What I’m thinking about: Joined the boy dad club a few days ago!
Big sister holding her baby brother
Lookalike kiddos
Our family is complete, and our hearts are filled with love 🙂
(Today is my birthday btw, don’t think I’ve ever received a better gift than the above!)
Back home now, mom and baby doing well.
When our daughter Zenzali was born, it took months for me to establish a deep, loving connection with her. Since then, I’ve grown as a person and a parent, and my bond with Zende accelerated right from day one, partly because strong bonds are a choice that can be made consciously, and also because he is the last child my wife and I will have, so we can (do our best to) savor every moment.
The parental behavior ideals preached by the hospital staff have already been kicked out the door by the realities of modern life, and the ~3 hour ticking clock is firmly back in place for a while (*cue parents of newborns nodding their heads wearily*).
I trust you’ll understand that today is going to be a brief newsletter as we get our feet under us (…already had to get up 9 times to see to the needs of both kids and my wife by the time I wrote this sentence haha), and we’ll be back to regular programming next week.
(If there are any hiccups, please bear with me as I navigate what will likely be the most logistically challenging period of my life over the next few months.)
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A few thoughts:
- Increased wariness of current macro (particularly interest rates, bond market, inflation, and global energy shortage), and the sliver of the population driving consumer activity will narrow further. At SLC, our focus will be on assets targeting premium buyers, in areas where wage growth is outpacing inflation (hard to find). Anything outside of that will be a near-automatic ‘no’, unless a deal is stupidly good.
- Lot of ‘land investing has permanently changed’ narratives. Certainly truth to that, and our strategy has adapted as well. Hard time believing that solid flips won’t stage a bigger comeback though, and our eyes continue to be open. Per the above bullet point, more folks are getting/going to get squeezed, and the dispo market isn’t friendly to them either.
- Pace of AI progress continues to be exponential, and the expectations and requirements of consumers (including us) are evolving on a weekly basis. Extremely tricky environment to develop software in, balanced by the rapidly lowering cost and speed of feedback. Within a couple of weeks of testing (internal and external), it became clear that SLC Chat needs agentic capabilities to meet the demands of the market…so that is what I’m working on, stay tuned.
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Quick follow-up to last week, since some of you asked. The Louisiana subdivide I wrote about last week with all three child parcels under contract and wrapping through the first half of June. After a full year of grinding dispo (the process of selling down our inventory) and price cuts approaching 50%, every investor is getting principal back plus their full preferred return, landing us around a 1.17x net MOIC (Multiple on Invested Capital, the total cash returned divided by the cash invested). Well short of our base-case underwriting, and exactly why we preach downside protection over everything else. We didn’t lose money in arguably the toughest real estate market in a century, and that’s the win. You can read the full story here.
At SLC, we write checks from $50K+. We close 100% of deals we commit to (including a large one this week). And we bring national underwriting experience (amplified by world-class AI workflows) to every transaction.
