Hopefully the title of this post sounds sufficiently stupid and obvious.  But maybe a better title would have been “watch what I do, not what I say”.

Real estate is full of characters that claim to be Buyers, and yet never seem to buy anything.  It’s pretty easy to talk yourself out of any deal, so the players that claim to be Buyers but never close on anything always have a good excuse.  The pro forma didn’t work.  The neighborhood wasn’t what I thought it would be.  Vacancy is too high in the area.  The market is still going down.  The land is located in the middle of a river.

Those are all valid points (especially the one about the river).  But they also highlight my original point.  If you’re a Buyer, you will talk yourself into deals… not out of deals.  So I always try to be careful about the Buyers that I spend my time with.  If they haven’t bought anything lately then I like to know why.  If they’ve tied up a bunch of deals without closing any, then I get pretty suspicious.

And to be clear, it’s fine to not be a Buyer.  In fact, at any given time it might be the right thing to sit on the sidelines.  But I hate it when non-Buyers claim to be Buyers.  It’s misleading and ends up wasting everybody’s time.

You can tell when somebody has turned on their “buy” switch.  It doesn’t matter what the market looks like at the time.  They make things happen.

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