Off-Market Deal Sourcing | Entitling large SFR developments & Developing Communities | also Applied Mathematics @johnshopkins
Manhattan, NY
Joined March 2021
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New algo intro:
I’m Alexander Pryor
I joined retwit when I was 18 and getting into the business. Started flipping and wholesaling, built a 15+ person team in the FL panhandle before leaving for college
Mastered direct to seller / off market deal sourcing, started acquiring and developing land for subdivisions
Now I’m running acquisitions and development at a family office in nyc, focused on industrial and IOS primarily in NJ and the east coast
The skills I learned and the people I met here took me from nothing to something, cannot overstate the value of the community here
New algo intro:
I’m Pat Carino.
I’m a multifamily developer in the northeast which is incredibly difficult and fun and rewarding and frustrating. Currently have 5 deals (~1,400 units) under contract in NJ, NY and MA and trying to get them all approved / closed!
I also founded a software co called @DealNav which I created when I couldn’t find a CRM / deal tracking tool that was simple affordable and map based. I’m now trying to scale that with two partners @Ant__L and @TheJackStrick
All the nonsense and brainrot aside chirping on and meeting people via ReTwit has been a fun and valuable. Idk about you but I’m here for the long haul.
Alexander Pryor retweeted
we're doing our annual event in greenwich this month for current and prospective LPs
If you're around and wanna see what we're up to sign up below!
forms.gle/mTuVMPhq325mAHeTA
Back when I was doing enough flips/rehabs to justify a full time construction crew we hired this kid barely older than me
Pretty cool guy, adopted and had a troubled past so figured we’d give him a chance
I remember one day I was working in the houses with the crew to get away from the desk and gave him my card to go grab lunch for everyone
He gives me a wink as he gets in his tiny old Ford truck, rips a massive bong hit, then proceeds to blow into his interlock device to start the truck
Didn’t last too much longer after I found out he was squatting in one of our vacant properties
AI proliferation is reducing the barrier to entry, thus reducing your edge
Hunker down on strong relationships and bringing value first
As time flows, the market is becoming more transparent and thus efficient
Fight for your edge
Been getting a ton of cold emails from students out of the blue for internships
Is there a database these kids are using?
Alexander Pryor retweeted
Attended the GP/LP Summit today, shoutout to @chernobelskiy for putting together a great event.
Lots of takeaways, but one that stood is too many deals and markets still feel priced to perfection, making it difficult for operators to maintain a real edge.
In 2026 and beyond, real estate will increasingly favor operators with true niches, both in sourcing and execution.
With the current market dislocation, the next 24-36 months will show who managed what they bought well, who actually has equity to deploy, and who can stay active while others sit on the sidelines
I’ll never forget being 16 and showing up for my interview at Publix to fund my first car
Before introductions or a resume were discussed, the manager sat me down and said
“Sell me this pen”
I replied with “I’ve got a million dollar check here that needs your signature. It can only be done with this pen, you can have it for $900k”
Hired on the spot not for any sales role, but to stock shelves for a crisp $13.50 an hour
Must be a lesson in here somewhere
Alexander Pryor retweeted
Allow me to reintroduce myself
My name is Shane, I run a boutique real estate private equity business. I've developed data center and self storage assets in California and raised institutional capital.
I am responsible for fundraising, asset management, and FP&A and heavily on AI to execute those workloads.
In a sea of AI slop, I strive to provide 100% organic content. I'm looking for ideas on what to post: drop a note in the comments below if there's anything you'd like to learn from me!
Had a great call with @lucashd the other night about our similar paths between college and real estate
He’s built a really interesting and quite useful software that im personally signing up for
Encourage everyone to check it out
Day 3 of senior year at Johns Hopkins
So far, about half of my professors gave up and went back to pen and paper only
The other half just establish guidelines for what AI can and cannot be used for
Alexander Pryor retweeted
Got sick and tired of having to sit on my laptop/phone to go thru replies to responses to my sms blast when majority is bullshit so i built a integration in Go high lvl for all my positive replies to ping my tele gram and allow me to respond or call them via tele gram. The lag rate from a positive reply to a text back then to a phone call just got crunched hella
It’s about to get scary if you own industrial or IOS and haven’t heard from me yet
Introducing Claude for people-search
No more $600 subscriptions, juts $0.0089/lead
Claude is now the best people finder in the world
#1 on People Search Bench
Fully open source, 0% markup
Try it at treg.to/people-search
Git Repo below 👇
These spam callers are getting crafty with their Canadian DID’s
Beyond annoying getting 5 of these per hour
Anybody familiar with the Augusta GA industrial / IOS market?
Have a site under LOI I’m doing some digging on
Never seen a more true and simple breakdown
Commercial Real Estate Development is Easy
1: Find a site you like for a d/t coffee store
2: Find the owner
3: Submit LOI to buy or lease
4: Negotiate terms
5: Put rough pro forma together
6: Sign LOI
7: Engage engineer to do a concept site plan
8: Pull all public material on in place zoning rights relative to developing a d/t coffee use at subject site
9: Draft Lease or PSA to buy or lease
10: Negotiate Lease or PSA
11: Execute Lease or PSA
12: Engage 3rd party reports (SIR, Phase 1 Environmental, Title Report, ALTA survey, Soils report)
13: Fake like you have patience while you wait 30-60 days for everything to come back
14: Set pre-design meeting with the city and introduce your plan
15: Review all 3rd parties
16: Confirm plan will fit on the site and can be built
17: Pro Forma Check with all fees added
18: Engage A&E team to prepare all items needed for site plan approval and CUP (conditional use permit)
19: Submit for Site Plan and CUP to the city
20: Negotiate with the city that you have met their requirements
21: Get confirmation from the city that they are reviewing
22: Fake like you have patience while you wait 2 weeks - 10 months from them to review
23: Receive comments back and adjust with A&E teams as needed
24: Resubmit to the city
25: Get scheduled for any public hearings attached to the site plan + CUP, typically planning commission and city council
26: Check contract dates to make sure you still have enough time
27: Decide if you are gambling. If you are then start your construction drawings right here.
