Real Estate Addicts

Steve Vettori went from 15 years of enterprise software sales to developing the 34-unit Beacon in Newton, and now he runs MassDwell, a factory that builds accessory dwelling units out of light gauge steel. He walks Marc, Ray, and Dan through why he switched framing systems, how the factory turns out about one 560-square-foot module a day, and why his crews are on a customer's lot for roughly 30 days instead of seven or eight months. They get into the $350 per square foot price, the 900-square-foot by-right ADU law, why septic is the real bottleneck, and a Sudbury town project that only worked off site. If you own land in Massachusetts and have wondered whether an ADU pencils or what it costs, start here.

Brian Vizarreta has been acquired twice in four years, from StructionSite to DroneDeploy to Procore, and he came back to explain what all that money is actually betting on. He and Marc, Ray, and Dan get into facade mapping that finally settled a four-fix water leak, why the most valuable thing to ask an AI is what isn't there rather than what is, and whether any of this makes sense for someone building six-unit multifamily instead of $300 million towers. 

Nick's first deal was a $50,000 Dorchester lot bought with no attorney, no due diligence, and a 13% hard money loan. Plus a deed restriction that took three years to kill. He walks Marc, Ray, and Dan through the code interpretation that turned $140,000 of steel into a $300,000 line item, why two "at cost" GC partnerships ended up in court, and how he found 40 to 50 percent margins hiding in site work and foundations.

Eleven weeks into a new demo and disposal company, a text from the business partner laid it out plainly: $70,700 in revenue, about $6,000 a week, against a burn rate that requires $20,000 just to hold even. In this first Real Estate Addicts Business Lab, the hot seat opens the books on Circa Demo. The transfer station lines eating billable hours, the overtime nobody planned for, and the $15 hourly margin left after payroll taxes and an $80,000 truck. Listen in as Ricky Beliveau is back as we pull back the curtain on Marc's latest venture.

When a two-and-a-half-acre Weston lot landed in Ricky's inbox at a price he could hardly believe, his first thought wasn't excitement, it was "why am I getting screwed here?" In his fourth appearance he walks through the two-week due diligence sprint that followed, from the zoning attorney and the wetland flags to the 1943 setback rules that determine whether the whole thing pencils, plus what's quietly killing Boston projects and the helical pile surprise that cut one deal's IRR from 70% to 40%.

Greater Boston's median single-family price just crossed a million dollars, and Marc, Ray, and Dan spend this episode explaining why the math no longer works for anyone hoping to build their way out of it. They dig into why a triple decker now costs seven figures to construct, why Boston's permit numbers have fallen to a fraction of what they should be, and the strange split where rents are softening while sale prices refuse to move.

The guys trade war stories from the least glamorous corner of real estate. The assessor's office. They get into a retroactive Newton tax bill that landed on unsuspecting condo buyers, a phantom drainage easement that appears on the city's GIS map but nowhere in seventy-five years of title records, and the one filing that quietly turns a six-unit building into six far more expensive condominiums. If you own property, are underwriting your next acquisition, or have never once pulled your own property card, this episode will probably pay for itself. 

A listener wrote in asking how you build a real estate empire when you're spread too thin to hire anyone — and the answer flips conventional penny-pinching on its head. The guys break down why the smartest operators gladly send a $100 Uber SUV to grab drip edge, tip drivers to wait, and befriend neighbors instead of drowning in thousand-cut tasks, all while AI quietly handles the admin. Along the way, they unpack the new realtor.com affordability report cards and why Indiana quietly took the crown, how Massachusetts and New York landed dead last, and what a negative new-construction premium really tells you about where to place your dollars. 

When a Massachusetts landlord discovered his tenants were using free legal aid and AI to exploit every loophole in the book, he stopped losing sleep and started building a weapon of his own. In this episode, Goodstander founder Caleb Wursten breaks down how he went from redeveloping Rust Belt towns like North Adams to creating a "landlord operating system" that scans your messages for legal risk before you hit send. From the brutal realities of eviction, security deposit traps, and hostile tenant laws to the ethics of AI giving legal guidance, this conversation is a must-watch for anyone who owns property in a tenant-friendly state. 

Marc, Ray, and Dan dig into how they've moved past treating AI as a fancy search engine and into agentic, "do-it-for-me" territory — building an in-house property management tool, diagnosing a stalling boat engine from uploaded videos, and turning a LIDAR kitchen scan into shop-drawing-level cabinet plans. They get practical about creating repeatable "skills" for tasks like certificate-of-insurance requests and podcast editing, and make the case for building your own custom apps instead of paying monthly for bloated software that never quite fits. Along the way they flag the real pitfalls: over-using AI until it costs more time than it saves, the etiquette of AI-assisted questions with busy tradespeople, data-security risks in shared skills, and why the human touch of a simple phone call is becoming a competitive advantage again.