Real Estate News and Market Moves Week 8

Going slow to go faster later: Don’t ever let ego be the pace-determining piece!

Being the Founder/CEO of a growing organization with plans for future national expansion and immediate regional expansion, including opening in Charlotte, Greenville/Spartanburg and Charleston in the next 90 days, I am consistently tasked with balancing our pace with our ambition. 

Sometimes the task of pace moderation can be really, really difficult, particularly when the entire world is moving with reckless exuberance–including many competitors in the SFR industry. 

However as I said in my annual letter to my private equity investors (revfundllc.com):

• Real estate investing is difficult, and yet recently it hasn’t seemed that way. Over the last several years we’ve experienced a ‘no mistake’ market; a market anomaly where every investor decision (good or bad; disciplined or reckless) has been rewarded by ever-increasing rents and endlessly appreciating asset values. It’s been really, really hard to lose.
• For SFR real estate agents, investors and operators it seemed too good to be true. And it was too good to be true. As economist Milton Friedman once said, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” 
• And perhaps the longer you believe you’re eating for free, the greater the bill coming due. For many SFR investors, this bill is proving costly enough to cause collapse.  As interest rates return to historical norms, investors, both institutional and individual, no longer have the ability to sell or refinance their way out of operational deficiencies.

Sometimes, the hardest thing to do is go slow when others go fast, however as Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, Mary Oliver, says in her book Felicity there can be a huge value to a slow pace: