68 | MENTORS MAGAZINE | EDITION 1
to take stock of what is going right in your
life and/or business, celebrate your small
wins versus what you don’t have, identify
your next target and.... plow ahead. Hurdles
come with the territory. Success comes with
staying in momentum.While Christopher’s family had a heritage in
real estate, we knew that there is no genetic
guarantee of success. Christopher’s grandfa-
ther was a San Francisco real estate develop-
er in the 1960s and even wrote a book about
how to negotiate a real estate deal. Thebook includes tactics like, “Only negotiate on
an empty stomach, so the blood stays in
your head, not your stomach.” A catchy sen-
tence, but not exactly a successful strategy
these days.Along the way, there were skeptics who
thought that the long term residential, single
family home rental business was not a
standalone in real estate. (“Why don’t you
just sell real estate?” colleagues would ask.)
But when we looked around the San Francis-co/North Bay area, we saw that property
was expensive, new building regulations
stringent and available land limited. With in-
creasing state and local regulation, self-
managing rental properties in California was
and continues to be more complicated and
riskier every year. We noted that the majori-
ty of our clients, while affluent and often
greatly successful in their own field of busi-
ness, were not experienced landlords and
would regularly get them into unintentional
legal trouble while managing their tenants.
Unfortunately, ignorance of the law is no ex-cuse in a courtroom –as a result, we saw our
clients regularly needing more help from us,
so we saw the need for detail-oriented prop-
erty management. We also believed that we
measure success by both financial and softer
measures. If our clients and our staffed
thrived, then what we were doing would be
successful.Our sense of the traditional real estate busi-
ness was that it was mostly transactional in
the eyes of the established firms and that