Gregmal

Whats been communicated and was reiterated at the recent AGM is that this was the last holdup for final approvals on the entitlements and once done the properties could be marketed which would wrap up the liquidation. They reiterated NAV is more than double todays opening price. This is a pretty easy to size up handful of assets, its just tiny and probably hasn't been on anyones radar in ages. The fact this opened sub $8 with this news just shows that. What was interesting though, especially given its size, is how on the ball Towerview has been, regularly, snapping up shares in the event they were available under $8.

Bought some more GYRO. Court ruling paves way for 100% upside IMO

Listen Warren is great and all, but if everyone decided they’d never take risks, hoard an obscene amount of cash most of the time, and then look to cash in when there’s “blood in the streets”, ie the majority of the system and those in it are hurting, I don’t think we d have ANY sort of innovations, ever.

I think @thepupil did a better job pinpointing the gist of what I was trying to ask you. But its simple. You are heavy with the implication that things are dire and claim this is already occurring, so all Im asking you is to actually establish some goalposts. Because for a very long time, not just you, but people having been stating these things while the exact opposite continues to occur.

I don’t think I’ll ever live full time permanently in one place ever again. The Northeast is amazing from May-September but it’s pretty disgusting after that. It’s disturbing the amount of taxes our local governments steal from us. Most of south Florida I find disgusting after a week or two regardless. Too hot, everything is fake, flat, and meh. North Florida over to the Carolina’s and up to Tennessee is pretty ideal for the winter months.

In what way? What are you forecasting? Are you saying we see 5-10% net population losses annually? By when? If it’s happening now can we at least establish some goalposts? It should be evident next year no? Because all these predictions and sensationalist forecasts have been going on forever. This kinda reminds me of the whole “rate hike/cut” guessing game here from a year or two ago. There was so much by the way of “obvious” forecasts and writing in the wall. Yet the majority of it never actually occurred. The wagers on these outcomes were largely busts, and the only correct move was to fade the noise.

Why would you deliberately ignore data? Even if you talk to disgruntled locals, if they’re leaving, someone is buying their property. This just seems like a very flawed way to go about analysis. The talking points about “decelerating” growth is misleading as well considering we are coming out of the turbo charged Covid growth period. Of course it wouldn’t continue at that rate forever or the entire US would be in Florida or Texas within a decade. It will just revert to a more normalized number, which is still super positive for the growth prospects. It’s like people and media sources can’t speak objectively about this stuff for some reason. They’ve been screaming about storms forever, no impact. They’ve been screaming about insurance for the past half decade, still growing. Just seem like a lotta haters out there. It’s crazy here around the NYC area how people act. Almost like they’re threatened by it for some weird reason.

It will be interesting to see what the real data says in the next year or two. These type of articles so far, have been awfully misleading. I saw one talking about businesses fleeing Miami, only to find out that the three addresses vacated were promptly leased up at higher rates than the previous tenants had. I’ve seen countless articles about people leaving, yet they fail to mention that the net migration is still positive. Anecdotally, I know of a few people whom have taken the money and run from south Florida. Given the moves in price, who can blame them? But for all the sellers, there are still buyers. That’s said, the insurance issue is legitimate. It’s broken. And despite the “free state of Florida”, rhetoric, a big part of the problem imo is government involvement in the process of setting prices.

It’s not really. The bulk of carriers had focused on the population centers which have always been the biggest risk. Miami, Boca, Tampa. It’s probably not profitable under the current system in those some of those areas. You’d see rate increases in areas that have seen huge appreciation and lie in flood zones or high risk areas. But that doesn’t explain why areas like say Jacksonville or Orlando are seeing these sort of premium increases. Milton was the storm or the century we were told and Orlando saw 30-40 mph winds and the parks were all open uninterrupted Friday…. It’s actually a fairly common phenomenon; we see it in plenty of businesses, commodity based are the absolute easiest example. Large portions of the market are not profitable through the cycles and go away, shut down, consolidate, etc. Then those that are left clean up and print money with little competition.

It depends where you are but this exact dynamic just exacerbates the issue. In the pop msa like Miami or Tampa people know what they’re getting into. But people in Orlando? Or Jacksonville? Those areas they’re getting totally fleeced because of companies leaving the markets and few options overall, and when the renewals come in it’s just “well you know insurance in Florida…” despite these areas being little more susceptible than idk, random parts of Virginia. If I’m not mistaken I’m pretty sure Berkshire even made a big reinsurance bet exploiting this recently.

It’s more just the cycle we’ve seen with everything the last decade. Drama and rhetoric rule the day. Sensationalism for clicks and views. It’s gotten insane. You look at some of these storms and “the cone” sometimes is 20% of the country lol. They’re doing updates and following storms that are 700 miles out to sea with zero chance of landfall. Every 2mph update on Milton while still 400 miles out was breaking news. Insurance companies love it because they don’t even need an excuse to raise prices, you just tell people one or two snippets about global warming or let the news about “insurance rates in Florida” take care of itself and that becomes your justification for 20-30% annual increases. Most have no choice but to take it because they need the mortgage. It’s a lot of shenanigans.

