Originally posted by @Bill F.:
@Jeff C.
I have noticed this about BP for awhile and it has recently crept into the forums. I think the golden age where the forums was just a bunch of RE nerds who really liked talking to other RE nerds about investing and helping others is coming to a close. No one in particular's fault, simply a bunch of factors coming together. The two big ones I see:
1. BP took Private Equity money and now they have have bosses and those bosses like to have as much stable recurring revenue as they can. That means BP needs to monetizes as many users as they can. They do that in the forums through the memberships and by giving access to lots and lots of people who are interested in RE to people who make their living off of people who are interested in RE: agents, wholesalers, turnkey, syndicators and the like, all who will pay lots of $$ to get their product in front of eyeballs. Of course this comes with a free rider problem where people will use the forums to start "discussions" about inflammatory/absurd/ feel good topics that they know will get lots of views which they hope convert to active leads for their business.
2. The market is in such a place where if you have a pulse you can get great returns with a modicum of skill and/or if you bought in 2009-13 you can confuse luck with skill because you have made tons of cash. C'es la vie. This optimism drives lots of new people into the market, which reinforces the feedback loop I mentioned above.
Anyway, I too was annoyed by this for awhile. I have come to accept it for what it is. BP still has lots of great folks to interact with, learn from, and help. At the end of the day it is a hell of a lot better than most social media platforms and we are lucky to have it.
Hey Bill, you are absolutely right that all of this is symptomatic of late stage of the market cycle we're in. I would deviate from your second point just slightly in that I would say that the market WAS such that anyone with a pulse could have pulled great returns over the last 8-9 years. Investors are all geniuses when the market does their job for them by moving in only one direction. A blind monkey could have thrown a dart at the real estate listings section of the newspaper in 2010-2011 and if you bought whatever it hit, you would have done well. However this set of circumstances simply is not going to replicate itself going forward, and anyone whose claim to fame is having bought something with absolute maximum leverage in 2011 and having it happen to work out is going to have to rework that business model going forward. Sadly, many of them are now doing all their deals with other investors money and those other investors will be the ones who suffer the hubris of the sponsors. When a large percentage of moves are being made with OPM by folks somehow or another collecting fees from assets under management, it causes all kinds of market distortions.
The investing world is littered with the bleached carcasses of investors who took on highly levered positions and had the market move against them. Most of them never tell their stories, whether due to embarrassment, or the fact that book publishers aren't clamoring for feel bad stories about losing. There's a great survivorship bias in investor tales. There is also a huge bubble again in the idea of real estate investment currently. Much more so than in real estate itself. Every person in the hood with no money, no education and no experience thinks they're going to be a real estate investor. Anyone who has actually done a deal is ready to guru them. For the moment, the industry has jumped the shark. You can't buy a property for any less than the dumbest person running around putting in offers, and the bottom of the barrel has never been lower than it is now.
