It’s not impossible for someone to have 30 apartments by the time they’re 40. It’s a matter of convincing mortgage companies to loan you money, which is what they want to do given it’s their job. I know several people who’ve done this 100% legitimately, the real question is how much equity they have
It’s impossible to buy 30 apartments in Munich for normal people with normal salary.
You need at least 40 million euros, more if you are not only buying in unattractive areas.
Ah so I show up at the bank and tell them “Please give me 40 million so I can buy apartments and rent them out - oh and I also have no money or safety of my own so just hope that I will be able to pay it back”
no bank would let you do that in the UK either. The way this typically works is that a bank will lend you ~75% of the purchase price on a Buy-to-Let mortgage, so you buy a £200k property with £50k down payment. This is achievable for normal people with good salaries, let's say they're earning £100k.
The mortgage is likely interest only so the landlord can make approximately £10k/year from rent from that one property. The next year they buy another, their earnings are now £120k. It now only takes them a few months to save another £50k to buy their next property, and the more properties they own the faster it is to acquire the next one. After a few years of this let's say they have 10 properties in total. They are now earning £200k, which makes the bank's decision to lend them more money an easier one, even though they have £1.5m in mortgage debt already.
If they already have 10 properties then it's not that much of a relative leap to get to 20, then 30. With 30 properties they're earning £400k a year and can finance a new property every 2 months. They do have £4.5m in mortgage debt that is not being paid off though, but they're making a bet on the value of those properties exceeding the purchase price by the time the balance of the mortgages becomes due 20 years from now. In the past that was a pretty safe bet.
The risk of doing all of this is that the property market can slow down, rates can go up, values can fall, property maintenance can become a significant cost, bad tenants can ruin a property and wipe out several years earnings and the government can change tax rules that makes all of this far less profitable (as happened in the UK quite recently). But it's absolutely not impossible.
About a decade ago I worked with a perfectly normal guy in his mid 50s who worked as an accountant in a small software company, he had 200 BTL mortgages! He just kept reinvesting the profits and buying more each month.
That's a nice theory, but it doesn't work like that in most EU countries where banks are reluctant to give you a loan even for the 2nd property, let alone for tens of it unless you have collaterals to cover the cost.
I don't know how it works in the UK, but in the US the types of people hustling properties in real estate are not using the same banks/financing an average person looking for a mortgage would. It seems from talking to small time real estate folks that you use these lenders (likely lie or stretch some truth to do so in many cases) to get your first 1 or 2 loans, then move on to specialized lenders.
There are specialized firms w/ private capital that are happy to fund these midsize deal flow guys and finance them. Once you get a working relationship with a few such vendors it seems rather easy to get marginal deals done others would find impossible.
I don't know if this simply doesn't exist in the UK at all - but I'd bet money that it does in some form. Since bankers and finance make their money off the points on deployed capital, especially the loan officer making commission on the deal flow, the incentives are aligned to make more loans vs. less.
I think the hardest part of getting something like this going is the first 2 to 3 properties. After that and a few years of proven ability to manage cashflow here in the US your lending options open up exponentially both in number of lenders and the creative/exotic means of financing now available.
Yes it can take several months but it's also a well oiled process that's quite straightforward as long as you have the relevant paperwork ready to go and assuming the properties you want to buy are easily mortgageable (and you have a large enough deposit and a good credit rating)
I am sure they do/did but this still doesn't match resulting reality. By financial swings he does, he has 1-2 mil euros of disposable cash, on top of that vast amount of flats. Judging by his age and career path, he had to amass most of it (80-90%) within less than a decade.
No German bank is going to give you 100% mortgage (in fact 110-120% for taxes/fees/additional reconstruction) when you already have 10 properties mortgaged in exactly same way. You also don't build any cash reserve like that, owning properties is always more costly than financial projections make it so.
At the end it doesn't matter, good for him (apart from everything that makes a man the man) but his vague background story as told simply ain't true, and folks were eating all that till I came along and thought about numbers for few seconds.
