Real Estate Investing

When to Use

Use this skill when a user is evaluating real estate investing decisions such as buy-and-hold rentals, value-add deals, BRRRR projects, flips, or house hacks.

Agent handles strategy selection, return targets, deal triage, underwriting, financing pressure tests, diligence sequencing, portfolio fit, and exit discipline.

Architecture

Memory lives in ~/real-estate-investing/. If ~/real-estate-investing/ does not exist, run setup.md. See memory-template.md for the baseline structures.

~/real-estate-investing/
├── memory.md         # Strategy, guardrails, and active priorities
├── pipeline.md       # Deals under review with current stage and blockers
├── markets.md        # Market notes, rent assumptions, and local risks
├── decisions.md      # Won/lost deals, post-mortems, and pattern updates
└── archive/          # Inactive ideas and old deal records

Quick Reference

Topic	File	Use it for
First-run activation	`setup.md`	Integration behavior, boundaries, and storage scope
Memory baseline	`memory-template.md`	Create local files for strategy, pipeline, and decisions
Strategy and buy box	`thesis-and-box.md`	Define goals, market focus, and non-negotiable filters
Strategy fit and return targets	`strategy-selection.md`	Match investing styles to capital, time, and risk
30-second screening	`deal-triage.md`	Reject weak deals before deep work
Underwriting model	`underwriting.md`	Revenue, expenses, reserves, and scenario stress tests
Debt and downside	`financing-and-risk.md`	Loan structure, DSCR, reserves, and refinance risk
Diligence workflow	`diligence-and-red-flags.md`	Documents to request and kill-shot risks
Operations and exits	`portfolio-ops.md`	Management, capex planning, and sell-or-hold triggers

Requirements

No credentials or external services required by default.
Ask before storing exact addresses, personal legal names, lender documents, or tax IDs.
Treat legal, tax, insurance, and lending guidance as decision support, not licensed advice.

Investor Lane

This skill is for investment decisions, not broad real-estate generalism.

Use this skill for return-driven property choices, capital allocation, rentability, strategy fit, leverage risk, and portfolio growth decisions.
Do not use this skill as the primary router for generic buyer, seller, agent, or landlord workflows that are not investment-led.
If the user mainly needs transaction help outside investing, route to real-estate-skill, home-buying, or rental as appropriate.

Deal Loop

Use this order unless the user explicitly wants a narrower question answered:

Lock thesis and buy box.
Match the strategy to capital, time, and operational reality.
Run 30-second triage.
Underwrite with conservative assumptions.
Stress debt, timeline, vacancy, and capex.
Sequence diligence around the biggest ways the deal can die.
Check operational fit and exit routes before recommending action.

Core Rules

1. Start With the Thesis, Not the Listing

Define target strategy, hold period, capital budget, target return, and acceptable workload before reviewing deals.
A good-looking property outside the thesis is usually a distraction, not an opportunity.

2. Choose the Right Strategy Before Chasing Yield

Match the deal shape to the real strategy: buy-and-hold, value-add, BRRRR, flip, house hack, or short-term rental.
A strategy with higher headline returns is worse if it exceeds the user's time, execution skill, or capital resilience.

3. Kill Weak Deals Early

Use deal-triage.md before any full underwriting pass.
Reject deals fast when rent reality, neighborhood fit, repair scope, financing feasibility, or execution complexity already breaks the plan.

4. Underwrite to Reality, Not Broker Story

Use in-place rent, market rent, vacancy, repairs, management, taxes, insurance, utilities, turnover, and capital reserves explicitly.
Every optimistic assumption needs a downside case beside it.

5. Read the Full Return Stack

Judge rentability and profitability through NOI, cap rate, cash-on-cash, DSCR, break-even occupancy, equity creation, and exit optionality together.
A deal is not "profitable" just because one metric looks great.

6. Stress the Debt Before Trusting the Return

Test break-even occupancy, DSCR, rate shocks, delayed refinance, slower lease-up, and higher rehab cost.
If the deal only works under easy debt, it does not really work.

7. Match Strategy to Operations

Favor strategies the user can actually operate: tenant quality, contractor depth, management bandwidth, market distance, and legal complexity matter as much as purchase price.
A lower-return deal with cleaner operations can be better than a "high ROI" deal that will fail in execution.

8. Treat Diligence as Risk Pricing

Convert every unknown into one of four outcomes: verify, renegotiate, reserve for it, or walk.
Never hand-wave title issues, insurance friction, deferred maintenance, or rent-roll quality.

9. Decide With a Written Kill-Switch

Before recommending "buy," state what would make the answer become "no."
Store the reason for each passed or rejected deal so future judgments improve instead of repeating the same mistake.