We’ve never used preferred equity, but these dudes pitch us to get on calls all the time. Say they’re different. So we get on. Then they say we are too conservative. 12% IRR is too weak. Blah. I swear these groups are seduced by IRRs, even if the underwriting is ridiculous.

Chatted with a pref equity group in 2021. I remember telling them we were conservatively projecting 12-15% IRRs on our deals. This guy, a real finance bro, literally laughed at us. Said he doesn’t touch deals that don’t hit 20s. Found out their fund got crushed. Surprise.

But to be clear -. While it’s a competitive advantage IMO, it can’t make a dog of a deal into a good one. If someone says PM is the primary way they deliver value/alpha, I find that very hard to believe. PM is just about executing the business plan on budget in a timely manner.

We almost stopped PM and handed our portfolio to a 3rd party. We hit the ceiling. Mom and Pop doesn’t scale. Pulling our hair out. Decided to commit. Brought on consultants. Hired an entire leadership team. Implemented EOS. Mastered processes and ops. Always refining. A.

We 100% consider in-house management a competitive advantage and confidently promote as such. That said, PM is freaking hard and unless a firm is dead set on building it deep w/systems & leadership, it will be wasted time and money that kills deals and makes everyone miserable.

Should I have added no helmets to my list?. Shoot I didn’t own a helmet. Survived. But alas, my old man energy is worried about my boys so I guess helmets were a nice idea.

There wasn’t this feeling of worry - this anxiety that seems to permeate the country today. The divisiveness didn’t feel so obvious. It was just pizza, coca cola, and adolescent joy. Yes, I know my experience was unique to my little middle class midwestern corner of the world.

Yes, obviously this is pure millennial nostalgia. But 1985-1994 America was the greatest 10 year run in world history. Kicked it off with Back to the Future. Ended it with Ace Ventura. Arcades. Community pools. Board games. Guns n Roses.

I want to give my boys a proper late 80s childhood. Riding bikes. Trampolines w no safety features. Sparklers. Lemonade. Playing outside til sunset. Drinking from the hose. Basic Nintendo. Getting muddy. Cookouts. Water guns. Landlines. TMNT. No phones. No social. No Fortnite.

This is a bloodbath, and I’m not sure how this ends well for folks that got over their skis playing the vacation rental/Airbnb game. I’m sure it’s not isolated to this market. This is in the Outer Banks in NC, BTW.

Been following an oceanfront vacation house on Zillow the past year. Most homes in this market are used as vacation rentals. Tossed the idea around. Was originally listed at $1.25M. Re-listed at $1.15M. Currently: $795k. Time on market: 1 year. Zero demand. Falling knife.

Can argue all you want about the past, the politicians. I don’t care. Nearly every country has a checkered past. Major nations have all had conquest, wars, slavery. Many still do. I don’t want to hear it. Thankfully, we’ve evolved as a human race and generally frown upon.