In 2015, a San Jose couple named Tina Lam and Michael Cheng showed up to a San Francisco tax auction and bought a street. Presidio Terrace: a gated oval lined with 35 mansions, one of the most exclusive addresses in the city. Price: $90,100.
The homeowners association owed the city a $14-a-year tax and hadn't paid it in three decades, because the bills kept going to a dead mailing address. The debt piled up, the city foreclosed, and the parcel itself — the sidewalks, the garden islands, the pavement under the Bentleys — went to public auction, where almost nobody was watching. Lam and Cheng were. When they floated charging residents to park in front of their own houses, the residents went nuclear, and by 2017 the Board of Supervisors had reversed the sale.
Everyone tells that one as rich-people comeuppance. Look again. The auction was public, the listing was public, anyone with $90,100 could have raised a hand. The whole edge was knowing what that parcel actually was, and what the fine print allowed, before showing up.
Right now America is running a much bigger version of that auction. Roughly 15,000 churches were projected to close in 2025, against a baseline of about 4,000 a year. More than a thousand public schools shut this school year. All of it drains into tax sales, sheriff sales, land banks, and county PDFs nobody reads. The listings are free, and anyone can pull them. But what can you legally build inside an 18,000-square-foot school? Nobody sells that answer.
Today's idea does: a paid dealflow newsletter that pre-screens weird institutional property for zoning, title, historic tax credits, and the five phone calls to make before bidding. Cheap Old Houses built a 192,000-subscriber free list on pretty photos and charges $12 a month for the paid version. You'd be selling the six hours of diligence at $29. Five hundred subscribers plus ten $1,000 research mandates from developers is about $24,500 MRR, built with a laptop and a Friday afternoon spent reading zoning ordinances nobody else will.
Read the full playbook here:
Church and school closures are flooding the market with odd institutional property. The listings are public. The zoning, title, and historic tax credit answers are not.
From the Vault:
A 14-megabyte open model and the ABA's Formal Opinion 512 point at the same gap: deposition review that extracts, cites, and never leaves the laptop.
Quintana Roo pulled 105,000 tons of sargassum off its beaches this year and Riviera Maya occupancy fell to 59%. Beachfront hotels can't buy a forecast. They'd buy a response.
