Good morning. It's Sunday, October 11, and in this week's edition, we're covering rising rates blowing up deals already under contract, a Fed split on how many more hikes are coming, and the AI tools I cut from my stack - plus where everything lives now.
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News & Moves
Rising rates are blowing up commercial real estate deals. Buyers who signed contracts earlier this year, when debt was cheaper, are now demanding price cuts before closing - or walking. The retrades started when bond yields climbed in late summer and picked up after last month's Fed hike. One Midwest buyer agreed to about $20 million for a roughly 200-unit apartment property, about $100,000 a door. Before the deposit even went down, borrowing costs jumped more than six-tenths of a point. The buyer threatened to walk, and the seller cut $600,000. The stress goes well past the closing table. Special servicing just hit 11.42% of securitized commercial mortgages - loans with missed payments or no way to refinance - the highest since 2013. Since late August, REITs are down more than 8% while the S&P 500 is up 1%. If your deal only works at the rate you had when you signed, rerun the numbers before closing.
My Favorite Finds
"Real Estate Just Crashed 50%. Here's My Move": Ken McElroy says some apartments now trade at nearly half their 2021 peaks, and owns up to getting caught himself - a 680-unit San Antonio deal mid-renovation on floating debt when rates jumped, sold at a $20 to $25 million value drop. His move now: lock the rate long term, assume expenses rise and rates don't fall, and only buy deals that work for 10 years. Watch here
"The RealReal CEO Rati Sahi Levesque: Resale, Robots, and the New Luxury Consumer": Stay for the end. After the RealReal interview, Blackstone's Global Co-Head of Real Estate David Levine explains why the firm bet on warehouses when e-commerce was 4-5% of retail sales (it's 24% today), why last-mile space close to population is so hard to find, and how tenant demands shifted - a few years ago it was clear height, today it's power for robotics. Watch here
The Fed Pulse
The Fed is split on how fast to keep hiking. Last month the Fed raised its benchmark rate a quarter point to 3.75%-4.00%, and 16 of 18 officials penciled in one more hike this year. Chair Kevin Warsh called it removing "a dose of accommodation." Since then, inflation came in cooler than expected and September job growth was weaker. New York Fed President John Williams says there is "no need for urgency," while Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan wants at least two more hikes. Markets now expect a hold at the October 27-28 meeting, less than a week before the midterms. The September inflation numbers land before then.
CRE Impact: A pause is not a cut. The Fed is debating how much higher to go, not when to come down. Price your next deal or refinance at today's rates, and leave room for one more hike.
Deep Dive: 3 Years of Productivity Tech
I've written about my tech stack a few times now, and those turned out to be some of my most-engaged emails of the last two years. So here's a quick update.
The biggest change: I cut way back on AI tools. Instead, I focused on keeping my memory and every workflow I build on my own computer, not in the cloud. Every skill, tool, workflow, system, and design I create should be repeatable in one shape or form. I want to control them on my computer and reuse them with whatever AI app I'm using.
What I cut
So here's what I cut: Manus, ChatGPT, Lindy AI, Lovable.dev, Cursor, Canva, and Notion.
Instead, I bought a Mac Mini. It now acts as a local server. It stores all my MD files and everything I produce, and it connects to Claude. You can read more about that setup here.
The biggest benefit: I now have pretty much infinite memory. I'm not limited by a chat's context window anymore. And I can plug any LLM I want into this system, and it's always up to speed. In other words, if Elon builds something better than Anthropic next year, I switch from Claude to Grok, and it knows everything that's been done and how to do it right away. No retraining.
The physical setup
The physical setup. I have a 49-inch ultrawide monitor split into two screens - my Mac Mini on the left, my laptop on the right. One mouse and one keyboard control both through a hub. The Mac Mini runs as a server 24/7 and never goes to sleep. Everything I do in Claude gets saved there, and I can pull up those files from any device, phone or laptop, anytime through the Claude app. My "Deal Hopper" folder on the Mac Mini syncs to Google Drive for the apps that connect to Claude that way. And Claude is now connected to most of the apps I use through MCPs, so I do most of my work from inside Claude - not in Gmail, Google Docs, or Notion anymore.
The other big game changer was Instinct. It acts as a personal assistant in a lot of ways.
Giving AI access
And the last thing I got over: giving AI access. My email, Google Drive, Dropbox, Google Calendar, my phone call transcripts (via the Plaud MCP), Zoom, a selected list of passwords, and Zapier. And now I'm toying with giving it credit cards with set limits - Instinct, for example - and seeing how much trust it can earn over the next six months.
Here's the stack
Claude: Mac Mini + Google Drive + MacBook.
Instinct: My personal assistant. It searches my email, signs docs for me, chases down PDFs, combines doc packages, attaches them to emails, and even searches, books, and buys flights.
Wispr Flow: I barely type anymore. Voice in, clean professional message out.
Plaud: Every meeting recorded, transcribed, logged, and filed in that property's folder on my Mac Mini. That gives Claude the context, so every detail about the deal is at my fingertips and never forgotten.
Superhuman: Still the best email app, period. Inbox zero at least once a week.
IndustrialIQ.ai: Our CoStar, only for small bay industrial. It's how we find and do small bay deals.
CRE Pipeline: Our own app. It's where our lead-to-close deal pipeline lives.
Brick: Blocks the apps that try to steal my attention.
Google Apps: Command center for the whole team. Unmatched for storage and search.
Apple Notes: Voice memos, quick notes, files on the go. Always open.
1Password: No more password chaos. Synced across the whole team.
Beehiiv: How you're reading this right now.
LandGlide: First thing I open stepping out of the car.
I Want to Hear From You
What's in your stack that isn't in mine? Hit reply - the best one might make the next edition.
I read every one.
That's a Wrap
Thank you for reading.
Until next Sunday.
Be well,
Saul
P.S. Missed my podcast with Gary Lipsky? Here is the full episode.
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