by RussellWestcott | Oct 1, 2026 | Development, Real Estate
The margin you’re planning to capture by cutting out the middleman? It was never there. I’ve been in a lot of rooms with builders. Not conference rooms. Truck cabs. Job trailers. Kitchen tables with coffee going cold and a set of plans taking up the whole...
by RussellWestcott | Sep 29, 2026 | Development, Real Estate
The volume builders own that game now. Your advantage was never speed. It’s time. I’ll confess something. A few months back I caught myself doing flip math on one of my own hold properties. Sitting at my desk, spreadsheet open, running the “what if I...
by RussellWestcott | Sep 25, 2026 | Inspire, market research, Real Estate
Michael asked how tariffs will hit real estate. The honest answer is that nobody knows. Here is what 26 years of shocks taught me to do when nobody knows. Part 4 of a four-part series. Michael asked how tariffs will hit real estate. Three articles later, here is the...
by RussellWestcott | Sep 24, 2026 | Inspire, market research, Real Estate
Diversification is not disloyalty. Same rule for a country, a marriage, and a portfolio. Part 3 of a four-part series. Back to the couple from Part 1. The best marriages I have been around have one thing in common that nobody puts on the wedding invitation. Both...
by RussellWestcott | Sep 23, 2026 | Inspire, market research, Real Estate
In April I wrote down four worries about where this country was headed. Four months later I went back to look at them. Part 2 of a four-part series. There is a particular kind of discomfort in reading your own writing back. Not the typos. Not the sentence you would...
by RussellWestcott | Sep 22, 2026 | Inspire, market research, Real Estate
Michael Ponte asked our community how tariffs would hit real estate. I gave him a coffee emoji. Here is the real answer. Part 1 of a four-part series. A weekend morning, a couple of weeks back. Michael Ponte, who leads the Savvy Investors Facebook group, one of the...
by RussellWestcott | Sep 15, 2026 | Development, Real Estate
Vacancy is a design decision made two years before the tenant ever shows up. Someone asked me a question in a Facebook group a few weeks back. “How’s rental demand in Edmonton?” I gave him the honest answer: softer than it was two years ago. No spin....
by RussellWestcott | Sep 8, 2026 | market research, Real Estate Investing Tips
The improvements have wheels. The value does not. I have never owned a mobile home park. However, I grew up in one. Guernsey, Saskatchewan. Small rural town. First thirteen years of my life, in a mobile home, in a park, in a place most Canadians have never heard of...
by RussellWestcott | Sep 1, 2026 | Mindset, Real Estate Investing Tips
The most important act in real estate is the one you will fight hardest to avoid. I spent an hour trying to name the one property I analyzed and never made an offer on. I cannot do it. Not because there isn’t one. Because there are too many. I still have the...
by RussellWestcott | Aug 25, 2026 | Mindset, Real Estate
A plumber hit a pipe four times and charged $200. Everyone thinks he overcharged. He didn’t. And the invoice he wrote explains why you’ve been undercharging your whole career. There’s an old story I keep coming back to. A man calls a plumber to fix a...
by RussellWestcott | Aug 18, 2026 | Mindset, Real Estate
Somebody asked which matters more, wisdom or adaptability. Watch who answers which way. It tells you almost everything about how long they’ve been in the game. Somebody posted a question this week that’s been rattling around my head since. What matters...
by RussellWestcott | Aug 11, 2026 | Mindset, Real Estate
I use AI to help me write. A guy in my comments called me a robot for it. He was wrong about me, and dead right about something bigger. Right there in a Facebook comment, under one of my posts: “Interesting, but every AI post on this site reads identically these...
by RussellWestcott | Aug 4, 2026 | Real Estate, Real Estate Investing Tips
Nobody asks if you should build. Only how. I can still get hypnotized by a number. Twenty-six years in, and a clean appraisal on a nice PDF still tugs at me for half a second. Big number. Bold font. A discount off the top, just for me. The number wants to be believed....
by RussellWestcott | Jul 28, 2026 | Real Estate
The crystal ball is broken. For everyone, mine included. So the real skill was never the real estate forecast… it’s what you do with all of them. Let me tell you who’s actually talking, because it should change how you hear this. I’m not a...
by RussellWestcott | Jul 21, 2026 | Mindset, Real Estate
Rock bottom doesn’t bounce you. It drags you. And I had to run this checkup on my own stuff before I had any business running it on yours. I’m an optimist. To a fault. My favourite lie has five words in it. “It’ll come back, I’ll...
