Me, my story, and my philosophy.

Reading the number

At UC Davis I studied political science and philosophy, then took a master's in political science at Columbia. Both are training in the same thing: what counts as evidence, and how an argument fails when it has none. Philosophy is where you learn that a confident claim and a supported claim are different objects.

At LinkedIn I worked as a data analyst. Large datasets teach you quickly that a number is a summary of decisions someone made about what to count. Medians hide the tail. Averages hide the outlier. A figure without its method is a rumor with a decimal point in it.

Reading a deal before it is built

At the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco I reviewed proformas in the affordable housing pipeline. Developers apply to the bank for funds, and my job was to read the numbers behind each request and judge whether the project was actually on track.

A proforma is a forecast that wants to be believed. You learn quickly which assumptions are carrying a deal, and which ones were chosen because the deal does not work without them. That habit transfers directly: a listing price, a rent estimate and an appreciation figure are all somebody's assumptions wearing a number.

What it takes to build

I own and am developing Warren Place. Entitlement took five years: five rounds of preparation and two rounds of planning commission review before the project was objectively compliant.

Getting there ran through geotechnical, civil, acoustic and environmental engineers, architects, landscape architects and a CEQA analysis. The land is constrained enough that only a handful of concepts work on it at all, and finding one that did was most of those five years.

What it taught me was not construction. It was how to ask a specialist the right question in a field I do not practice, and how to hold a large team together when the answers have to reconcile and the money is real. The expensive mistakes are the questions nobody thought to ask. Five years is also the real distance between a rendering and a permit, and knowing that makes housing supply hard to treat as an abstraction.

Sitting with the decision

I studied counseling psychology at Northwestern and saw clients under supervision on a training internship. I was about six months from finishing when I had to stop. I am not a licensed therapist, I do not practice, and nothing on this site is therapy or advice of that kind.

What the training left me is narrower and more useful than it sounds. Sitting with someone through a decision they cannot undo teaches you to hear the difference between the financial question and the argument underneath it. Those are rarely the same question, and the second one is usually what is actually stuck. A good deal of this work is the second one.

How I got here

Bela Shah is a family friend, and the responsible broker whose name sits at the bottom of every page on this site. She is the reason I made the turn. Her suggestion was to take the pre-construction and development work and point it at real estate.

What that adds up to

Five fields, and the same job in each one: work out whether a claim is supported before somebody acts on it. I did not plan the convergence. This is simply the first work I have done where all five are useful at once.

What that means for you is concrete. You get the number, its source and its date, then what it does not cover, because that is usually the part that decides things. When the data cannot answer your question I will say so rather than dress a guess up as an answer. And you get the three properties that fit rather than the thirty that might, because your time is the one input nobody can make more of.

Under all of it is a fiduciary duty I owe you as your agent and would owe you regardless. It looks like reading the disclosure package line by line, running the comps again when the first set looks too clean, and negotiating from evidence rather than from confidence. Every figure on this site carries a source so that you can check my work. That is why it is there.