How do you guarantee your company never buys another deal? A friend asked me the other day why I look at so many deals and never buy any. He wasn't being a jerk about it. He knew our count from last year, all those deals and one closing, and he goes, so what do you actually do all day? Reminded me of a story. There was a horse buyer who drove eighty miles to the sale barn every Tuesday for thirty years. Plenty of Tuesdays he bought nothing. One whole year he bought nothing at all, and the other buyers laughed at him in the parking lot. Hollow Hat Hal, they called him, when he wasn't standing there. Finally one of them asked why he kept making the drive if he never bought anything. He said, "I know exactly what I'm looking for. I don't know which Tuesday." Hal got the last laugh. Three or four horses a year for thirty years, and he built a breeding barn nobody in the state could touch. There are two things in that story and people usually take only the first one. Yes, he showed up. He also knew a good animal when it walked through the gate, and that part took him thirty years and can't be bought. From 2021 through 2024 we didn't buy a conventional apartment deal. Not one. Cap rates on the stuff we chase fell to four and a half, and we kept underwriting the same way we always had, and the same way kept coming back no. Hundreds of deals. We were selling instead. Somebody's already thinking it, so I'll say it first. Loosen the return requirements, and I could have bought plenty, and that's true. But a return requirement isn't a number you pick. It comes from your assumptions. We've owned and operated thousands of units, so I know what R&M actually runs when the building is full of real people. I know what the renovation costs after the third change order. I know what rent growth does in year two when the comps catch up. Then there's the part I don't control at all, which is the debt and what my investors need on their equity. That makes it hard to lie to myself, and in this business that's a disadvantage. The buyer who believes the prettier number wins the bid. He just doesn't always keep the building. So what do I do all day? I underwrite. My underwriter underwrites. Deals come in every day and most of them are dead in fifteen minutes, because the rent growth is somebody's dream, or the expenses are half of what we actually pay on a building the same age, or the seller still wants 2021 money and nobody has told him yet. Look at a hundred and one or two fit. You can lose those too, to somebody faster or somebody more optimistic. From 2010 through 2015, the hit ratio was a lot better, a different game entirely. Times are always changing; that much you can be certain of. Which brings me back to the question at the top. Want to guarantee you never buy another deal? Stop looking. Works every time.