Rob Bellamy

Fixer upper gets listed for $250k. I offer $180k with 3% commission — I’m a licensed agent and my company is the buyer. Plan is to wholesale it for $190k. Needs $75k in work and will be worth $320k after repairs. Listing agent says too low. 4 weeks later our CRM notifies me the list price dropped to $225k. I follow up. Agent still says $180k is too low. Another month goes by. CRM notifies me again — price drops to $210k. I follow up. Agent says they think it’ll work. I draft the offer, send it over, and it gets accepted. We price the deal at $190k and sell it — signed contract and EMD in hand. While we’re still in DD, I tell the agent my buyer needs a $20k price reduction to move forward, but they’re ready to wire EM and waive the rest of DD. Seller meets us halfway. Price drops to $170k. We make $25k. That’s the exact play we run wholesaling MLS properties.

Now this is a story all about how my life got flipped, turned upside down

It’s been genuinely embarrassing to see 95% of Yimby’s not understanding how a growing group of Angelino’s are frustrated with the state of crime and homelessness. Their candidate has continually voted to keep encampments next to schools, supported needle handouts and given us soft on crime rhetoric and policy. She’s disqualified for many of us.

Crazy how many commercial property owners are now hit with a 4%+ transfer tax in LA. So, Los Angeles gets 4% of your property if you decide to sell. Especially sucks for the people who bought before this was a thing. What a mess.

$24M of LP capital. Nuked. The biggest violation of trust by these guru GPs is not that they lost LP capital. That's bad, yes. Losing capital is terrible. But IMO, the worst offense is that most have been unwilling to publicly demonstrate even a shred of humility or take a single ounce of responsibility for these situations. It's brand above all else. Now I'm not saying full atonement is possible, at least not quickly. The reputation hit will linger. But I do believe there is honor in being upfront about mistakes made and lessons learned. As an LP myself, I wouldn't disqualify a GP because of a loss in the past. But I will definitely disqualify a GP that doesn't clearly identify and take responsibility for where they went wrong...and what they're doing to ensure it never happens again. I don't want to hear about the Fed. The new supply. The vacancy. The insurance. The concessions. The property management company. The lender. or your partners. No, I want to hear where you failed to build enough margin in your choices as the steward of my capital that led to this failure. I want you to own it. Anyway, this is a brutal video from a local guy in our market that discusses one such loss. It was forwarded to me and was the genesis of this post. I am not going to link it, but if you're interested, you can go take a look.

Here’s how we’ll eliminate encampments citywide: 1. Treatment: Immediately deploy street medicine teams citywide. These are clinicians who bring physical, mental, and behavioral health care directly to where people are living — and in my plan, the same clinical team stays with a person from the street to shelter, and from shelter into permanent housing. That continuity builds trust. And trust is what actually gets people indoors and keeps them there. Because 60% of treatment costs are covered by Medi-Cal, this is one of the most cost-effective interventions we have — just $200 per person per month after reimbursement. 2. Shelter: we will restructure how we use our existing motel resources. Right now people are staying in Inside Safe motels for over a year on average. Motel rooms should work like emergency rooms — stabilize people quickly and move them to the next step. Under my plan, people will receive 120 days of intensive stabilization — case management, mental health treatment, document preparation — and then move directly into housing. That means every motel room can serve three times as many people a year as it does today at half the cost per person. 3. Housing: Dramatically expand Time Limited Subsidies — a proven short-term rental voucher program. Under Inside Safe, the city spends an average of $82,420 per participant to fund a year in a motel room — yet less than a third of participants transition to permanent housing. Under Nithya's plan, for around the same cost per participant, people receive 2.25 years of housing and intensive services, with 75% sustaining permanent housing. 4. Accountability: We will also provide rapid response to new encampments — if you report a new tent, someone will be there within 48 hours. And we will publish a real-time public dashboard so every Angeleno can see exactly where their money is going and whether it is working. No more hiding the numbers. No more managing the optics. Just results and accountability. And if something isn’t working, we’ll learn and adjust.