It isnt as though people arent aware of the storm risk though. Its been shown that there arent more storms than normal occurring, and they arent more intense than historical averages either. Whats changed is the sensationalist, click seeking nature of the reporting about them. I thought this snippet from a Post article was quite funny and accurate.... This was a particularly difficult week to suffer what TV has become. It was impossible to escape the sounds and sights of weather warners standing in deadly conditions — pelted by rain, surging seawater and debris-launching, tree-bending, house-splitting winds — to urge viewers to seek shelter from this life-imperiling calamity.

Lmfao. Some people will literally say anything for attention.

They had a window where it could have worked. They missed it because they are bizarrely committed to the orange biz. Even before hurricanes of late, it was beetles, it was 3 days of colder whether, it was always something from them. Its strange too because theyre controlled by hedge fund guys who you'd expect better of.

Yea so I dont think any of these stocks have any impacts, let alone material, except for maybe Alico which is a POS anyway. On the ground, I have a lot of family in that path, and so far, I hate being a broken record, but it sounds like the media overdid it a little bit. No doubt there is some terrible stuff that happened. But by and large, theres not nearly as much as feared. The pictures of course of the Trop roof are edgy, but misleading. The Rays have been in a fight with the city trying to escape that outdated shithole of a stadium, and were already planning to leave in 2028 as its just not a professional level building. My parents are in Hillsborough, a few trees down, power outages. Sister is in Orlando, said it was scary as well when the winds ramped from like 12 am to 5 am, power outage, otherwise, not much. My other sister and her family are in Gainesville and said that Helene was worse.

Related in a way to this subject, there are people I am very familiar with, who if they’ve done the work on something and it’s new to me, I will give that a lot of weight in terms of how quickly I can put an idea in the actionable category. For instance, GRIF was a @BG2008 special. It’s a microcap real estate name which is my bread and butter, so when my man was getting a hard on for it, I was able to do minimal work to verify on my own, and then largely jump in aggressively knowing BG is an animal on the due diligence front and if it passed his inspection, I would be good. And it turned out how I expected it to, almost to a T. So I’d say you need to have personal thresholds, but also go with instinct and find shortcuts, especially if you’re a one man/small operation type of investor. Conversely there are people who if they own something I just immediately write it off lol. I think awhile ago someone joked if @thepupil, @BG2008, @Williams406, and @Gregmal all were involved in a name, it was money. I think that criteria is still batting a thousand.

Monish Pabrai?

Most of the country was built and infrastructure established wayyyy prior to the 1990s. There is an absolute ton of housing, bridges, roads, etc that aren’t built to handle outlier weather events. The insurers have been waking up to this which is why rates should continue to be strong for years to come.

So with this recent hurricane in view, I can’t help but think this highlights the current dynamic driving homebuilders. Much of the current US housing supply is simply not built to current housing standards. Everyone thinks of Florida, but really, so many markets are unprepared and ill suited for what many consider black swan weather events. We talked awhile back about supply, but I mentioned how millennials and current home buyers and prospective don’t want their parents homes. They want modern built homes with less space and shiny kitchens and huge great rooms. This begs the question…is the new build MPC centric, resort style, big builder home the home of the future? If so it’s hugely bullish for the big guys. I bought a bunch of TOL in July on the dip and it’s already up $40 a share. Will this trend only accelerate given the recent weather related news cycle?

100%, I like it and am a long term, stubborn holder. But like pcyo(which I’ve largely moved on from), I wanna start seeing some consideration for our time and patience. If the apex of allocation is a 2% buyback during a generational market panic…I need more than that. If they sell a great asset and state that they will either find a suitable home for the money, or return it to shareholders, 6 years later I’d like to see some return of capital. No complaints really, just some grumbling. But they need to start cultivating a public market identity. A special dividend machine? A slow and steady regular buyback machine? Whatever, but it needs to be something.

Added some more FRPH last few days. Just kinda hoping they start waking up to the fact that the current state isnt going to cause a rerating on its own.

Well, elevation matters. Northern migration within the state of Florida is inevitable. As is migration to Georgia. Youve got better odds of your house getting hit by lightning than you do storm surges in most of JOE land. Not joking, theres been 2 homes at Origins hit by lightning TTM.

This could actually being a pretty big inflection when you consider the macro trends. US is and will possibly become more and more hostile to businesses, while trading at lets call it 20-25x. The FTC is an abomination, press is bigoted beyond belief, and politicians (both sides) enjoy scapegoating China, Russia, Middle East for everything. Meanwhile China is demonstrating it will support and be favorable to its capital markets, support the general prosperity of the middle class, and take necessary action to root out bad actors; while many of the China based companies trade at sub 10-15x.

Id also say LVMH and DEO benefit a good bit too.

YUMC has been turning it around. Own a small bit of that.