The renovation was never the hard part

I buy houses in North Carolina. My office is in Mississippi. Charlotte, Concord and Gastonia mostly, and twenty eight or so since 2022. A little over ten million dollars' worth. The last one closed in March.

The model is simple. Find one sitting empty and worth less than it should be. Buy it. Fix it. Somebody lives in it again. I pay my contractors wholesale and I buy material in bulk, and that's where the margin comes from.

The renovation was never the hard part. I know how that sounds coming from me. Skilled people do skilled work, and once it's on the calendar it mostly happens.

The job is knowing what happened in another state

My houses are a long drive from my desk. The work gets done without me standing in the room, which is how it has to be. What is the job then? Knowing what happened. Whether the thing a man promised on Tuesday actually happened on Tuesday.

Utilities on. Utilities back off. Trades that have to go in an order, because you don't paint a room before the drywall goes up. Material that has to arrive at the house instead of at the supply yard. A crew that turns up to a room nobody got ready for them. Every one of those is a phone call to somebody standing where I am not.

None of that is skilled work. It doesn't take a decision. It takes somebody, on the day a man said it would happen.

My edge in this business is administrative, which isn't a flattering thing to say about yourself. Wholesale pricing holds if the volume holds. Bulk material saves money if I'm ordering ahead of the crew instead of behind it. Slip the schedule and I'm paying retail like everybody else, on a house I already own.

Anybody can learn houses. The edge is whether the small things happened on the day somebody said they would.

I put AI to work in my own company and it helped

That's the whole claim and I am going to leave it there. Every pitch you have ever heard came with a before and after number on it. Nobody believes those.

What it does for me is narrow. It drafts the message and I read it. Then it goes out, it gets written down, and when the answer doesn't come back it asks again.

None of that takes judgment. All of it takes somebody. A man says Thursday, Thursday comes, and somebody has to ask him whether it happened.

Nothing leaves this company without me reading it first. That isn't a setting a salesman talked me into. It's the only version of this I'd run.

What I won't hand over

It does not decide what I buy. Which house, which offer, which contractor I keep calling. That's the work I like and I'm not giving it away.

Anything with my signature on it stays with me too. A machine writes a clean sentence. It doesn't know which one somebody is going to keep, and those pages get read back to you a year later, in a room where nobody cares at all what you meant when you signed them.

The hard call to a man who let me down stays mine. That's a phone call and it needs my voice. He isn't going to take it from a message and he shouldn't have to.

And it can't walk a floor and tell me the subfloor's soft. I still get in the car.

Point it at the boring part

Not the part you are proud of. The deciding is the part you enjoy and there isn't much of it in a week. The week is small messages that had to go out on a day somebody named.

Give it one job and see whether that job got easier. Then give it another. I wouldn't do it in the other order.

And read everything before it goes out. I don't care what you bought or who built it. Read it.