Shane Mason

We built a numerical palace around our storage underwriting. Killer analysis is not always the best thing. The details that made our team comfortable with the deal took a lot of time to compute, and they weren’t necessarily the details other people cared about. Some people will do their own underwriting. Others will trust that you’ve done yours. In retrospect, thinking harder about scope and removing as much as possible could have given us a simple enough deliverable to ship faster and get market feedback sooner. That would probably have been a better path than the one we took. Feature creep is real and time to market matters! Can you share a time when you wish you would have cut scope to get to market sooner? Share your story in the comments!

After 13 years in real estate, here's what I've learned: - Understand how long your capital could be tied up - Never underestimate the people and relationships that can make or break a deal - Evaluate the operator as carefully as you evaluate the property. A spreadsheet can tell you what a deal might earn. It can't tell you whether the person running it will make the right decisions when things get difficult. That's where experience and judgment matter. If you're an accredited investor looking to diversify beyond public markets and explore passive self-storage investments with potential tax benefits, subscribe to my newsletter or DM me. I'll share what I've learned from 13 years in commercial real estate.

Mistake #3: Evaluating the property but ignoring the sponsor I see this mistake among high-income investors all the time. They scrutinize the property, analyze the returns, and examine the tax benefits. But they don't always scrutinize the person managing their money. That's dangerous. Real estate is an operating business. Someone has to make decisions about expenses, financing, property management, and the long-term value of the asset. Those decisions can make or break your investment.

We also trusted the wrong signals. We believed the mobile home park operator supported our project. Instead of speaking directly with the people who owned the mobile homes and would be affected by our plans, we relied too heavily on the operator's apparent support. When we presented the actual design, that support disappeared. We hadn't built the community relationships we needed. We lost the project. Looking back, we made two mistakes: We neglected the design's impact on the community, and we failed to engage the people who mattered. The lesson? A project can work perfectly on paper and still fail because you misunderstand the people involved.

Mistake #2: Thinking the numbers are enough We wanted to build a 65-foot-tall structure on a narrow railroad right-of-way in San Jose. The existing industrial zoning required 10-foot setbacks, making the site practically unusable for our intended project. We needed planned development zoning to make it work. So we hired an excellent land-use consultant and put together a plan. From a practical and economic standpoint, we knew what we wanted to build. But we made a critical mistake. We designed a building that worked on paper but did little to address the surrounding community's concerns. It was essentially a blank wall. We focused on making the project economically viable without thinking enough about how it would affect the people living around it.

Mistake #1: Underestimating how long a project takes One of my first major projects was entitling and repositioning a 30 MW data center in San Francisco. From start to finish, it took more than 20 years. Then, just 3 weeks before COVID hit, we sold it at a record-setting price. The timing was extraordinary. But the project also taught me how long real estate can take to execute. A deal that looks attractive today can require years of work before you realize its potential. Never underestimate the time, patience, and capital required to see a project through.

My family has developed $230M+ in real estate across 5 major U.S. markets. After 13 years in the business, I've learned that one bad decision can kill a multimillion-dollar deal. If you invest in real estate, avoid these 3 costly mistakes: 🧵

Their German-engineered concrete structure, with a design capacity 50% larger than a storage building would ever need, turned into an overbuilt substrate for attaching storage doors. 8/28

Some deals take 3 years to execute. This one took 22. Here's how we sold a data center to the City of San Francisco and launched our firm: Back in 1999, it seemed like all you needed to IPO and raise millions was a plausible idea and an internet connection. 1/28

When you're analyzing a real estate deal, the person responsible for executing the deal deserves as much attention as the property. 1/7