Aerobarrier install

We were the beneficiary of an Aerobarrier install at the project site over the weekend. What does this mean? Well, we pressurized the houses, put a powerful fan on the door to blow air inside, and sprayed an aerosol like caulking around the building. This pressurized caulking acts as a vigilant sealant, seeking out and destrying any air leaking through the poly vapour barrier into the walls or attic space. This becomes like an airtight drywall approach, where the drywall helps to bond with typical leakage zones, preventing unwanted humidity from escaping in winter. Given our cold climate, this is a way to dramatically reduce what I call ‘fugitive’ emission of humidity into the attic, which can then condensate or frost up and cause moisture problems later. https://www.aerobarrieralberta.ca is a link to more video on the process. No doubt Mike Holmes and Matt Risinger approve of this process and enjoy sponsorship from the manufacturer. The rest of us pay for these procedures. Are they worth it? Well, that is a complex question. It is an investment in efficiency, and also in reducing problems that are really difficult to resolve. We have a climate where all homes could benefit from the use of an Aerobarrier process to seal the vapour barrier moreso than perhaps anywhere else on the continent. With the movement toward greener building finally going mainstream 15 years after I built my first house, perhaps the time is now to increase the specs on what we can offer our clients? Well, if you can afford $50 for a piece of OSB you can afford meaningful improvements in air tightness as well.

0.5 ACH50 is a tough bar to reach. Mortals with a caulking gun and some poly cannot eliminate the thousands of tiny leak zones that add up to a major leakage problem. Thus Aerobarrier to the rescue.

$800k for a tear down property - why the R1 communities need some regulatory change

Why have I never built a house in Elboya (and a lot of other similar Elbow River areas)? Well, number one is the ridiculous land value expectations. Like $800k for a property on a typical 50x120 ft lot, that prevents a person from dabbling in the business. That is some serious money and I don’t believe the amenities/location/quality of the Elboya community justify such a sum. Plus I haven’t been in the business of building $2M houses, there aren’t always a plethora of buyers. I think a 50x120 ft flat lot with a lane accessed garage isn’t necessarily special enough to warrant the asking price, and the regulatory system is too rigid and archaic to allow any creativity on what can be done to create more viably price homes.

Based on some published reaction to the new Guidebook For Great Communities, http://calgaryguidebook.ca shown here, the general reaction to any change to the R1 communities will be met with a lot of resistance. This isnt a battle that interests me participating in, but I’d take sides with the city here. I dont think the R1 communities really have a ‘character’ worthy of preservation. These aren’t heritage homes, the one highlighted today is a total junker. If an area is so special that its land use needs to be frozen in time, then shouldn’t the individual homes be architecturally significant and worthy of protection? To me, a place that has character is somewhere you’d bring out of town guests to while they are visiting Calgary. These areas include the Riverwalk to the Peace Bridge, the 17 ave SW commercial district, and some of the great natural areas like Fish Creek or the Paskapoo slopes erratic trail. Not a 50’s era subdivision with a bunch of remnant bungalows with curly roof shingles.

Character is typically a NIMBY tool to protect established interests, in Calgary it is a tool to ring fence desirable areas and entrench class based divisions. The less dense areas are demanded protection via use of municipal powers to enforce a non-existent contract between the planning department and land owners who want to keep things exactly as they are, regardless of societal interests. I think we need a higher bar to determine what has character and needs real protection, and what is just a bunch of people who dont want anyone to park in front of their house.

At $800k, you can be confident that I am not a buyer of this one.

More on the brewery lands - who, what, when, where how?

Some more interesting info regarding the brewery lands redevelopment. The developer appears to have hired some significant expertise to assist it in community engagement and design. They are leading off with the possibility of a linear park creation. Who could possibly oppose that? Good strategy here, get the masses intrigued with a little park creation promise, and then roll out the rest of the project in stages. I’d like to see this get started sooner than later with detailed presentations and a rezoning or land use change application, and a build out schedule. That is a lot to ask, surely this will be a multi year affair, and breaking ground can’t really begin for considerable time. Note the proximity of my upcoming build. When I purchased property nearby I had no idea plans for the brewery lands were moving forward this soon (after some false starts and media stories related to preservation rulings by the province). Securing a project this close to what could be something really unique and special is a major bonus, if it proceeds. Every builder likes to ride the coattails of a major developer, even better is taxpayer largesse on connectivity (high profile pedestrian bridges), parks and landscaping improvements. All of this could come to inglewood?

