All Forum Posts by: Omar Khan

@John Laney Every transactions has tracking # and other information. All banks (syndicator and receiving banks/financial intermediaries) need to reconcile their accounts using the same information. This is the basis of bank reconciliation and double-entry bookkeeping. 

You should become the squeaky wheel and get info. Going to the SEC should be your last option because it will poison your relationship with the syndicator (not saying you should never do that). But it is surprising to me that the syndicator is treating you as poorly as you have described. 

FWIW, I am a syndicator and we confirm and double-confirm all banking information from our LPs, send the money, reconcile our books and send multiple emails both stating that the distributions have been made and for LPs to contact us if they have not received the distributions. 

A positive mindset is very important. It's also very important to run these types of experiments with your own money. I'm all for being optimistic and tackling bigger problems. But you don't have to take my word for it. You can ask folks with an even longer tenure in investment management (@Brian Burke) to chime in. They will echo something similar. Don't take risks with other people's money, refine your pitch and take your time. A lot of the advertising you hear online from gurus is designed to sell you a dream. Sadly, that dream turns into a nightmare for a lot of well-meaning people. 

But I am with you on positive thinking, having a generally optimistic outlook on life - personally and professionally.

@Andrew Hogan As per my understanding (could be completely off as I'm not a CPA), if you're a real estate professional you can write off depreciation writeoffs against all income. But definitely curious now... do you know any CPA who can chime in? 

@Danny Milea Her write-offs as a passive real estate investor will be limited to the extent of her real estate related income (assuming she's not a real estate professional). Your CPA is correct.

One way around this if she was either a real estate professional (can write-off the entire depreciation offset against any form of income) or if she feels jointly with a partner who is a real estate professional. 

There are a ton of investments she can get into that are tax-efficient but at her income level unless she is accredited you don't have a ton of options. 

Don't be too sad. $150K is a nice salary :)

@Ashton Levarek I wouldn't take shortcuts especially if you don't have a background in either of commercial property management, in-depth investment analysis (e.g. investment banking) or have a significant financial backing. Otherwise most newbies are playing with other people's money which sounds exciting but is not entirely the most ethical way to be doing business (IMO). 

We all have to start somewhere and there is no shame in starting small. You can always scale up quickly if you have a natural talent/flair. But unlike those people, the rest of us, including successful sponsors, have perfected their art over years if not decades. Don't play with other people's money and learn things on your own dime. Then start accepting outside money.

@Colin Spivey I use Hubspot and find it intuitive but there are a ton of CRMs available. A lot of them are free and good enough for even the most advanced users.

@Kurt S. I'd love to see ML applications in real estate if only for the "cool" factor. The biggest problems is the lack of curated data sets. Most of the truly valuable real estate data is still silo'd in private hands and structured in all forms of different ways. On top of that most of it is either not publicly available (or not easily), not updated and not cleaned. You can probably get around the cleaning part but the first two are critical and so far the lack of proper datasets, IMO, has been the real killer. 

The stuff you see of Zillow/MLS is interesting but small potatoes compared to the amounts of money changing hands in commercial real estate (CRE). But there are many issues at hand in CRE apart from the underlying fundamentals of real estate that come into play when making investment decisions like cost of capital (which varies by party), investor motivations (arbitrage, tax, etc) amongst other items.

Would love to hear more about what you have in mind. 

@Matt Wilkes While a preferred return structure is "preferred" (no pun intended) by most sophisticated investors, you are under no constraints to only use that structure. There are many creative ways of structuring deals which can meet the unique needs of you and your investors. 

Personally, we have a preferred return structure in our deals but I know many sponsors who don't (and who have a decent track record).

While I understand and am sympathetic to your plight, I would be very surprised to find out if you were allowed to just take over that easily. Most contracts are not written that way. This is why doing due diligence on the sponsor is the most important thing you can do before investing.

@Naveen Desai My hunch is no because all PPMs are written from the perspective of protecting the GP in the case the worst happens. That being said, if the property is not performing, why would you not want to sell and recover as much money as possible? The market is hot across the country so this might be the ideal time to dump this property.