I put up virtually no capital, just a limited guarantee that I’d feed the deficit of the loan if necessary to keep it current over a three-year period, which was how long I thought it would take for the market’s supply/demand equilibrium to return. It worked because the lenders’ only alternative was to take back the assets, which meant taking over management — something they did not want to do. They had no structure in place to manage all those buildings. We did. We were ready. There was so much supply and opportunity we branched out from apartments into retail and office buildings. Between 1974 and 1977, we bought roughly $4 billion in assets with $1 down and a hope certificate.

I was the pitchman. I went to each of the houses, sat on a lot of couches, and flipped through dozens of family photo albums as I explained to the homeowners that we were going to build student housing and they could either stay and put up with loud music at night and beer cans on the lawn, or they could move to the other side of Ann Arbor. It worked. I kept buying houses and eventually acquired one full block of land. They were all cash deals, $1,000 each to tie up the properties with deferred closings requiring around $20,000.

All things considered, the third best investment I ever made was the purchase of my home, though I would have made far more money had I instead rented and used the purchase money to buy stocks.

Our three major acquisitions of recent years have all worked out exceptionally well — from both the financial and human standpoints. In all three cases, the founders were major sellers and received significant proceeds in cash — and, in all three cases, the same individuals, Jack Ringwalt, Gene Abegg and Vic Raab, have continued to run the businesses with undiminished energy and imagination which have resulted in further improvement of the fine records previously established.

In 1988, I invested most of the earnings from this lecture circuit acquiring the leasehold on Connecticut's Stratford Inn… In retrospect, I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of such a business, especially during a recession of the kind that hit New England just as I was acquiring the inn's 43-year leasehold. I also wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made me a better U.S. senator and a more understanding presidential contender.

I used to buy a group of objects -- let's say, 10 objects for $US100,000 -- keep 3 or 4 of the best aside and sell the rest for $US250,000. I used my knowledge to create money to finance my dream."

The first was How I Turned $1,000 into a Million in Real Estate — in My Spare Time by William Nickerson, a paperback book I bought in a Sydney, Australia, hotel gift shop in 1963.

Equally important, John Schaub (author of Building Wealth One House at a Time [McGraw-Hill, 2004]) and Jack Miller taught me that single-family rental houses are the best investment for the average investor because houses are so easy to buy, finance, manage, and profitably sell.

My very, very first purchase was when I was about 12 or 13. My father used to take me wherever he went buying or selling anything from the age of eight, because amongst my other sisters and brothers I was the only one who showed interest. We bought ordinary things like Persian lacquer to start with. Many years later I did my PhD on Persian lacquer

Up until then, our investment decisions had been based on buying broken companies on the cheap, below replacement cost, and building them from there.

I’m not sure if I would have done things differently. I should have looked into them and their registration but they were registered with the Financial Services Board, which I thought was sufficient to prove they are in the finance business. Like any other [due] diligence in getting a loan, I should’ve thought better than I did.”

It’s hard to overstate the extent to which this confidence is unearned. Kushner was a reportedly mediocre student whose billionaire father appears to have bought him a place at Harvard. Taking over the family real estate company after his father was sent to prison, Kushner paid $1.8 billion — a record, at the time — for a Manhattan skyscraper at the very top of the real estate market in 2007. The debt from that project became a crushing burden for the family business. (Kushner was able to restructure the debt in 2011, and in 2018 the project was bailed out by a Canadian asset management company with links to the government of Qatar.) He gutted the once-great , then made a failed attempt to create a national network of local politics websites. His forays into the — for which he boasted of reading a whole 25 books — have left the dream of a on life support.

Zeckendorf’s autobiography was packed with colorful stories, but what fascinated me most was his strategy. Zeckendorf viewed assets as a sum of parts, so he could increase the value of the whole. Various parts were more valuable to different buyers, so Zeckendorf could maximize the value of his holding overall, in effect making 1 + 1 = 3. For example, One Park Avenue in Manhattan, which the marketplace had valued at $10 million, was ultimately worth $15 million in Zeckendorf’s hands. He calculated everything separately — the building’s title, the land, the leases, the individual mortgages. I thought this was brilliant. I adopted the approach both inside and, later, outside of the real estate industry.

I was targeting good real estate assets overburdened by excessive debt. Well, I began seeing similar scenarios unfold in the corporate world and realized I could provide equity to those companies for a stake at a discounted price, and that would help them position themselves for when the market recovered.