the brewery lands encompass a huge amount of land, the largest parcel that could be developed in Inglewood, for perhaps, forever? This is a really interesting project. Driving around the area it is so inaccessible that by car you don’t get much of an impression on what this land means to the community, or what the possibilities are. The hiring of professional design companies lends a lot of credibility and creative talent to what can happen to this land. Can we hit the FFWD button on it?

Inglewood Brewery Lands Redevelopment - what do I think?

https://www.breweryraillands.com is a link I recently stumbled upon on twitter. What do I think of this? Well, first of all, I am cautiously optimistic, but if it proceeds I’d be ecstatic. The developer behind this hasn’t exactly hit a home run regarding the Westbrook station redevelopment though. Putting it mildly, the weed carpeted Westbrook lands continues to hurt the Killarney motherland. What was once looked upon so optimistically has brought forth our inner cynic, at this point, we have no idea when/if/ever this land will be developed, and until it does, a westside inner city regional centrepiece remains derelict. Derelict yes, but this pales in comparison to a really derelict site, the Inglewood brewery lands, with a history that extends back to the late 1800’s, that is some serious Calgary heritage. Matco is saying all the right things;

A 20-acre compact, livable, mixed-use and transit-supportive redevelopment where leading-edge anchor institutions, urban light industrial businesses and employment clusters support new urban housing

This development proceeding would be excellent for my operations, as I have essentially rolled the dice on Inglewood as a great place to be (which it will remain even if the brewery lands development does not proceed). However, in a spread out city with a dearth of heritage buildings, and the character that comes along with it, this project could be a boon to the heart of Inglewood. Inglewood has a gritty urban feel in some of its alleyways and an abundance of old brick and sandstone accented low rise buildings. Restored brick buildings in the brewery area would be fantastic especially a mixed use new/old employment centre 200 m walk from my project site, along with new urban housing. To me ‘new urban housing’ means condo lofts and townhomes, exactly what I am not going to be building. All that the more dense new building will do is make detached homes all the more precious and unique.

An aerial view of the brewery lands and the rail yard beyond. Imagine this area landscaped with the treed canopy as in the background of 10th and 11th avenues. And some of the industrial metal siding stripped off to reveal century old brick facades, with new buildings sprinkled among the dilapidated parts containing housing, jobs, and shops. that is really exciting. Even better would be a pedestrian connector to a new train station if the green line is built. Who will pay for all of this? I’m guessing Mrs. and Mr. Taxpayer will have to ante up or it can’t be built by the private sector.

A big time Alberta rebound - is this it ?

Look how the tables (literally - the charts) have turned over the past year. And market sentiment is totally different when reviewing some posts I made last March. Q2 2020 was absolutely hideous for Alberta but Q2 2021 is a different story. The Canadian dollar plunged to 0.68 cents USD, now we have breached 0.80, a major 12 month turnaround for a country reliant on imports for many essential products.

The energy industry went through some surprising consolidations and the outlook is much brighter. Companies facing collapse are now market darlings. All the key commodities I look at, lumber, copper, etc are huge industrial moneymaker (while the builders are getting screwed for sure and it hurts, at least the economy can overall improve).

Perhaps the biggest change is the advent of vaccines. While the country is performing poorly as a whole in acquiring supply, the market is now forecasting abundant doses, likely enough to inoculate everyone by fall. And since government debt appears to not matter to anyone we’re debasing our currency into prosperity and driving up the price of housing and hard assets everywhere with cheap loans.

what does it all mean? Nobody knows but we can keep on building until we run out of lumber!

Straight up from below 69 to 80.

Even land with poor/little 'value add' development potential is selling...

Without discussing realtors spreading pseudo-authoritative information on listings utterly without accountability for the misrepresentation, commentary on the Calgary infill market cannot be considered complete. I have noted land selling that lacks any sort of added development potential, at prices that indicate serious value add development potential. Am I confused, is marginal redevelopment land now worth more? If so, what is the value of land with strong development potential? While I am making assumptions, sure, there is just something suspicious about a few recent transactions.

