The Real Estate Espresso Podcast

Today's podcast continues our discussion of the structural failure at the former Pfizer headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, where a massive office-to-residential conversion suffered localized structural distress during construction. The investigation has only begun. Engineers have not yet reached any conclusions about the root cause, and it would be inappropriate to speculate. The building may...

The structural failure on 42nd St. in Midtown Manhattan this past week made headlines all over the world. The building in question was originally an office building belonging to Pfizer and is now in the process of being converted into a residential apartment building. It is the largest office to residential conversion project in US history and will result in nearly 1600 apartments. The structural...

On today’s show, we’re talking about meetings, specifically the balance between enough structure to create accountability and so much meeting time that the work itself gets pushed into evenings, weekends, and sleep. I have been looking at my own calendar, and the conclusion is uncomfortable. Too much of the week is committed to talking about work. The consequence is not merely fatigue. When focuse...

Today we’re talking about the July 1 review of the United States Mexico Canada Agreement, better known as USMCA, and what it means for anyone developing or constructing buildings in North America. Leading up to July 1, the public conversation made the date sound like a cliff. Either the agreement would be renewed for another sixteen years, or it would somehow vanish overnight. That was never the a...

As usual the headline doesn’t tell the story. The numbers often get revised for previous months.  This time revisions to April and May, combined with a falling unemployment rate, tell a much weaker story than the headline suggests. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that nonfarm payrolls increased by 57,000 in June. That is already a modest number for an economy of this size. But April was re...

Paul Moore is the principal at Wellings Capital, based in Lynchburg Virginia. On today's show we're talking about how the investment thesis has changed in response to market conditions. To connect with Paul visit https://www.wellingscapital.com/ They also have a number of resourcesincluding their due diligence checklist available on their resources page at https://www.wellingscapital.com/r...

Dipesh Sitaram is based in Austin Texas. He's a dentist, like my father. He has invested in multiple asset classes including hotels, medical, office to name just a few. On today's show we are focusing on a vertical niche within medical office. To connect with Dipesh or to learn more, visit https://acuerecapital.com/ ------------ **Real Estate Espresso Podcast:**  Spotify: [The Real Estate...

Today we are asking a practical question. Can you get a leading indicator of what is happening in real estate before monthly or quarterly reports from the major brokerages?  If you really want to look at the leading indicators, how would you do it? How could you do it?  Well, as it turns out, Brokerages like Redfin and Zillow can see activity before it appears in the monthly statistics. They see s...

On today’s show we are talking about the difference between pattern recognition and intelligence.  We’ve all seen the cases where AI is completely lacking in common sense. In order to understand how this happens, we need to understand how AI has been trained.  By examining historic patterns, AI algorithms take the lazy path to predicting the next step in the pattern. But not all patterns are predi...

Our book of the month is "This is Strategy" by Seth Godin. When this book was published, I knew I wanted to read it. I’ve been following Seth for years.  Rather than presenting strategy as an academic discipline or a collection of management frameworks, he describes it as a way of thinking about systems, incentives, and long-term change. The result is a book that is less about business t...

This month Mayor Mamdani implemented a rent freeze for the next two years on rent stabilized apartments. Memories are short. This has been tried before and it was a dismal failure. But this time will be different.  You see when property owners have expenses rising including city taxes, insurance, utilities,  and rents are legislated to be flat, and you still need to comply with the city’s stringen...

Today's show is sponsored by The Cost Segregation Guys . To learn more, click on the link and you can qualify for a discount on your cost seg study. ----------- I’m usually pretty skeptical when someone tells me they’ve found a breakthrough in homebuilding. We’ve heard this story many times before. Modular construction was going to change everything. 3D printing was going to make housing drama...

Anthony Scavo is with Basis Industrial. They are on a growth trajectory and now have more than 10M SF of industrial in the portfolio. On today's show we are talking about the changes that are taking place in the market. To connect with Anthony, visit https://www.basisindustrial.com/ --------------- **Real Estate Espresso Podcast:**  Spotify: [The Real Estate Espresso Podcast]( https://open.spo...