28: Do a 2nd scrub on title with the survey back to confirm no plotted easements present a problem.
29: Confirm what anchor tenants and / or shopping center owners might need to approve the site plan or building design
30: Draft approvals for approving parties and submit them
31: Start dialoguing with a couple of local GC’s and discuss the scope of project to stress test the hard costs of the pro forma
32: Adjust pro forma with contractor feedback
33: Order all power equipment required for the project
34: Confirm any other long lead time items for the construction and order anything that is 20+ weeks now
35: Go to planning commission and get abused because they don’t like drive thru’s, meanwhile every drive thru in their city is over indexed vs. national sales, because clearly their residents LOVE drive thru’s
36: Gain approval at PC and get scheduled for the zoning board or city council
37: Receive 1st round comments back from the city. Engage architects to revised drawings and push to get everything resubmitted within 2-3 weeks.
38: Resubmit CD’s to the city
39: Submit everything to the County Board of Health
40: Go to city council meeting. Meet every Karen that lives in the city as they show up and tell you why your project is going to ruin the environment and their lives.
41: Take comments from your first attempt at city council that failed and work to resolve all concerns you can while attempting to still run your business in the future with the building that gets constructed.
42: Receive 2nd round of comments from the city. Try not to blow a gasket when multiple things that were not redlined on the 1st round are now redlined on the 2nd round.
43: Get scheduled for next city council meeting in 2,4,6,8 weeks
44: Receive redlines from Board of Health
45: Turn CD’s back into the city & Board of Health
46: Go to city council. Some former Karen’s, some new Karen’s show up to contest you. You have made 8 of 9 requested changes and city council appreciates you “meeting in the middle,” so they approve you.
47: Bid out the CD’s to 3 contractors
48: CD’s are accepted by the building department and Board of Health signs you off
49: Review bids & select GC
50: Engage GC with contract
51: Pull building permit
52: GC mobilizes
53: Construction starts
Alexander Pryor retweeted
Were you a @DealNav member who left bc we didn’t have a feature you needed, or bc you were too lazy to track your deals properly?!
Good news - we’ve shipped a bunch since then:
📧 Email integration
📋 Kanban pipeline view
🛠️ Custom fields & columns
🎨 Customizable dashboard
Coming soon:
🤖 AI to auto-enter data & surface deal insights
🗺️ Upgraded map w/ parcel data
Come back and see what changed!!
Someone needs to study how the VFW always ends up occupying the most prime industrial sites
Highest and best use?
Alexander Pryor retweeted
Everyone’s a fucking broker these days.
Spend enough time around real estate, PE, finance or any industry where large amounts of money move around and eventually you’ll notice something:
Everyone’s a fucking broker.
Someone knows a family office, the “owner,” the off market deals, the capital, etc.
There are increasingly 5 plus people standing between the two who actually need to speak to each other
I understand why. Because I lived it, and still do, to an extent.
It’s one of the most seductive businesses in the world when you’re ambitious and don’t have capital.
All you need to start is to know one person who wants something and another person who might be able to give it to them. Start up cost is effectively, ZERO.
And when a transaction is big, the math is intoxicating. A $200m deal at 2% is $2m. So you start thinking:
Why build a shitty little 20k a month business when I could make $2m with little to no effort?
Sadly, this is a trap.
The actual dynamics of this business are more like
Potential fee x probability the deal closes x probability you actually get paid x opportunity cost x uncertainty from the stress to hold / # of hidden brokers in the deal
Now it’s a completely different profile
On top of this, you own nothing. You can hardly NDA a relationship. You may not even truly own the relationship. You may at best, own permission to participate in one conversation for some period of time, which is an extremely fragile asset (if you even want to call it that)
Proximity to $ is not the same as owning the leverage and brokerage makes it really easy to confuse this fact
Said different, you are at the mercy of everyone else. Think of everything you can that could blow up a deal. They are likely all first order. Try and imagine the second and third order things that could blow up and deal and you’ll start to realize it’s a shitty way to make a living.
A few other high level observations about the business
- most people don’t actually have the access they claim and if they do, blink, and you’re in a 5 person broker chain
- brokerage creates endless motion (calls, emails, intros, nds) and you can burn so much time without actually improving your position
- ambiguity survives longer than it should in this business vs an operator led business like ecom. This can lead to making detrimental decisions, believing the $ is a sure thing when in fact it’s not
Which leads me to my final point. The psychology will fuck with your head because you’re living in a permanent state of anticipated payoff. So you start to treat a “closing next month” as income received. Then you start making serious life decisions based around an imaginary number. The number you should be underwritten is ZERO. Nothing matters until it’s in your account. But us humans, we don’t live this way. This mindset is a one way ticket to blowing yourself up
The best brokers aren’t really brokers anymore. They cultivate one relationship. They know what they care about and go find it. They anticipate problems, structure around them, protect trust, among other things.
If removing yourself from the transaction makes it easier, you aren’t creating enough value. This should be a key evaluation metric.
There’s nothing wrong with making money as a broker, but you likely don’t understand the full risks of the game you are playing. You must evaluate them and accept them. If your entire economic value disappears when two people learn each others phone numbers then you don’t have much of a business.
The goal is as always, to own something that isn’t dependent on the outcome of two other parties who you don’t control to agree to something you benefit from.