First of all, some land can only be used for a detached home, because it is too small. this is basically any lot under 42 ft. When you get deep into the 30 ft lots, then for sure you cant be subdividing land, and if you could, which you cant, the homes would be too narrow anyway. On occasion you could take a 40 ft lot, if it was large and on a corner and put some row housing on it, but in the cases of sales I have see, you can’t do this.

Yet the homes are typically teardown that sell, not something likely to be rehabbed, due to age, conditions, sizes etc. So who is buying these homes and why? Are they looking at the listing and using erroneous data in to it make false assumptions of what can be built? Are there many buyers or builders who want to start with very inflated sums and then try to build new luxury detached homes? Is a long but skinny lot suited for a garage suite attracting interest among home buyers who want a built in revenue stream? Lots of questions about this market in Calgary today.

425000 is no small sum for a lot you cant do anything with except build a newer, larger, detached home on 4 st nw. Sure the lot is r2, but it wouldn’t allow any conventional subdivision, but you could try a up down split, thus ‘duplex’ is mentioned in the advertisement. This is not done in the calgary market very often. I can’t think of any done recently, but I’d like to know about it if someone has tried it. 4th St NW does have a fair bit of development on it, but $425k is a high bar to start from. It wasn’t long ago there was a plethora of 50 ft r2 lots available to purchase in the low 500’s or less. That would allow two legitimate houses to be built at nearly half the land cost. At 425 for a single lot, the house will inevitably need to be valued over $1m to be worth pursuing here. I dont know if I like that math.

More Inglewood building

Inglewood is my current favourite place to build. It is one of those strangely labelled communities along with Kensington. It is always referred to as ‘trendy’ in any sort of marketing material or publication. How can a community be perpetually chic, fresh and fashionable? Does that make the rest of the city dowdy and unfashionable (in the case of Calgary, I would agree that the vast majority of the city is uncool)? To me, Inglewood is a way to get out of the commodified r2 areas on the west side of the city. The areas where any good idea is immediately stolen and copied and mass produced in a race to be the cheapest. The older, historic parts east of the downtown have some appeal as they can never go out of date. A lot of the inner city has infill buildings that tend to depreciate like used cars. You can almost always identify what era an infill was built in. Inglewood is a place where you can build modern while adopting style from 100 years ago. Inglewood was building modern farmhouses before Chip and Joanna were born and took over HGTV with shiplap. It also has 100 year old brick warehouses and commercial buildings. That’s a style that needs to become trendy (and will be soon if I have my way with this city!).

My new baby. Needs to be torn down quick or I will get fined $100,000. I’d like to not pay that fine. I’ve got some ideas of what I’d like to do to this property that are unconventional. I will explore in detail what I should do with this land, there is only so much you can do with an r2 property and I am not enamoured with land use redesignations and all that goes along with that. What I know is I want to keep it not sell it - they dont make more like this.

Skinny houses. Who wants them?

With the creation of the developed areas guidebook and a new land use bylaw we should be in a position where the rules of infill development should be compatible with policy direction the City wants to move toward. Right now it is easier at times to gain approval for a sprawl subdivision than a single inner city fourplex. That’s obviously untenable and typical of government getting everything wrong and overcomplicating via over regulation. My critique of the guidebook, despite staff protestations, is that it doesn’t reflect the market desire for housing that we know is real today. Staff says it is flexible to adapt as market trends shift. I say it isn’t compatible with the market now. Perhaps the new land use bylaw will change this. My views on the current bylaw is it makes designers spend most of the effort on compliance and little of it on creativity, this is to our mutual detriment.

what I want to see is more options to create (smaller lot not skinnier lot) single family detached housing in established areas. Communities tend to want to create enclaves where the lucky few get to live in tranquility as the planning department acts as agents of value conservation on their behalf, ring fencing the ‘valued’ areas with undesired ‘dense’ housing, i.e. people. What I don’t want to see is the only option to build detached housing is on 50 ft lots by doing skinny singles. I don’t see demand for unnaturally narrow accommodation. We need more ways to divide property that makes sense. Common garages, less garages, alley activation, creative splits of larger lots yes. Not rigid bylaws that crush creativity and push all the builders to just copycat each other. That’s what we have today.

