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Mynd’s Doug Brien on Single-Family Rentals and Remote Investing
Doug Brien of Mynd and The Real Deal’s Hiten Samtani “Do you have to live in Atlanta to invest in Coca-Cola?” Doug Brien is making a point about how provincial single-family rental investing is, with people tending to buy within driving distance of where they live. That’s because the market, unlike those for stocks and bonds, is messy and opaque. Things we take for granted in debt and equities — reliable data, smooth portfolio management — are hard to come by in single-family rentals. Brien speaks from experience: He first took on the sector as co-founder and CEO of Wall Street-backed Waypoint Homes, which he built into a $3 billion,…
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Cheap Meat or Luxury Rentals?
The newly reopened Western Beef in Queens. Photo: Peter Castellana, Jr. The crown jewel in the Castellana family real-estate empire is a 20,000-square-foot Queens warehouse wedged between a Home Depot and a row of mom-and-pop appliance stores. For five decades it was a busy grocery store that offered cheap staples as well as specialty ingredients for the neighborhood’s Asian and Latino residents: dumplings, seaweed, chayote. As the flagship store of Western Beef, its once-orange exterior and its grinning mascot, Charlie the cactus, made it one of the most conspicuous businesses on College Point Boulevard. But in August 2018 it abruptly closed. When I visited the building last summer, spray paint…
