Real Estate Investing

Analyze real estate investments with conservative underwriting, financing stress tests, diligence gates, and exit planning.

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.

text

~/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:

1. Lock thesis and buy box.
2. Match the strategy to capital, time, and operational reality.
3. Run 30-second triage.
4. Underwrite with conservative assumptions.
5. Stress debt, timeline, vacancy, and capex.
6. Sequence diligence around the biggest ways the deal can die.
7. 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.

Real-Estate-Investing Traps

Trap	Why It Fails	Better Move
Using pro forma rents as fact	Return targets look safe when they are not	Anchor to proven in-place rent and verified market comps
Underestimating capex	Cash flow looks healthy until the first major repair	Separate maintenance, turnover, and true capital expense reserves
Calling any positive cash flow "rentable"	Thin margins hide vacancy, delinquency, and management drag	Test DSCR, break-even occupancy, and reserves before calling a rental healthy
Treating cash-on-cash as the only metric	Leverage can fake a great return on a weak asset	Read DSCR, break-even occupancy, debt terms, and exit risk together
Buying outside operational competence	Distance and vendor weakness destroy execution	Match asset type and market to actual operating capacity
Assuming refinance is guaranteed	BRRRR math breaks when rates, value, or DSCR move	Model delayed or failed refinance before acquisition
Ignoring taxes, insurance, and regulation drift	"Stable" deals can reprice overnight	Track reassessment risk, insurance availability, and local restrictions
Falling in love with one deal	Emotion overrides guardrails and exceptions stack up	Compare every deal against the thesis and recent rejects

Data Storage

Local state lives in ~/real-estate-investing/:

• the local strategy memory file for buy box and recurring guardrails
• the local pipeline file for active deals and blockers
• the local market-notes file for rents and recurring local risks
• the local decisions log for won/lost deals and post-mortems
• archive/ for inactive opportunities and old decision logs

Security & Privacy

Data that stays local:

• strategy preferences, underwriting assumptions, market notes, and decision logs in ~/real-estate-investing/

Data that leaves your machine:

• none by default

This skill does NOT:

• place offers, sign contracts, or move money
• claim jurisdiction-specific legal or tax certainty without source material
• submit lender or insurance applications automatically
• store secrets, bank logins, or full identity packages
• modify its own SKILL.md

Scope

This skill ONLY:

• helps choose the right investing strategy before analyzing properties
• helps analyze and compare real estate investment opportunities
• keeps local memory about strategy, markets, and deal outcomes
• improves decisions through explicit assumptions, stress tests, and post-mortems

This skill NEVER:

• act as a generic buyer, seller, or agent assistant
• guarantee returns
• replace licensed legal, tax, insurance, or lending advice
• recommend a deal without stating key assumptions and failure points

Related Skills

Install with clawhub install <slug> if user confirms:

• property-valuation - Estimate market value and compare comp-driven pricing against the investment thesis.
• home-buying - Separate owner-occupant decisions from pure investment decisions when a deal mixes both.
• rental - Evaluate tenant-landlord realities, leasing friction, and rent-side execution details.
• invest - Compare property returns against broader investing trade-offs and capital allocation choices.
• real-estate-skill - Broader transaction support across buying, selling, agents, and mixed property roles.

Feedback

• If useful: clawhub star real-estate-investing
• Stay updated: clawhub sync