Not much market interest in skinny houses. But it sure matches the guidebook and city policy vs sprawl. We need to find ways to redevelop the r1 areas based on a new land use bylaw and the guidebook.

All signs point to a serious unsustainable housing bubble (not here) but its consequence is usually horrible (here)

Recent market data from the expensive housing markets suggest a dangerously inflated, wobbly, top heavy bubble has formed in certain markets. Mainly Toronto and Vancouver, but it is inflating almost everywhere. The expectation that past performance equals future performance is perhaps one of the greatest follies of investor mindset. Market irrational exuberance is blamed on capitalism on the twitter debates, however, it is the government meddling in the cost of money that inflates the bubble. If the market set rates, then the bubble could not inflate (lenders would apply a risk premium to protect from a downturn). House prices would find a happier medium where local home prices reflect local homeowner income, not some crazy multiple that we see today. Instead we see house prices in the bubble markets as a form of class warfare where the boomers are screwing the millenials out of a chance at home ownership, the holy grail of the Canadian Debt Dream. House sales in those cities does now appear to be a massive upward shift of wealth toward the fortunate sellers, while saddling the ‘winning bidder’ home buyer with the crushing debt load.

Expect more government meddling to attempt to sort this out. Meddling has unfortunate consequences and is hard to predict, but the likelihood of Alberta being screwed by the Liberal government is strong. Collateral damage is inevitable when the Ontario dog wags the Alberta tail.

Here we see a strange and bizarrely over-priced home. This property must be 90% land value and 10% construction value. Is it worth it? Someone thought so, or many multiples of someones thought so. I view the seller of this home as a genius. The seller can cash out of Toronto and move somewhere else, and buy a cheap million dollar shack. That’d leave the seller with about two million to fund a retirement lifestyle anywhere in the world. That is a really good deal, but for the buyer, I fear for their mental health and credit score when the bubble pops.

This home increased in value by $2.234M over a period of exactly 17 years, that equates to $131k per year, or $360 each day. Basically a perpetual increase of $15/hour, that is like a 24/7/365 minimum wage job, tax free, earned passively. Less property tax, repairs, renovations, and mortgage interest I guess. Did the eager buyer save a huge sum, trade up from a similarly overpriced lesser home, or is this just debt financed? What were the buyers costs for land titles and fees to the City of Toronto and Province? Ouch!

Maybe those old houses are worth more than we thought?

Some of us take a sadistic pleasure in demolishing the old houses we purchase. Basically they tend to be asbestos riddled shacks, with low ceilings, tiny windows, bad choppy layouts and inadequate bathrooms. Making them livable takes a lot of work and merging the old and the new is costly. So we can demolish them in a day and move on with a new build. However, given the prices we have now for product, an old house’s intrinsic value may be worth revisiting. Could project economics flip enough that we can no longer afford the full on armada of infill construction in Calgary? I don’t think so at least not yet but the path we are on will make a new build prohibitively expensive for all but the most wealthy buyers.

Way higher material cost, increased land value and trades that want to be paid more….builder will be squeezed in the middle of home values don’t go way up in 2021.

More Inglewood detached builds

Follow up the Inglewood build with…another Inglewood build. The urban feel and combination of historic brick structures everywhere and footstep access to the best walkable amenities? Irresistible to that segment of the market that prioritizes lifestyle, parking the cars, and shrinking the huge city into tiny urban pockets.

Great lot !

