Real Estate Addicts

Who sells the 20-unit building? Marc, Ray and Dan sit down with Hunter Perry, Founder of MassBuildings, the investment sales arm of Choose Boston. Hunter went from developing and running furnished rentals, and being the first person on the ground for Compass in New England, to brokering apartment buildings and land. They get into how he sold a distressed Auburndale site that had sat with another b...

A smoldering fire, a burst PEX line and water pouring through three floors of a nearly finished nine-unit building, about a week before the certificate of occupancy. Marc, Ray and Dan sit down with Cam Denommee of ServiceMaster by Gilmore, whose team had two crews on Marc's site right away. They walk through what actually happened, from a line set soldered in a ceiling to fire suppression that was...

Marc and Dan are back for another AI episode, this time on the difference between an AI assistant and an AI bot. They compare assistants like Instinct and Muse with a roster of Grok bots that each have a job: Sue Pervision the chief of staff, Cash Flo the podcast editor, Val U. Add on social media, Duke Diligence on research and Walter Jarvis as admin. You'll hear how one bot got Best Buy's execut...

Fresh off six days in Poland with Drutex Windows and a group of Boston developers, Marc and Dan break down what American builders can learn from how the Poles build. Marc toured townhouse communities 30 minutes outside Warsaw going up for about $100 a square foot and selling around $280,000, delivered as vanilla boxes: the missing middle the U.S. doesn't have. They get into 20-inch exterior insula...

Steve Vettori went from 15 years of enterprise software sales to developing the 34-unit Beacon in Newton, and now he runs MassDwell, a factory that builds accessory dwelling units out of light gauge steel. He walks Marc, Ray, and Dan through why he switched framing systems, how the factory turns out about one 560-square-foot module a day, and why his crews are on a customer's lot for roughly 30 da...

Brian Vizarreta has been acquired twice in four years, from StructionSite to DroneDeploy to Procore, and he came back to explain what all that money is actually betting on. He and Marc, Ray, and Dan get into facade mapping that finally settled a four-fix water leak, why the most valuable thing to ask an AI is what isn't there rather than what is, and whether any of this makes sense for someone bui...

Nick's first deal was a $50,000 Dorchester lot bought with no attorney, no due diligence, and a 13% hard money loan. Plus a deed restriction that took three years to kill. He walks Marc, Ray, and Dan through the code interpretation that turned $140,000 of steel into a $300,000 line item, why two "at cost" GC partnerships ended up in court, and how he found 40 to 50 percent margins hiding in site w...

Eleven weeks into a new demo and disposal company, a text from the business partner laid it out plainly: $70,700 in revenue, about $6,000 a week, against a burn rate that requires $20,000 just to hold even. In this first Real Estate Addicts Business Lab, the hot seat opens the books on Circa Demo. The transfer station lines eating billable hours, the overtime nobody planned for, and the $15 hourly...

When a two-and-a-half-acre Weston lot landed in Ricky's inbox at a price he could hardly believe, his first thought wasn't excitement, it was "why am I getting screwed here?" In his fourth appearance he walks through the two-week due diligence sprint that followed, from the zoning attorney and the wetland flags to the 1943 setback rules that determine whether the whole thing pencils, plus what's q...

Greater Boston's median single-family price just crossed a million dollars, and Marc, Ray, and Dan spend this episode explaining why the math no longer works for anyone hoping to build their way out of it. They dig into why a triple decker now costs seven figures to construct, why Boston's permit numbers have fallen to a fraction of what they should be, and the strange split where rents are soften...

The guys trade war stories from the least glamorous corner of real estate. The assessor's office. They get into a retroactive Newton tax bill that landed on unsuspecting condo buyers, a phantom drainage easement that appears on the city's GIS map but nowhere in seventy-five years of title records, and the one filing that quietly turns a six-unit building into six far more expensive condominiums. I...

A listener wrote in asking how you build a real estate empire when you're spread too thin to hire anyone — and the answer flips conventional penny-pinching on its head. The guys break down why the smartest operators gladly send a $100 Uber SUV to grab drip edge, tip drivers to wait, and befriend neighbors instead of drowning in thousand-cut tasks, all while AI quietly handles the admin. Along the...

