Alex

@FactsAboutTexas Valentine, TX

What is your favorite SMALL TOWN in TEXAS?

@moseskagan Many of them know. But your interest and their interest aren’t aligned even when you may think so. You get paid for providing housing, they for providing studies. See?!

And yet the "smart leftists" are like "we need to see academic studies" when you tell them, for example, that increasing the cost of operating apartment buildings will result in fewer of them being built.

Remember when those idiots at UCLA published the paper showing that taxing away 5% of the gross sale proceeds of every piece of real estate in LA >$5MM wouldn't impact housing production?

@ektrit Remember the first time I understood this concept. Eye opening because is closer to what I see on the ground than the time risk concept I hear from finance bros.

It's exactly the surplus breeding the interest rate. You can't breed surplus if supply chains can't produce it. I have been talking exactly about this since 2014, non stop. Supplies are not infinite. Dollar creation doesn't create output. Supply creates the dollar.

@KHendersonCo @SMB_Attorney @Sam_Rosati Flowserve needs you!

It's with a heavy heart that I announce that I've made the difficult decision to step away from SMB Law Group. When @SMB_Attorney, @Sam_Rosati and I set out to build a new kind of law firm almost 4 years ago, I never dreamed where it would take us. And where it has taken me is to into the searcher seat myself, having recently closed on the acquisition of @SupremeWrapsDFW. So as of today, I'll be stepping down as a partner of @smblawgroup and working full time with my wife as the operators of Supreme Wraps. Thank you all for your support and the wild ride these past 4 years!

@TheBrokeAgent Pow! That always hurts But, you know then he was never a friend. Not because he bought with others but because he hid it which shows intent to deceive, and deceive is the seed that breaks relationships.

Real estate is a funny business. You can go weeks… months with nothing happening. Then out of nowhere… Right when you’re considering a side hustle… Boom. Your “best friend” is holding up a giant closing key with another agent on Instagram.

@kaylanknit It happens to me every time I refer a new commercial broker. 😂😂😂😂

You ever give a referral to another broker and then they completely ghost both you and the client?? Mr. Youknowwhououare you’re on my last nerve

@moseskagan I was talking about this today with an investor about another flipper. Always wanting to squeeze a cent, always not giving an inch to gain a mile, always winning 100x. But a long term relationship cannot work that way. Eventually it creates contempt. No RE agent will touch him.

Do not enter into long-term relationships under terms unsustainable for your counter-party. Given a sufficiently long time-horizon, arrangements which are unsustainable will not be sustained. - For more writing on business and real estate, including the due diligence checklist we've developed over >100 deals, check out moseskagan.com

@moseskagan For me, Zillow leads are the worse leads across all my marketing channels when looking for tenants. 1) Unreliable 2) bad credit score 3) lowest income 4) highest eviction rates

Perfect example of a bill introduced in the CA legislature that would make running apartments more difficult, and therefore slow housing development (bc every developer of rentals is either a landlord-in-waiting or hoping to sell to one.) When we briefly allowed applicants to use Zillow reports ~18 months ago, we had five quick move-ins that all turned out to be fraudulent, requiring five separate eviction cases (I paid for all of these, so the owners would be spared.). And it was introduced by a legislator, Tina McKinnor from Inglewood, who is (inexplicably, imo) endorsed by YIMBY Action.

@ektrit @Molson_Hart That was a really great article @Molson_Hart !

Must absolutely read by Molson @Molson_Hart He is my first paid subscriber on Substack, numero uno, one of the 3 Twitter friends who pushed me hard to go paid on Substack. READ AND LEARN It’s Time to Build… Assets? linkedin.com/pulse/its-time…

@BowTiedPassport I have seen so many celebs in Polanco, with the exception of Hollywood artists. But high profile American writers directors athletes businessmen/women are a common sight.