Kyle Whissel is the principal at EXP in San Diego where they have sold more than 9,000 properties in their team. On today's show we are talking about what's happening in San Diego and Southern California in general. Definitely some unintended consequences of more relaxed development rules. To connect with Kyle, he is @kylewhissel on Instagram --------------- **Real Estate Espresso Podcast:...

On today's show we're talking about a simple transaction, selling a portion of one property to the neighbor. Simple enough. Get a survey, update the new legal description, receive payment and record the new deed. Not so fast. The list of deliverables to perform this simple transaction involves 3 governing bodies, 5 consultants, three lawyers and about 10 pages just to list the deliverables...

Today’s episode is a cautionary tale about real estate, memory, and the story attached to a piece of land. On June 24th, 2021, Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida partially collapsed in the middle of the night. Ninety-eight people died. It was one of the deadliest structural failures in American history. Further investigation showed that some of the building columns were showing signs of f...

Today we’re looking at the AI value chain, and more specifically, how the migration of AI workloads from centralized data centers to local devices could change the investment thesis for data center real estate. Right now, most AI feels like a cloud service. You type a prompt into an application, that request travels to a hyperscale data center, a large model performs the computation, and the answe...

A recent Wall Street Journal article laid out the rising cost of home ownership in a very clear way. From 2019 to 2025, the annual cost of owning a home rose from about $20,600 to about $28,600. That is a 39 percent increase, compared with a 26 percent increase in the consumer price index. The biggest increases were not just mortgage payments. Insurance rose 72 percent. Home maintenance rose 85 pe...

Today we’re looking at a very interesting policy announcement out of British Columbia. The federal government, working with the province, has announced a plan to purchase more than 2,000 unsold condo units from developers in the Vancouver market and convert them into affordable housing. The reported scale is roughly 2,200 units, with a broader financing package in the billions of dollars. This fol...

Pat Zingarella is the founder of Invest Clearly, a platform for providing reviews by investors. On today's show we are talking about how the process works and the nuances of communicating investor experiences. To connect with Pat and to learn more, visit investclearly.com or email him at pat@investclearly.com ------------- **Real Estate Espresso Podcast:**  Spotify: [The Real Estate Espresso P...

Allie Readyhough is based in Rhode Island where she is a realtor. On today's show we are talking about the upcoming luxury second home tax for homes having an assessed value above $1M that is being imposed in Rhode Island. Some are calling it the Taylor Swift Tax. To connect with Allie, call 401-932-6597 or visit her website at https://serhant.com/agents/allie-readyhough -------------- **Real...

Markets are supposed to be mechanisms for price discovery. That’s the theory. Markets are also supposed to be efficient.  Millions of buyers and sellers, each acting on their own information, come together and arrive at a price. That price is supposed to reflect supply, demand, risk, cost of capital, and expectations for the future. But in the real world, markets often experience distortions. Glob...

I was recently speaking with an investor who was looking at the purchase of an agricultural property. During the discussion, a question came up that applies not only to farms, but to many types of real estate. What is the property actually worth? At first, that sounds like a simple question. But the answer depends on what exactly you're valuing. Let's use the example of a coffee farm with...

The Fed held today. Rates stay at 3.5%-3.75%. But here's the thing — the hold was not the news. The news was in the dot plot. The median projection for where rates will end 2026. Core PCE inflation was revised up to 3.3%. And unemployment? Revised up to 4.3%. Rising inflation and rising unemployment in the same forecast. That is the stagflation signal, and if you've been in this business l...

Today’s show is sponsored by The Cost Segregation Guys . If you own investment real estate and haven’t looked seriously at cost segregation, you could be leaving significant tax savings on the table. The Cost Segregation Guys help investors accelerate depreciation, improve near-term cash flow, and make more efficient use of capital, all without changing the underlying asset.  ------------ Today I...