When a Massachusetts landlord discovered his tenants were using free legal aid and AI to exploit every loophole in the book, he stopped losing sleep and started building a weapon of his own. In this episode, Goodstander founder Caleb Wursten breaks down how he went from redeveloping Rust Belt towns like North Adams to creating a "landlord operating system" that scans your messages for legal risk b...

Marc, Ray, and Dan dig into how they've moved past treating AI as a fancy search engine and into agentic, "do-it-for-me" territory — building an in-house property management tool, diagnosing a stalling boat engine from uploaded videos, and turning a LIDAR kitchen scan into shop-drawing-level cabinet plans. They get practical about creating repeatable "skills" for tasks like certificate-of-insuranc...

The guys discuss whether paid real estate gurus, masterminds, and mentorship programs are actually worth it? Drawing on the pricey course they took early in their careers, they conclude that most of the value was motivational — the "feather in Dumbo's cap" that got them to finally swing the bat — while the mindset fluff, generic templates, and empty promises were largely useless. The crew makes th...

Marc, Ray, and Dan open with a multifamily update on the Massachusetts SJC unanimously killing the rent control ballot measure over a religious-exemption technicality, pushing any reintroduction to 2028, before pivoting to the "Silver Tsunami" - the roughly 41% of America's eight million tradespeople expected to retire by 2031 and the massive labor shortage it's creating. From there, the guys dig...

The guys dissect adaptive reuse through Dan and Ray's 1874 mixed-use Amesbury building — a restaurant, three commercial spaces, and six residential units — unpacking why reviving a 150-year-old structure is far more demanding and unpredictable than new construction. They trade renovation horror stories and hidden surprises: asbestos waterproofing behind all four sides of the brick, three stacked l...

Guest Crystal Chieregatti of Choose Boston Brokerage joins for a fiery rent control debate, including Marc's contrarian case that if Massachusetts must adopt rent control it should be strict and immediate rather than a slow creep that scares lenders and equity capital into fleeing to Florida. The heart of the episode is a masterclass in selling new construction during the build. Branding each proj...

The guys go deep on the operational grind of construction and demo focusing on the economics of Marc's Circle Waste business, transfer-station logistics and tipping fees, his new labor-saving gear (a mini excavator and a stair-climbing crawler), and a riff on robots and exoskeletons eventually replacing job-site labor. Dan also tells the story of catching a contractor on camera illegally dumping a...

The guys open on the frozen capital markets for multifamily development. Banks are eager to deploy senior debt at reasonable terms, but equity, mezzanine, and pref capital have gone into hiding, leaving big approved projects unbuilt while smaller deals still pencil. From there, Ray launches a new "Multifamily Minute" news segment covering three timely items: the Darby Development v. United States...

Fresh off a crash course with his labor law attorney, Marc pulls back the curtain on Massachusetts non-competes, non-solicitations, and the brutal world of employee misclassification including a real pest control case where workers walked away with a seven-figure judgment. The guys dig into the three-part test the AG uses to decide if someone is truly an independent contractor, why the "nuts and b...

The guys break down what operational excellence actually looks like on a construction site — from how to build a 13,000 sq ft, five-townhouse project in just 9.5 months to the hidden advantages of self-performing as the GC. They get into the mechanics that actually move jobs forward: pre-construction meetings, three-week look-aheads, cash as "the lubricant," and why trust with subs matters more th...

Charles de Jager — aka "The Hunter," founder of Energy Credit Consulting joined the guys to break down what's actually saving developers money now that federal incentives like 179D and 45L have been gutted by the One Big Beautiful Bill. He walks through how his team finds millions per project by running hundreds of energy models and challenging "default" specs like triple-pane windows, continuous...

In this episode, Dan and Marc sit down with Jordan Hayashi, founder of Bizzen, to break down how AI is rapidly transforming small businesses—especially in construction and real estate. Jordan shares his journey from working in a top AI lab to building tools that eliminate tedious tasks like estimates, reporting, and project communication. The conversation dives into the overwhelming explosion of A...

Because we couldn't get enough of AI a few episodes ago, we continue our discussion and dive deeper into how AI is transforming real estate, entrepreneurship, and everyday business operations—faster than most people realize. They share real-world examples, including launching a fully branded company in just hours, automating workflows, and replacing expensive tools like CRMs with custom-built AI s...