History repeatedly repeating for the builder

Each cycle has the same fundamental characteristics. Only the extent of the overshoot, to the upside and eventual downside is unknown. The outcome is generally the spec builder losing some terrible six figure sum on a spec build. The root cause is the builders act as their own worst enemy by competing among themselves to drastically overpay for the biggest input cost, the land. As the land value of building lots increases, you see sellers take one of two approaches. They either refuse to sell because they want to earn more money sitting on a couch vs working. Or they do list but at a huge number to preemptively attempt to capture the future, but not guaranteed increased land value. The end result is there are no inventory of land to purchase, creating a false sense of scarcity, further driving up prices. I think that is where we are right now.
the cycle comes crashing down when building input costs go up, interest rates change, or the economy cools off. The lack of end buyers then crushes the most leveraged builders. They fail or have to dump finished homes, taking large losses, and they have to sit on the uneconomic land they bought at the top of the cycle. This drags the entire infill market down. Next, those land owners who held off selling when land values were highest amd apparently increasing rush to list, but then they create a bunch of unwanted inventory and the more motivated land sellers sell for a huge discount. The cycle is now complete.
All of this is predictable as it tends to happen in slow motion. In this 2021 cycle, the land part of the cycle does feel like it is on fast forward. What is scary to me is the number of semi detached builders all building identical product in the same areas. That makes the downside risk much more severe for those that get caught with unsold product at the end of the cycle.

If I am such a Nostradamus-like prognosticator in all of this, what is my strategy right now? only buy unique lots in demand areas. That is what I will do to avoid some of the herd mentality that is so dangerous among builders. Plus it helps to be sitting on land purchased earlier on in the cycle, that increased in value by over $100k.

Flashing red light to builders. Stop overpaying for land. Ends in tears, every single time!

Vancouver house price madness edition

Nobody is comparing prices in Calgary to Vancouver as if they intend to choose one or the other as a place to live, and home values will dictate the outcome. I’m sure those in Vancouver are pretty comfortable with their status as a tier 1 global city. I don’t necessarily agree but it is a great place to live, as is anyplace in BC. However, the prices for land and building are simply outlandish based on any metric a person can come up with. Is it really possible that a semi detached can be worth over $2.5 million? I’d say no. You’d have to be crazy to be a house shopper in Vancouver. Do crazy people have those vast sums of money? There must be a linkage between mental illness and bank balance. Even in today’s cheap loan easy money environment, that’s a weighty sum.. With home prices that high how can someone also save money and generate business activity to increase their income or plan for retirement? Is there even employment in the Vancouver region that pays enough for someone to qualify for this type of purchase?This madness makes Calgary seem really affordable in comparison if you can get the same house for $1.5 million less.

A really shocking sum for this property.

Expensive design does not mean ‘good’

I was given a set of design drawings to review to gauge my possible interest in building it. I examined the package with an initial feeling of uneasiness which gradually evolved into a sense of total revulsion. Basically the designs contained a lot of professionalism amd detail, except that the details were not just abominably inappropriate for our climate but also among the most expensive way to assemble and supply the envelope, roof, decks and structure. Making the building work would require a level of precision you’d find in an aerospace factory. Unfortunately that precision isn’t found on a job site, nor is that degree of skill and expertise. This project seemed to be a recipe for failure and folly. If it gets built, then likely it will have immediate problems, and somehow repairing the problems will be so hard it won’t likely even be viable. You have to wonder about the client who ordered this design work to be done. Were they oblivious to home building techniques, or just more concerned with the appearance of the building than the cost and viability of it? If someone presented to them a list of the hurdles involved in constructing it and the cost of some components, would they abandon the project? What was the cost of hiring the designer? Had that designer ever visited a job site before or did he just sit at a computer and create fantastic yet theoretical buildings without regard to practicality. Are there clients that want to spend 100’s of thousands of dollars on envelope details that may fail or never work from the day they were installed? Is there a builder that wants to be responsible to execute this building? It won’t be me.

What City Hall wants versus what home buyers want - the townhouses suck edition volume 2021.

First of all townhomes suck to build. Now that this fact has been established we can discuss why. It is due to compliance costs and endless burdensome regulations, fees, delays and engagement expectations. These eat up a lot of builder capital, without improving the product for the client. As you may recall, Rndsqr published this some time ago and pointed largely at City hall as to why it was abandoning the townhouse market. In classic bureaucratic incoherence, there was no response from the City, certainly no internal soul searching and promise to change.
The city has the developed areas guidebook and the municipal development plan MDP. These call for more infill development and less sprawl. Again, the city makes infill development of anything except detached homes super painful, yet it expects for some reason the builders will just line up to get slaughtered building something nobody wants because the planning department publishes a policy document. Just look at the market data from January 2021. Some of the market is on fire, and some of it is in the toilet. I know some serious builders who aren’t touching what used to be their core business of townhomes. What will the city do if the goals of the municipal development plan and the new guidebook are ignored by the industry? Why doesn’t the city do something to achieve its goals for densification by incentivizing rather than punishing those who’d create the product that aligns with the MDP? Can the city change buyer tastes during a pandemic? Market data says no.