One side of Mexico City that rarely gets mentioned: "Anonymity Arbitrage." I’m friends with a few guys who are famous everywhere but here. I’ve known one guy for years…just sports, gym, grabbing drinks. We talk a lot but he never hyped himself up. Then one day, we’re out in public and a small group rushes up, calling him by a stage name I’d never heard of and asking for pictures. I was confused because to me, guys just chill dude. I asked him about it..Googled him and turns out dude has a full Wiki page: a long list of accolades and multiple hit songs with high double digit millions of listens. In his home country, he’s a big name; in Mexico, he’s just another expat living in peace. You occasionally see a lot of big names hanging around. Shak popping into bars in Mexico City. Lenny Kravitz in a random market. For the most part…they can be semi regular.

One of the main reason for the decline in goods in services in the United States, and to a lesser extent, the world, is the financialization of our economies driven by excessive money printing. Let's break that down into simpler language. The quality of the things and services you buy has gotten worse because the people making those things and doing those services are worse today, generally, than the ones who were doing it 10-20 years ago. Why? Because there is no money in it. Why is there no money it? Because all the money is in creating assets, not in creating goods and services. Why is all money in creating assets? Because there is an enormous demand for assets because all the governments of the world are constantly creating new money and people want to protect their savings. Their savings are not protected in cash. They will become worth less and less every year. So, they invest in assets, because assets trade at a multiple of what they earn, which is constantly rising because new money is created and then prices change. So, concretely, a smart person who otherwise would have run a manufacturing business making glassware, instead buys a bunch of glassware manufacturing businesses using debt to take advantage of the new money creation which is constantly driving the prices of these businesses up. Instead of thinking about how to make better glassware, that person thinks about how to raise more money, how to sell these businesses in another party which is doing the same thing. The focus goes from making a good product, to making an asset which is traded. Why? Because you can make so much more money buying a 5 million dollar glassware company and selling it for 10 million dollars than you can actually selling glassware. Further, since 2008, there has been no downside to this trade because every time there is an economic weakness on the horizon, governments, fearing loss of power, chaos, or hardship, just print more money so that there isn't any specter of job loss. So the only reason why you would make goods and services instead of assets is because you do it for the love of the game, because you get a much better reward and minimal risk because nothing is allowed to fail from building assets instead! There are a couple of reasons why this problem is particularly bad (yes it's bad that goods and services are in decline) in the United States: 1. It's tax advantaged. Selling glassware has a tax rate of about 35%. Selling assets has a tax rate of about 20%. 2. The United States has the "deepest capital markets", meaning its the easiest place to get the loans that are integral to this game 3. It's become part of the culture. While someone in France may say "absolutely not, I am not buying up bakeries, I am building baguettes", in the United States, we have a culture that celebrates this. We think it's the pinnacle of capitalism, when it's not even capitalism. The Federal Reserve is a unelected body of people who are nominated and then serve out a full term and decide how much new money to create. It's central planning, which is the opposite of capitalism. But, hey, look at that cool guy on wall street in the 1980s with his satellite phone, so cool, so capitalism. This is also why the new industrialization drive is 100% government driven. Whether it's the Chips Act or the venture-funded companies which will sell to the US government. There's no money in making this stuff unless the government comes in and pays a stupidly high price which is, once again, only possible because of excessive money printing. Unless they're just doing it for the love of the game, the only way you can get someone to make physical stuff instead of making assets (which they're kind of doing anyways) is by paying them the market rate, which has to compete with working in finance. This is why Zoomers have no motivation to work normal salaried jobs. Because, why would you work when you could trade crypto or stocks? The income potential is so much higher, which again comes from all the new money that is constantly printed. So when someone says "it's time to build!" and they're in the financial industry (I'm speaking generally, I have no personal issue with someone who does that), just laugh because it's not real. What they mean, is that it's time to build assets, not real goods and services, because that's a lot harder and, with the current system, from taxes to the way the government funds itself and saves the economy, it's a bad way to make a living (even if it's spiritually fulfilling).

