The Real Estate Espresso Podcast

On today’s show we are talking about how a $40 tool can save you thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars in energy costs. As real estate investors we often spend the bulk of our time in the relative sanitized environment of the office and spreadsheets. Your buildings are literally throwing money out the window. Energy costs are a primary line item in your expenses for any investment property. Now some of you might be thinking that the cost of heating and cooling is being paid by the tenants and you don’t need to worry about the budget for your tenants. Your focus as an investor should be on the bottom for your property, not getting caught up in the weeds of your tenants finances. Now you could go out and hire an energy consultant who will come to your property with thousands of dollars of high priced thermal imaging equipment that will show you exactly where you are losing energy from your building. That is certainly one option. You need to know where your building is losing energy. That means creating a map of where your building is leaking. You don’t need five decimal points of precision in those measurements. ----------- host: Victor Menasce email: podcast@victorjm.com

On today’s show, we are talking about one of the implications of artificial intelligence that is not being widely discussed in the main stream media. There are billions of people in the world. Designing and tailoring products for individuals has been largely ignored as even a remote possibility. It takes far too much effort. To develop custom products for each individual on the planet. We have lived much of the past century with products that are designed for the masses. If you think about a standard bell curve, what in statistics is called a normal distribution, product developers, and product marketing have been aiming at the average, and try to remain within one standard deviation from the average. When marketers send messages to their target demographic, they tend to put them into buckets. This is also true when it comes to trends in voting. What matters to the Christian voter, to the hispanic voter, the indigenous voter, the immigrant voter, the African American voter, and so on.  Increasingly AI can be used to create messages that are not tailored to a group, but tailored to an individual. The question is, could AI be used to influence an election result? 

On today’s show we are looking at the result of a lawsuit that has been decades in the making. I’ve wondered for a long time why real estate commissions in the US have remained solidly anchored at 6% when in other markets real estate commissions seem to fluctuate much more widely. For example, where I live in Canada, it’s much more common in high priced markets like Toronto to see commission structures where the selling agent is charging 1%-1.5%, and the buyer agent who has a lot more work to do in many cases charging 2.5% for a total of 4% or 4.5%.  In most professions there are two separate industry bodies. The first is a professional association that acts on behalf of the members. The second is a quasi government body that serves to regulate the industry and to enforce the licensing requirements. They also serve to protect the public. You see this dual structure in most professions whether we are talking about doctors, lawyers, psychologists, and also real estate agents.  The body that represents real estate agents is an industry body in the US called the National Association of Realtors.  A Kansas City jury last month delivered a $1.8 billion verdict to home sellers in Missouri against the National Association of Realtors and several major brokerages, finding they had conspired to keep commission rates high.

Bob Knakal is a senior executive at JLL in New York City. On today's show we are talking about some of the challenges facing real estate in the New York market. JLL is a large national commercial brokerage and the New York team is truly expert at what they do. You can connect with Bob at bob.knakal@jll.com -------------- Host: Victor Menasce email: podcast@victorjm.com

Chris Larsen is based in Asheville, North Carolina where he runs Next Level Income. On today's show we are talking about economic super-cycles. You can learn more or you can connect with Chris at nextlevelincome.com. -------------------- Host: Victor Menasce email: podcast@victorjm.com

On today’s show we are talking about measurement diligence.  People are human and they make mistakes. Often these potential mistakes are not checked, double checked or triple checked. You have no doubt heard the mantra, measure twice, cut once.  Measuring sounds easy. In some ways it is. You take out your tape measure and you just measure. Diligence requires attention to detail.  Those who make a lot of measurement errors are also prone to missing the details in a contract, or the details in a report. It requires a lot of focus and diligence to catch errors. If you think that errors are rare, you might be more prone to observer bias.  This brings me to the most overlooked role in any organization.  Quality assurance is a mandatory function in any business in my experience. The review process is a formal process that can’t be skipped. So often I work with consultants who aim to deliver their work on the deadline. They are assuming that there are no mistakes. They are assuming no review time in their schedule. If you actually do perform a review, you are guaranteed to be late. If you find an error, which is likely, then you are guaranteed to be even later than late.  I started today’s show talking about measuring. But measuring is a metaphor for any critical item. It could be a test result or a consultant report. Each time a consultant makes an error, it can result in delays in securing building permits or in redesign of the project. If people are not used to the review process, they might be inclined to charge extra for that service.   ------------- Host: Victor Menasce email: podcast@victorjm.com

Happy Thanksgiving to our listeners in the United States. We have lots to be thankful for. I’m personally thankful for a long list of things. I’m thankful for my health, for my family, for having the privilege of working with great people. I’m grateful for friendship and for you the listener to the podcast. I love listener questions.  On today show, we are looking at several leading indicators that are painting a much clearer picture of what’s happening in the economy then the shortlist of lagging indicators that the federal reserve references as meaningful in their committee meetings that are held a times a year. The Federal Reserve is fixated on inflation, Gross, domestic product and unemployment. The only way to reduce wage and price increases is with a contraction in aggregate demand. However, government spending continues to grow with any contraction being disproportionately, concentrated on the private sector. The government didn’t get the memo that demand needs to shrink.

There is a new law which takes effect Jan 1, 2024. The primary purpose of the Act is to provide greater transparency of legal entities to detect and combat illegal activities. The new reporting requirements, however, will cause millions of existing legal entities to file new beneficial ownership disclosure forms with the federal government. The regulations are written so broadly, that nearly every small business in the US will be swept up in this new law. The idea here is not for you to be getting your legal advice from a podcast. That’s certainly not my role. You want to seek your own legal advice from your own law team. The purpose behind reporting this on the podcast is simply to make you aware that you likely have some work to do to understand the new rules and make sure you’re in compliance.  ---------- Host: Victor Menasce email: podcast@victorjm.com

On today’s show we are looking at the results of one of the most anticipated real estate auctions this year. Signature bank failed in the Spring of this year, shortly after the failure of Silicon Valley Bank.  The loan portfolio was finally put to auction and it looks like a joint venture of two nonprofits and Related Fund Management is poised to win an auction for billions of dollars of Signature Bank loans backed by New York apartments,  Signature failed in March following a run on its deposits, the fourth largest bank failure in U.S. history. While the failure had little to do with its real-estate portfolio, it was one of the biggest commercial property lenders in the New York region. -------------- Host: Victor Menasce email: podcast@victorjm.com

 On today’s show, we are talking about four ways to liquidate debt. Our entire economy is driven by access to credit. Credit facilities of all types are essentially a claim on future earnings. I don’t have the money today, but I will in the future if you lend me some of that excess money that you are not using right now, I’ll give it back to you with extra in exchange for letting me use those funds today. It doesn’t matter cause weather the borrower is an individual, corporation, charitable, organization, or the government of a sovereign nation. There are four ways to liquidate a debt obligation. 1. You can repay the debt to future earnings and rely upon your week to week months to months, cash flow to service that debt and repay both interest and principal over the life of the loan. 2. You can rely upon a capital transaction to provide a source of funds to repay the loan. 3 You can wipe out the debt through an active insolvency by seeking bankruptcy protection. 4. You can inflate away the debt.