Ken Doble joins Dave Dubeau to explain what it actually takes to find a distressed apartment deal worth buying in 2026. He calls his filter the Goldilocks principle: a good location, rents materially below the comps, and a property that is unstabilized enough that fixing the operation creates the value. The math on that discipline is blunt. His team screened 168 deals last year, made eight offers, and closed one, a foreclosed 176 unit, 576 bed student housing property across from East Tennessee State University that a lender had held for five years and let run $135 under the newer comp across the street. Ken traces the discipline back to 2008, when he was COO of a $1.5 billion portfolio with 76 partnerships and $350 million of pre-sold Florida high-rise development, and watched all of it go back to the lender. He explains negative leverage in plain terms and why a stabilized deal bought into it leaves no room to perform. The back half is his Five Ps framework for diagnosing a property on site: People, Pricing, Promotion, Product, Process. He then runs the Johnson City turnaround through all five, including hiring an entire site staff from two people, roughly $3 million of renovation, a $350 community fee the prior owner never charged, and close to 80 evictions with off-duty officers escorting the notices.