Reflections on Reconvene

In late September, my wife Simran and I hosted ~225 real estate operators and passive investors for the 4th annual Reconvene “un-conference” in Santa Monica.

Note: Next year’s Reconvene will be September 16-18, 2025 in SoCal. Tickets for repeat attendees will go on sale shortly; new attendees will get their shot beginning in November.

The goal of the event: To help my fellow real estate nerds build relationships to move our careers forward (and also have a good time).

In addition to the relationship building, we host speakers at Reconvene. Many of the talks are off the record, so I’m not going to share names, but below are some of the ideas / insights from our speakers that I found most interesting / actionable:

1. In apartment investing, supply is like 5-10x more important than demand (or anything else) in determining investment outcomes
2. Operational expectations across property management and construction are low, and you don’t have to accept them. You can get *really* differentiated results from creating clear lines of authority / responsibility, identifying measurable metrics, investing heavily in creating optimized procedures and training, and aligning financial incentives
3. In the development game, bigger is better - the brain damage is the same as it is for smaller deals, non-recourse construction debt is available on larger deals, and you can get a co-GP to sign the completion guarantee and the carve-outs for a piece of the promote and (maybe) the fees
4. The best place to start in affordable housing is contract Section 8 deals (HAP), and you can find a list of all of them on the HUD website

Hope you can join us in ‘25.

Respectfully,

Moses

P.S.: Our property management company, Adaptive Realty, Inc., is growing rapidly. If you are, or intend to be, the long-term owner of a high-quality Los Angeles-area apartment building, and you need management help, please reach out.