All Forum Posts by: Jonathan Greene

Great point about the low-hanging fruit being harder to reach. I just feel like many people have no will to try to ask a really good question anymore.

I find them almost unreadable now. Finding a good post to respond to takes me close to ten minutes. There is so much AI, reverse trolling, and one-line posts that the moderators can't keep up. And I know because I was a moderator for a couple of months, but I quit.

Being a moderator on the site is thankless. There are no benefits, no pay. Whenever you remove a post, you have a 10-20 percent chance that the poster will email you to complain. It's not fun, but it helps the site a lot. However, there aren't enough moderators to do the job against technology and spammers now. This is part of why the forums are pretty vapid, significantly more so than they used to be. When you give the benefit of the doubt to garbage posts, it creates a pile of trash, making it harder to find the collectibles.

The company's target audience is new investors. Old investors like me only invest in the subscription for pro; we don't buy courses or books (actually, I own probably 20 of their books) regularly. So, the focus on new investors creates allowable concessions in favor of new people, but that doesn't improve the forums. "We all had to start somewhere" is true, but the forums used to be more fun when people weren't as fragile as they are now. When you tell someone their strategy isn't brilliant, they melt into an offended state and fry themselves in their forum.

Are the forums here getting worse, or is it just me? Maybe I am just getting too old to wade through AI posts to try to help someone. I can't even look at the Facebook group because it is the forums x 10. I still want to help, but the time to find something interesting is getting too long for me.

Thoughts?

I worked with Zillow for years. My team was on Zillow Flex. They are a platform that has no identity and doesn't really know what they are doing or who they are serving. They make their money off of real estate agents, but real estate agents are the worst people to make money off because they are highly unreliable and in and out of the business when the market changes.

Their target should be the consumer with higher levels that they can subscribe too for data, since Zillow is linked to the MLS now which makes their data somewhere more reliable. But consumers all are on the site for free where real estate agents are constantly hawked to buy leads or participate in what is now a 35-40% referral business for unvetted leads who think they are contacting the listing agent.

Their business model has always been flawed. I gave them consistent feedback for years and still believe they could have made $10m or more off of my ideas. Instead, they bought homes and lost money, then acquired Open Door and lost money. There is no one with experience in actual real estate high up in the company, which is the problem with most tech companies masquerading as real estate companies (including brokerages).

Let me know if you want to know even more. :)

This is why so many new investors are saying they are going to BRRRR properties, not knowing that, in many markets, it doesn't work right now with high prices, low inventory, and higher rates. And of course, they can't find a deal that pencils.

Nothing is absolute, there are deals everywhere still if you keep digging.

The pyramid scheme became obvious when the underlings started to reign down in the forums here, as many mentioned, where no one looks too kindly on SubTo, not knowing what they were walking into and not caring because they were looking for the "hungry" bros who would spend the $8,800 to get into the community and "share" deals. There is a way to do it with respect to all parties, but that's not why people are signing up. They are signing up because they want to be a billionaire and follow in the footsteps, which is literally insane to think you can do that with SubTo.

I mean originally, not now. Now it's an out of control machine with a lot of financially incestuous relationships in the tupperware farm.

All of this. Personally, I like Pace and think he is a smart guy who cares about helping people, but the empire has overtaken the vision. The SubTo community has become bro-fueled tupperware sales and Acme/Avon downlines.

Anything creative is best done with complete transparency and the entire premise of SubTo is not transparent. It's rarely fully transparent to the seller and never to the original lender. A lot of people get themselves in trouble by acting as a conduit to mild fraud or just general deceit within the rules.

Yeah, older tenants may think that it automatically makes someone a criminal of something, but I would just explain the card and that it at least, in theory, has a medical purpose, unlike cigarette smoke which kills the smokers and everyone else around.

What due diligence did you do before hiring them? You should fire them right away and talk to an attorney to prevent the loss, but I wouldn't expect much and it could be a waste since a company that does this will not have the money to do anything.

When you have just one unit and you are looking for PM companies, your options are the bottom of the barrel because it's not a good use of the big one's time.

That's a horrendous fallacy and a weak mindset to think that real estate agents are buying the best multis. More than 90 percent of real estate agents are out of the business in less than five years. Less than 2% even own real estate. Most real estate agents do less than two deals per year. The smart ones house hack and buy rentals, but the good ones know that their clients come first. You want to find a balance of investing experience, but strong track record of multifamily sales (which you can see on their Zillow profile).