Townhome builders have taken note of the market, there is too much supply and not enough buyers. Courtesy of the Newinfills market report.

The ‘be glad you aren’t shopping for a house in a distant Toronto suburb’ edition

Can we all take a moment to celebrate we live in a place with rational housing prices and are close to mountains that you can ride a bike on great trails? Contrast the house you can buy in Calgary for a million dollars vs some bedroom city out on the edge of Toronto! I wouldn’t move to Ontario if someone gave me a million dollars. But if I did move to Ontario I would actually need a million just to buy a dated old semi. No thanks

Sold a little over asking price …

What you get for over $1.1M. No thanks. Does this look like the quality of house that someone who can afford a million dollar property would want?

condo fee madness!

Browsing the MLS, not that I don’t have plenty of work on the go right now, but it is more fun to hunt deals out than it is to execute on a project. Some curious ‘deals’ always pop up, houses that’d be mostly cosmetic to fix and not require a vast amount of time and energy. Yet these ‘opportunities’ become unglued when you read the fine print. First of all, what looks to be a semi detached is in a condo complex. If that isnt bad enough the monthly freaking ball and chain is $1023. If it was a bareland condo, I could get behind that. But the monthly second mortgage on this sucker includes ‘insurance and common area maintenance’.

• common insurance within a group is now a negative not a positive. You get lumped in with a group of people and you cant control their behaviour, frivolous claims, or general dumbassery like leaving a bathtub running and flooding a neighbour. The neighbour then tries to squeeze the insurer with hotel bills and repair quality expectations that add up to enormous supplemental damage claims. Deductibles and premium bills escalate quickly

• common area maintenance - is this more than snow removal and lawn care that you are paying for? If so find a good contractor and bill the actual cost, it can’t be that high for this type of property that is wide open and snow removal can be done with large machines (quick and easy, low manpower)

• reserve contributions - this is a vinyl clad building, that stuff is cheap to fix. With those huge condo fees, the building should have already been redone in something more hail resistant.

Over an ownership horizon of five years, that is $60k in fees, for that sum you could fix anything that goes wrong on a building yourself and hire someone to shovel and mow. Perhaps the agent would argue if the condo fee was lower than the unit would be priced $100k higher. Maybe that is true, if so the condo board should then be decertified and each unit owner would accrue $100k of free equity. To me the unit is basically unsellable, because no buyer wants that condo fee. There must be some serious craziness going on inside the condo board for those involved to think this $1023 is reasonable.

Imagine this was a rental property. The condo fee and property tax is $1500/mo. Maybe this rents at $2k if it a $50k makeover done to it. Factor in a 20% down payment after reno you’ve got a loan of $440k, even with favourable rates the mortgage is $1750, making this property negative cash flow by $1250 per mo. ouch.

Tricky delivery

Having the correct equipment to make a hard job easier. Paying enough so that the subs can have a team sized to fit the scale of the job. These are hard lessons you learn when you try and cut corners and disaster ensues. Planning, prep and execution allowed us to get the drywall delivered into a horribly inaccessible job site. My main issue with even taking the job on was this delivery. With it complete, it’s going to be smooth sailing from here on. In this instance, the board needed delivery on a freezing cold day to a site with no access. The crane was able to lift large stacks of the board and stretch all the way deep into the side yard. From there the three man crew had to haul it by hand and through the window that I had disassembled, luckily it fit. The board was 54 inch as well, to reduce one entire seam throughout the basement. This made it even harder, heavier and worse to move. It may look like magic and easy when the clients get their completed job turned over, but it wasn’t!

The crane reaches only half way. The rest is hauled the old fashioned way. Worth every penny to have this done.

