Build-to-Sell Is Dead (For You)
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...
Nobody Knows. Do The Work Anyway.
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...
You Are Allowed To Have Other Friends
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...
Four Questions. Still No Answers.
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...
Thoughts? Lots Of Them
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...
100% Occupancy in a Softening Market
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....
Buy by the Yard, Sell by the Foot: What Mobile Home Park Investing Taught Me About Dirt
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...
Kicking and Screaming: Nothing Happens Until You Write the Offer
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...
The Plumber Charged $200 for Five Minutes. He Was Right
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...
Everybody’s Pivoting. Almost Nobody Knows When to Hold
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...
Somebody Called Me a Robot This Week
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...
Fantasy Island Pricing
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....
What Were They Saying in 2021?
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...