@TukiFromKL Coding for developers was always the easy part

🚨 do you understand what Karpathy just said.. the guy who co-founded OpenAI.. led AI at Tesla.. one of the best engineers alive.. built an app with AI.. and said the code was the easy part.. the hard part was Stripe.. auth.. DNS.. databases.. deploying it.. connecting 15 different services that all have different dashboards and different docs and different billing pages.. AI can write your entire app in 20 minutes.. but it still can't click "confirm email" on Vercel.. so the thing that's "replacing developers" can't do the thing developers actually spend 80% of their time doing.. vibe coding didn't kill software engineering.. it just proved that coding was never the job.. the job was dealing with the mess around the code.. and that mess is still 100% human.

@contractorkeith @contractorkeith where were u? I haven’t seen your posts in ages.

Do people really buy homes NOT knowing how mortgage amortization works now?

@bankertobuilder @gmbarnard22 Modern!

@gmbarnard22 Agree - the new home needs to be painted white with black trim

@dig_with_kyle What about bald people? Asking for a friend 🤪🤪🤪🤪

I’ll never sell out. Count on me for honest reviews. Trust no one that doesn’t have some grey hair in their industry.

@BowTiedBroke Brother, you lived in South Florida during 2008. I bet you remember how many people surrendered their condos because the association fees were humongous after half of them moved out. Crazy times in Miami!!!

In 2022, I got PESTERED by a GP about investing with them. To the point where he reminded me of a used car salesman. He had a huge company too. They bought crappy apartments & fixed them up. Said they’d get 2X the current rent. I dug a little. See, I saw this same play in ‘03-‘07 & saw the outcomes of those apartments that were purchased by GP’s, fixed up, turned into to “For Sale” condos for $200-$300K a piece. By 2011, buyers of those were living in a crappy apartment (now referred to as condos or townhomes), and getting hit with HOA special assessments of $20K per unit to fix shoddy work done by the original GP and company. Not all GP/LP deals are bad, but I’d venture to say, a significant amount are, especially when the GP is young in age. I have numerous SMART investor friends who were lured into apartment rehab, RV parks, STR (Airbnb), etc by a smooth talking GP and team, only to get capital calls 2 yrs later because this deal or that deal wasn’t going as planned. (Who knew…no matter how nice you make an apartment, if it’s still in the same crappy zip code that it was in before, it’s NOT going to get increased rent) One friend who had a $10 million real estate portfolio on his own, put $1 million with a GP for some RV park projects. I talked to him a month ago and he’s now thinking he will lose the full amount of that investment. Be careful with GP/LP set ups. There is a reason tons of new ones pop up when real estate is going through the roof in a short period of time (ie ‘03-‘06 & ‘20-‘22).

@mwmoedinger This is great!! I'm becoming a fan!!!! Usually, what's the $/sqft for a new luxury bathroom addition and luxury walk-in closet on a first floor in your neck of the woods? I have a flip coming in, and I'm toying with that idea, given the market price in the area is $420/sqft

We do this work every single day - whether as floorplan consultants or by providing full service architecture/interiors. DMs open if you'd like to chat!

Plan update! Let's bring this early 20th century home into 2025 with a few updates. There are millions of these kinds of homes all across America - they're generally well-built, and worthy of being renovated. Read on 👇 👇

@dig_with_kyle I knew a GC like that. Eventually, he couldn’t find work, decided to go from cocaine to meth, his wife left him, and now sits in rehab. Hopefully he recovers though, he has a wonderful family. How the heck, did they have a black sheep like him?

Our neighbor accross the road was a cabinet installer. He ripped off half the town. I bet he was low bid often. Let that sink in.

@JulieChangRE You would not believe how many shoddy contractors I see pulling this one. The worst, some of them know. I tell owners to sit down with the tile crew and make them explain the layout, not like a test, but to check if they will just run with it with no planning.

Look at this tile job 🤦🏼‍♀️ 🤡 work