A word of caution for aspiring developers

You can have an executive mba from a prestigious school and a chartered accountant designation and claim to have 25 years of business experience. I wouldn’t claim any of those titles and accolades, because if I did, that wouldn’t be true. You also don’t need those titles, because none of that helps you be a successful developer of inner city projects. Skill at the ‘financialization’ of everything is dangerous, it can lead to a flawed self belief in your own superpower and harms your judgement. We have learned from people that have the real qualifications and (feigned) experience, that they can lose their aborted project to foreclosure despite the rosy projections and gala product launch. Even worse than this self harm, the guys in suits tend to take dozens of innocent people down with them. I guess that mba program didn’t teach much about ethical operation or how to forecast the success of a development venture!

here are some red flags

1. optimistic forecasting - you need realistic forecasting that accounts for the hardships any project will encounter and you must predict what the sale revenue will be with some certainty

2. extreme leverage - avoid a deal where the principals don’t have skin in and instead leverage themselves in a way that is impossible to unwind without wiping out the investor. The developer needs to lose first so he can make whole those who invest in him if the project fails

3. ignoring advice from those who’ve got it - there is someone operating in that market right now that could poke holes in your business case, speak to them and listen to what they say

4. inflated track record - lack of specific project success by the deal principals. This is easy to find out in a connected world. Titles don’t matter much, track record is a better predictor of success

5. marketing - the marketing hides the lack of substance. Large expenditure on a marketing campaign can hide a project that is in disarray and will never be viable to build.

6. ambitious growth - how can a builder be marketing a second project before the first is started (or better yet, complete and successful).

7. top heavy structure - those who believe they can outsource everything also think they can outsource the responsibility of the project being successfully managed. This is one area where the people who run the business fail because they don’t want to actually build projects they want to be seen as executives. These types value the trappings and appearance of success, but when the going gets tough they flee. To this type of person, investor money is a plaything to squander after they’ve taken a cut. Run from these people

I think this gets back to qualification of the developer vs his/her desire to shortcut right to the top of the field without paying any dues. Would I show up at a dental clinic and expect to do the work of a Doctor of Dentistry during my first day on the job? Or arrive at the airport and take the first officer chair on a passenger jet? An aspiring developer should consider training a little before taking the reins of complex project, otherwise will likely crash and burn. And my advice for investors? Just find a quality REIT and possibly loan money to builders at fair rates.

This guy has the magic touch, everything he does will succeed. He’s never going to scam you in a business deal!

A tale so sordid I dont want to publish my actual thoughts and risk getting sued

Certain ‘deals’ raise eyebrows. One in particular was so stunningly out of the norm of what someone (such as myself) would expect, that my inner cynic started regurgitating some ‘un-supressable’ diatribe on what I can politely call ‘suspicious activity’. What I knew then was extremely puzzling, and generated a lot of unanswered questions. Issues like dramatically overpaying for a property, raising capital in unconventional means, serious budget discrepancies, and outlandish predictions, in isolation could be explained, but together, didnt pass the sniff test. And what was I sniffing? I wont print it on a publicly accessible place like a website where the word I have in mind, once printed, can’t be taken back.

Now here we are, a couple years later, the cookies have crumbled, and the dominoes have toppled. Somebody has lost multiple six figures, actually it appears that 25 somebodies, ‘accredited investors’ (this is where the OMG LOL comes in), are wiped out to the tune of $1026500, plus or minus, depending on the outcome of the main lender on title recovering its loan first (if this was how the deal was structured, I can’t know). Those in an unsecured second position are going to fare really badly in a foreclosure, that is a certainty. I would have advised those investors not to touch this deal, I reviewed the investor slide deck when it was initially publicized. It was a horrible document and hard to believe people believed it. The marketing behind the deal was so phony and transparent, and the ownership team track record so thin a person would have had a hard time committing to the capital raise, but it happened.

This is just another in a series of deals where the investor is the bag holder. This is a relatively tiny deal, but wont seem like it to the 25 victims, imagine if they get zero, after the lofty promises found in the slide deck. This really makes the entire industry appear tarnished, that the builders are thieves, and the parasitic hangers on are….well they are what they are. If anyone asks, I am going to give them advice, run from any inner city investment proposal! On this particular deal I would say, where’s the cash now!

This was my first exposure to the deal. Reviewing the documents behind it raised some massive red flags

The sales value published appeared to be too good to be true. And it was.