Morgan

minten, I think the fear is that the virus will could get out of control and kill huge numbers of people. After all, it is spreading exponentially. I'd rather the government be harsh and do what they can to limit the spread and damage, than say it is like the flu and not do too much. I am seeing headlines everyday of famous people who have died from the corona virus. It is real, and it seems to kill all kinds of people. We're just starting this in the US. We probably have quite a bit more to go unfortunately.

Where are your apartments located primarily? They're in the northern panhandle of West Virginia - about an hour west of Pittsburgh.

I'm not sure what the banks are doing in my area yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're stopping everything except for top quality borrowers with lots of cash. I haven't tried to get a loan since all this corona virus stuff started. That being said, I have three cheap fixer-up houses that were listed just before this began. They're all a little bit below what I think they're actually worth, but still basically no interest. My realtor told me there has been a "drastic slow down" in everything real estate. We shall see, but I don't anticipate selling those anytime soon. I've been looking at some other deals and people haven't really started to drop their prices yet. Some have just been too high to begin with, but others don't seem to realize what kind of recession we're going into. The US is due for a slow down or recession. 10 years of growth quite a bit longer than average. My memory says five to seven years is the average. Anyways, I have a few hundred apartments and only five or six tenants have said anything about not paying. We'll see what happens in the next two or three days.

It seemed very alarming that they shut down so many cities so quickly. It’s up to like 30 million people “quarantined” in their cities. China doesn’t mess around, so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it’s much bigger than the government is saying. You don’t just shut down 30 million people for no reason.

I agree. Keep the politics on the politics board. I don’t have anything muted and read a fair amount on this site everyday, but the culture seems to be changing as more hostility from political discussions spreads to other areas - mostly the result is people posting less in general. This site is very important to me and I really don’t want it to decline because of politics. (This is isn’t a slight against moderators. Sometimes it just leaks out and is hard to control.)

Good lord guys. At least read the book before commenting... that's how book discussions work.

That dude is gonna have a bad day.

The guy who started it sold it a few years ago I think. It was quite good when he was running it. I haven't been following too much since he sold since it changed a bit after the sale.

I'm giving rocket a try too. Looks pretty good so far. Doesn't seem to have a quick way to upload portfolios though. Anyone able to find a way to do it?

Mine finally was changed - what a completely useless update. I guess I'll find a different service to use. What the heck Google? Why?

This site is incredible. Thanks!

Yes I need to pay $8 to listen to someone tell me that it's ok and I should feel good paying a lot of money for a company that doesn't make any money. You see... these are not the droids you're looking for. I believe these are the articles that are printed in the book. They're free here and worth the read even if the website looks silly. https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/03/elon-musk-post-series.html

A few years ago I was looking into buying a mid 80s Porsche 911 SC and they were 10k-20k depending on condition. But now, those cars are 40k-50k. I'm definitely not going to buy one at those prices. They'll almost certainly go down eventually. I can wait...

Thank you for the list!

I basically have no cash, so I usually mortgage as much as possible of the purchase price as long as it's cheap relative to the rents. In my view, cash is key and worth a lot more than the possibility of getting a loan. I'd rather have debt and save my precious cash (if the interest rates are reasonable) for emergencies.

Thanks for sharing the book with us - just ordered it.

Very fun book to read and really shows the constant hustle you have to have to grow a really large company.

I haven't heard of it either. I'd like to see them too!

As others have posted, Trump would likely not be that great for the US, but imposing martial law and stopping our democratic process is highly likely to be far worse over the long term. It would set a seriously bad precedent. Stopping democracy because you don't agree with the views of the other person is taking the wrong path down a bad road in my opinion. We must work our differences out and continue to grow our country in a stabilized manner.

Thanks maxprogram. I read it over the weekend on a camping trip. It did have some good info and was fun, but it was written poorly. Regardless, I'm glad to have read it and learned something.

Thanks Poor Charlie. I also came across this one, "From Cassandra with Love..." by Sam Zell: http://www.cre.org/memberdata/pdfs/zell_cassandra.pdf

Donald Bren is pretty interesting. He is the richest real estate developer in the US with a net worth of $15 billion. He bought 10,000 acres in the southern California boonies in 1963 and then built a 250,000 person city in the coming decades. Another huge stroke of luck was when his company was purchased for $34m in 1970 and sold back to him two years later for $22m. I mean come on... how much better could that get? An extra $12m to grow your company? That's just incredibly lucky. That being said, you still have to execute very well to grow that large. Anyways, later he and some partners bought the Irvine company that had another 100,000 acres to develop on. He is very secretive and not much is known about his company. Supposedly he has 500 office properties, about 50 shopping centers and at least 50,000 apartments. He has gotten mostly good press from what I have seen except some negative press from the OC Weekly. See some of the links below: http://www.ocweekly.com/news/donald-brens-highway-robbery-6420022 http://www.ocweekly.com/news/web-extra-the-real-donald-bren-with-commentary-6477118 http://media.ocweekly.com/6016594.0.jpg

While I do agree that it is certainly possible to get quite wealthy/rich from real estate, it is much less common (it seems) to become a real estate billionaire than other industries. Most of the billionaires are builders and there don't seem to be many who get it from inflation alone. There may be some who have bought and held who have become billionaires. There are a large number of Hong Kong and China real estate billionaires. They mostly have come from the same generation and are now 65-80 years old or so. This type of thing isn't likely to happen in the US as far as I can tell. Perhaps on a very small scale in the shale oil rush areas. That's a big maybe. The NYC and HK/China massive return scenarios will happen again, but the question is where? I would guess parts of India, Africa and Brazil. Africa (and that is a broad generalization) is probably at the lowest point of this relative the other places and India seems like the safest place in terms of stability, government and growth. There is opportunity in many, many places for real estate, you just gotta go out and do it! Great! I just ordered it and am looking forward to reading it.

I think part of it is the private nature in general of real estate investing compared to investing in publicly traded companies. There are of course publicly traded real estate instruments. There are a number of real estate investors on this board; DTEJD1997, ragnarisapirate, myself, and probably a few others, but mostly we're fairly small operators. Probably all under $10m in real estate assets. I may be wrong on the size part. The real estate investors who are huge probably don't have time to or desire to post here. Again, I may be wrong on that too. All that being said there are a number of great books on real estate: - All of William J. Poorvu's books are good - King of Capital by David Carey - Other People's Money by y Charles V. Bagli - The Reichmans by Anthony Bianco looks pretty good, but I haven't read it There are probably other good ones, but I haven't read them.

Did you read it? If so, how was it? On amazon it has quite a few bad reviews. I ordered, but would like to know what you think of it.