I would bet that the Chinese manufacturer that cloned the design never had one of the original balls in their possession in the first place. They probably saw photos of the ball online, copied the design as closely as possible and googled some clipart to fill in the letters that weren't visible in the photos. That clipart was Swedish, maybe by coincidence but probably intentionally.
Pretty much. Although the toys for young kids (at least in the EU) are quite regulated, including the plastics that can be used. Other than that, I'd have immediately considered a mistake - it's designed for kids, it should be obvious. No need for extensive research or a question on the interwebs.
Subscription is a common model for things like this, particularly because it’s so easy for people to make direct approaches to the vendor, cutting out the middleman to avoid the commission/fees
Show what's listed, show basic financials and an asking price. Only after a buyer sees something interesting are they asked to jump through hoops to create an account, etc.
Looking at the listings, they would be really hard to de-anonymize.
there is simply no way to make that type safe without wrapping or forking TypeScript, and consumers really don't want that. Why make that tradeoff? Especially when it's so easy to accomplish with a more normal syntax:
I think this used to happen when files were transferred as plain text rather than binary, but I forget which transfer protocol was affected - maybe FTP?
>> uncook.exe is a utility to remove line feeds from the mp3 file. Line feeds can be inserted when web sites are not configured properly to serve mp3 files. So Netscape (the browser which actually pays attention to such things as server configuration), can download mp3's as text files.
>> How many times does it happen? You click a link to an mp3 file while using Netscape, and before you know it the mp3 file starts loading itself like a text file in Netscape. Either that, or you shift+click on a mp3 file then put save to disk. You goto play it after it downloads, and in no time you are disappointed that it sounds like plain screwed up shit, like you are under water, or you are listening to the lead singer of Type O Negative gargleing on a glass of kool-aid!!! Well with this new fix program that Blex has found out there on the net, I will guide you though fixing this irritating problem!!!
MS and OpenAI certainly have non-solicitation clauses in their contracts. MS could afford the legal battle but isn't it better for them to wait it out and see what happens first?
The letter from OpenAI employees to the board expressly says:
"We, the undersigned, may choose to resign from OpenAl and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAl employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join."
I think it's safe to say there probably isn't any non-solicitation clause; or at least, it's a very weak one or specific one that Microsoft isn't violating (i.e. you won't reach out over LinkedIn).
It is different between JV partners or between vendor and customer . If non solicit agreement were not legal for those , consulting companies either tech or management consulting will not be able to operate at all .
Do you mean to say that if non-solicitation agreements were entirely unenforceable, consulting companies would see all of their best consultants poached by clients?
I've yet to see a more clear example of solicitation and MS is very much out front with this, presumably their ability to protect their interest in OpenAI outweighs the risk that the competition (Google, etc) would snap up the employees. Think of it as a stop-gap move to ensure that people won't leave and it looks different already. If there is any legal risk (which I doubt) then it is more than offset by their most simple excuse to ignore it, besides the legalities involving non-poaching agreements to begin with.
The clauses are common in the UK but I see them all the time from startups incorporated in Delaware. Maybe they're there for the deterrent factor. Also, hi!
Yes, they get put in but if you try to enforce them you'll find that you can't.
We sign contracts with non-poaching elements in them all the time because the companies we look at are afraid that we will use our inside knowledge to go after their best talent. But I suspect that just the basic protections an employee has under employment law would be enough to stop a company from trying to enforce this (we have a term for this in Dutch which is called 'broodroof' but I don't know any good English translation).
That said: for Execs and consultants it is a different matter. But they are not rank-and-file employees.
The majority of my wealth is in MSFT (for historical reasons...), but I never check the price. When I saw the tweets about it being down 2 percent, gasp, at the news of Sam leaving, it was still 15% higher than when I last checked. Now it's even higher.
Probably not a bad time to lock in some of those returns.
