Street Smart Success

Making a lot of money in Real Estate doesn’t require actively operating or directly investing into assets. Top-performing brokers can make a lot of money without any of the risk or brain damage of dealing with operations. As a highly productive broker, the sky is the limit in terms of how much you can earn. Many successful brokers make over a $1 million per year, and the uber elite can make severa...

Maintaining properties efficiently and managing expenses can make the difference between making or losing money. Many operators of multifamily properties spend way too much on supplies and labor and don’t have effective processes to manage their assets. On larger properties, this can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or even more in profitability over just a few years, thereby adversely impact...

The best Real Estate in the world has historically appreciated through good times and bad. With the right properties, demand has always exceeded supply and values have increased over time. These properties rarely come on the market, however, because sellers know the value of what they own, and don’t need or want to sell them. Larry Taylor, Founder and President of Christina Development Corporation...

Class C value-add projects are a rite of passage for most new multifamily investors. These assets generally have a lower barrier to entry than newer properties and promise higher returns. What most operators learn, however, is that these properties cost a lot more to operate than anticipated, and rent increases are harder to achieve than initially projected. That’s why many operators advance to ne...

Once you turn a property into a profitable, cash flowing asset, it makes sense to keep it indefinitely. If it’s built enough value, you can refi out and redeploy the capital into another asset and continue to benefit from the cash flow and appreciation on both assets. This is a repeatable process that builds multigenerational wealth. After years of trial and error, and investing in several valuabl...

One of the challenges to properties in tough neighborhoods is that while expenses continue climb, rents don’t. Buying older properties can make sense, but mostly in better neighborhoods. What’s important is being able to add value that translates into higher rents and a higher sales price for the asset, where most of the returns are. Ken Gee, President and Founder of the KRI Group of Companies, st...

Consistently passing on deals requires unusual discipline. It’s too easy to rationalize they work when they really don’t. It’s this lack of discipline and lack of underwriting knowledge that’s currently costing a lot of operators and their investors a lot of money.   It also helps when sponsors manage properties in-house to avoid excess costs, slow and expensive unit turns, and ineffective leasing...

Many multifamily operators avoid C Class properties built in the 70’s or 60’s in tougher neighborhoods. These properties often have issues with crime and delinquencies, not to mention deferred maintenance. In the past, these properties were priced low enough to justify the risk and the work involved to make them highly profitable. In the past few years, however, newer operators paid too much for t...

Investing in private credit is growing at a rapid clip as traditional lenders are getting increasingly restrictive in their lending practices and investors are looking for safe havens for their money. One of the most conservative Hard Money lending spaces is against single family homes in non-coastal markets because the home values are relatively predictable without dramatic fluctuations. Will Col...

Buying properties in satellite markets within short driving distance to secondary or even tertiary markets can produce alpha returns, especially when buying them from older owners. Often times, these owners aren’t current on what their properties are worth, and their rents are significantly under market. To make money on these properties, however, you still need to buy them at a discounted price....

One of the ways to become successful in Real Estate is through the path of brokerage. There’s almost no barrier to entry and unlimited upside. You can be successful as a broker if you develop a niche, passion, and discipline. Bob Knakal, a modern legend in the NYC brokerage community, leads the Private Capital Group for JLL in New York and has brokered the sale of well over 2000 buildings, more bu...

Investing in Real Estate syndications can be risky, especially if you don’t have the necessary years of experience and the knowledge to effectively vet the operator and the specific opportunity. As a result, many investors have lost money, especially in the last year. One way to mitigate this risk is to invest in a fund that’s run by a fund operator with a lengthy track record of success and diver...

Although core gateway markets have the highest appreciation for multifamily over time, secondary markets also offer tremendous growth and stability, and they have smaller barriers to entry. Bobby Larsen, Principal and Founder of Vanamor Investments, has invested successfully in submarkets of Portland, Oregon and Tampa, Florida, plus others.  He’s deployed a very conservative approach to acquisitio...

Maintaining high occupancy levels in apartment complexes can be an ongoing challenge, especially in highly competitive markets. This is why affordable, government subsidized housing can be a great option for investors. If the properties are in the right location, occupancy can consistently run at 100%, with waiting lists for new tenants. Not only are these properties full, but delinquencies are a...

One of the hottest asset classes right now is neighborhood retail. Although it was out of favor just a few years ago because people thought ecommerce would replace it, it has proven to be not only resilient, but incredibly stable. There has almost been no new construction for over fifteen years, so existing properties are seeing occupancy levels at way over 90%.  As a result, the competition to ac...

Cracks are starting to show in the multifamily space. Several owners have expiring rate caps and are underwater on their properties as they face dramatically increased debt payments. This is starting to force sellers to get realistic and capitulate on price. Great deals are starting to emerge with healthy spreads between interest rates and cap rates. Julian Vogel,  Fund Manager at Colony Hills Cap...

In the last several years, industrial Real Estate has become a highly visible asset class, mostly because of ecommerce. One growing subset of this category is Industrial Outdoor Storage. It’s a great asset class because there’s very low capital expenditure or management involved. It’s mostly land with a small, sparsely furnished industrial building, and sometimes no building at all. As a result, i...

There can be outsized returns in out-of-favor asset classes when there are still strong underlying fundamentals.  Office, in particular, can still be lucrative. Matt Drouin, Partner at Oak Grove Development, has acquired great legacy office buildings in downtown Rochester that are generating great cash flow. Matt also invests in multifamily, retail, and industrial in Rochester. Tight geographic fo...

In the alternative investing space, there are numerous ways to build long-term wealth. Many of these opportunities involve direct investment in Real Estate, but there are other investments that the same or even better returns. Dave Zook, Founder and CEO of The Real Asset Investors, invests in alternative asset classes including ATM machines, Oil and Gas production, Car Washes and Self-Storage faci...

As we’ve emerged from the pandemic, Americans are now travelling almost as much as they were back in 2109. In certain markets, the hospitality industry is doing as well, if not better than ever, but there are still great opportunities to invest in hotels. Paul Hassebroek, Principal of Six Four Asset management, has been successfully operating hotels in Iowa and Wisconsin and will be raising a new...

A great sector of Real Estate investing that has a low barrier to entry is land flipping. Land flipping requires very little start-up money, and the profits can be incredibly lucrative with very little downside. Mike Deaton, a successful land investor, generates as much passive income from land investing as he and his wife made combined in high corporate salaries. Buying and selling land is easier...

A well refined market niche for real estate entrepreneurs can deliver outsized returns, but it’s easier said than done. It takes a lot to discover a niche in a crowded marketplace, and it requires discipline to stick with it without getting distracted by other shiny objects. Axel Ragnarsson, founder of Aligned Real Estate Partners, buys 10–50-unit value-add apartment buildings in Southern New Hamp...

Over the last five years, overly exuberant investors vastly overpaid for multifamily properties. Instead of basing their pricing on in-place property performance, they based their pricing on overly aggressive proformas. In many cases, these proformas didn’t materialize because of increased renovation costs and declining rents. Because of these factors plus increased borrowing costs, we’re starting...

Although there can be gains from physical improvements to a property, the most expedient value-add occurs when you buy well-maintained properties for less than they’re worth. Ben Kogut, founder of Rooster Equity, buys single tenant retail properties, office buildings, shopping centers, and medical office properties from motivated sellers at prices below market. These properties have few improvemen...

With construction costs having increased for value-add properties, and better deals coming online for newer properties, acquiring older properties may make less sense than a few years ago. Older properties also have a lot of maintenance costs and higher unit turn costs. As prices continue to come down for newer properties, these deals pose less risk and greater reward. Mark Weinstein, President of...