The first 90 days after closing
The deal you underwrote and the deal you own become the same thing, or not, in the first ninety days. Takeovers fail politely: nothing dramatic happens, the seller’s habits just keep running your property while you celebrate. The cure is a sequence.
From The REbuild — see all 456 pages →
Days 1 to 7: establish control
Money, access, insurance, utilities, software. Every password changes, every payment path points at you, and you physically count and inspect every unit, reconciling what you walk against what the software claims. Every takeover I have done found ghosts: occupied units marked vacant, vacants storing the seller’s own junk, locks with no ledger.
Days 8 to 30: verify and stabilize
Reconcile collections to bank statements, not to reports. Put every delinquent account into the correct lawful process, kindly and consistently. Stand up the daily dashboard and exception alerts so problems surface themselves.
Days 31 to 90: improve, then systemize
Only now touch the revenue engine: street rates by unit type, the website, missed-call recovery, the review pipeline. Close the quarter by writing the twelve-month budget and the capital plan, and by documenting every process you invented so a person you have not hired yet can run it. Ninety days in, the property should run on systems you installed, not habits you inherited.
Why the first ninety days decide the deal
The deal you underwrote and the deal you own become the same thing, or not, in the first ninety days. Takeovers rarely fail dramatically. They fail politely: nothing explodes, the seller’s habits simply keep running your property while you celebrate the closing.
So I treat the takeover as its own project with its own plan, written before closing, not improvised after. Control first, then verification, then improvement, then systems. In that order, every time, because doing them out of order is how operators end up raising rates on a rent roll they never verified.
Days 1 to 7: control
Money, access, insurance, utilities, software. Every password changes. Every payment path points at your account. And you physically count and inspect every unit, reconciling what you walk against what the software claims. Every takeover I have done has found ghosts: units marked vacant that are full, vacants storing the previous owner’s equipment, locks with no ledger entry.
Days 8 to 30: verify
Reconcile collections against bank statements, not against reports the seller generated. Put every delinquent account into the correct lawful process, kindly and consistently. Stand up the daily dashboard and the exception alerts so problems announce themselves instead of waiting for you to notice.
Control, verify, improve, systemize. Out of order is how good deals quietly become average ones.
Days 31 to 90: improve, then systemize
Only now do you touch the revenue engine: street rates by unit type, the website, missed-call recovery, the review pipeline, the ancillary items nobody was offering. And you close the quarter by writing the twelve-month budget and the capital plan, and by documenting every process you invented so a person you have not hired yet can run it.
What this buys you
Ninety days in, the property should run on systems you installed rather than habits you inherited. That is the difference between owning an asset and having bought yourself a job, and it is decided almost entirely in the first quarter.
The mistake I made on my first takeover
I raised rates in week two. The rent roll looked soft, the street rates in the market were clearly higher, and I was impatient to show the improvement. What I had not done was verify who was actually paying, so I sent increase notices to a handful of tenants who were already sixty days delinquent and effectively invited them to leave without ever settling what they owed.
It cost me a quarter. The lesson is the order: control, then verify, then improve. Verification is not paperwork you do to satisfy a lender, it is how you learn which tenants are real. Improvement applied to unverified data is just noise with your signature on it.
The second thing I would do differently is meet the staff before closing rather than after. Whoever has been running the counter knows which tenants pay, which units leak, and which vendor never shows up. That knowledge walks out the door on day one if you have not made it worth their while to stay.
