Founder of North Star — building America's preferred national brokerage & advisory firm for Outdoor Hospitality. Clients in 21+ states
Austin, TX
Joined July 2011
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10 months in the making.
In January, I left my previous brokerage to start something new — North Star Brokerage & Advisory.
North Star is a boutique commercial real estate firm focused exclusively on RV parks, mobile home communities, marinas, campgrounds, and storage properties.
We chose the name North Star because every client and investor we work with has their own “North Star” — their unique goals, motivations, and version of success. Our mission is to partner with our clients in helping them achieve it.
Providing the best brokerage and advisory services, data, information, etc, all come second to that mission.
The vision is bold: to build an elite nationwide team of 25 brokers laser-focused on outdoor hospitality and storage assets and utilizing the 1031 exchange as an estate planning tool.
I’ll be sharing the journey as we grow — the wins, the lessons, and everything in between.
If you’re in this space (or want to be), I’d love to connect. Let’s build something meaningful together.
4/5 people inquiring about our listings all start the same way
In nearly every case these “buyers”
- are not principles, but instead are sourcing leads for other buyers (wholesaling, rebranded)
- have no experience or similar real estate owned
- have no liquidity to purchase anything
- have not read the offering materials (where this is explicitly stated)
Somewhere along the way, hundreds, if not thousands, of people have been convinced that they can “get rich” buying “passive real estate” with “none of their own money”. They believe that if they just wave the magic wand of creative financing enough times in the marketplace, they can do it.
To this day, nobody who's reached out to me or any member of our team about any of our hundreds of listings over the last four years has successfully purchased a property from our company using “creative financing”
Costar will never be better than it is today. The model is wrecked and now more than ever data is cheaper and easier to get using AI.
Costar has lost 50% of its public valuation this year. The data is trash. Every broker open lies to the company about lease rates/sales prices.
ANY broker can run a one-time data scrape, then plug that into their LLM of choice to watch the web and get future updates. Costar can do nothing about it and they know it. Thats why they are not seriously investing in the platform but going into other areas like Homes.com.
The only reason Costar still exists today is that big companies have legacy contracts with them and are not in a position to upset the apple cart. Regional and boutique shops are fleeing the platform like a burning building.
Every Costar rep is either too new to know how bad the data/platform really is or they are on the take.
instagram.com/reel/DdnH5x3x9…
It's becoming more and more common to see disclosures like this on RV park listings, and there's a reason for it.
Pace Morby has built a community that's flooded this market with unqualified buyers, bird dogs, and "acquisitions associates" spraying and praying for deals. In practice, that means hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people mobilizing to find a property, then feeding it into their internal groups so a bird dog can pocket $10,000 for sourcing it.
We've had 30+ individual people reach out on a single listing, all from the same community, all running the same script. Ask the right questions and you'll often find several of them claiming to represent the same buyer, without that buyer even knowing.
This hasn't produced a single closed transaction for me. What it did do was bottleneck our deals. Every time we listed a new park, we'd get 100+ people from this community reaching out in the first 30 days, all asking the same questions and requesting the same information.
The market's response has overwhelmingly been to add qualifying criteria and gates. Nothing complicated, but enough friction to weed out anyone who isn't real. We require direct communication with the principal or their licensed representative. We require proof of funds and a schedule of real estate owned. And early in the conversation, we make clear that if this reaches a contract and there's any attempt to wholesale the deal, there's a financial penalty for it.
And the "creative financing" pitch is a joke. In well over 90% of cases, it exclusively benefits the buyer at the seller's direct expense. It's not the win-win these people love to claim it is.
This hasn't produced a single closed transaction for me. What it has done is torch the reputation of everyone involved: the community, the bird dogs who don't know better, and the buyers being misrepresented on their behalf.
The problem is none of it matters, because these are the same people not reading the offering materials in the first place. We've had signed NDAs breached, with confidential deal information showing up circulated in groups with thousands of members.
Qualify your buyers. Protect your sellers. This is why.
Dear CRE owners,
If your broker/agent still pays for Costar it means they have spent minimal/no time making investments into their own data and technology and are relying on other brokers self-reported data to service your real estate. That data is, unequivocally, trash because no one reports real figures.
They pay THOUSANDS per year for that subscription cost which gets passed back to you.
Sincerely,
Collector of my own data since 2025 (and its better)
A year ago I made a post about how to delete Costar forever.
In that same period of time their stock is down 50%.
Who should I take down next?
teapawt.net/HunkyDoryTX/status/190…
How to Delete CoStar Forever:
1.Track Competitor Listings:
Start saving your competitors’ flyers and marketing materials. Store them in a folder, and log key info in a spreadsheet or your CRM.
2.Track Closings:
When a property sells, gets leased, or disappears from the market, make a few calls. There are always multiple parties involved—reach out and ask what the numbers were.
3.Call the Owners Directly:
If a property sold in the past 24 months (check the CAD), call the owner and ask what they paid. Offer value in return—market reports, comps, or other useful info.
4.Comp Swaps:
Keep your own comps organized and ready. When needed, trade them with competitors (aka market friends). It’s a win-win.
5.Leverage CoStar Users:
I’ve got buddies at firms across the country. Many are happy to trade a lunch for a full export of comps—especially if they work in different product types.
6.Talk to Appraisers:
Appraisers often reach out for comps. Instead of ignoring them, I give what they need and ask for their relevant comps in return. I’ve gotten dozens I’d never find elsewhere.
7.Use a VA:
None of this is hard, but it takes time. Delegate comp tracking and data entry to a VA or assistant.
8.Own the Best Data:
Do this consistently for a year, and you’ll have the best data in your market—and the leverage to trade it with anyone.
Wait what?
I thought brokers loved paying to have their data sold back to them at a throw-up-in-your-mouth premium?
Serious question to my friends in the brokerage community/owners of properties:
How does this help your client get the most exposure and best possible deal on their property sale?
Pace knows this is not true. Anybody who's ever owned a park knows that this is not true.
Pace's business model is not running parks. It's selling access to his community to people that don't know any better but believe that they are going to get rich.
Please be careful who you listen to. A large audience doesn't mean anything.
I was taught to look for the “6 D’s of Sellers”
1.Death
When owners die, face serious illness, or start thinking about their own mortality, estate planning kicks in. Many want to understand their options before they’re forced to act.
2.Debt
Most commercial properties are purchased with debt that has a maturity date. When a note comes due, there are really only two paths: refinance or sell.
3.Disease
A serious diagnosis can change someone’s personal and professional plans overnight. What made sense before doesn’t always make sense after.
4.Disaster
Car accidents, tornadoes, floods, fires, life-altering events that force owners to reassess everything, including whether they still want to be in the game.
5.Dissolution
Business partnerships end. When co-owners split on direction, timing, or value, a sale is often the cleanest path forward.
6.Divorce
Real estate is often the largest marital asset. When a marriage ends, so does the shared asset picture, and something has to happen with the property.
In my experience, most sellers aren’t selling because they want to.
They’re selling because life gave them a reason to.
Worth knowing if you’re trying to find the right deals at the right time.
When I tell you my inbox is flooded…
It’s because this YouTube Guru charges you $10k to join his community by telling you that you can replace your job by buying an RV park with no money down…
So now I get 10-15 offers per month from people trying to buy our parks with 100% financing.
Me mailing a check to the IRS on April 15th
Legendary Spanish matador can't eat, sleep and suffered 'immense pain' from gruesome rectal goring injury trib.al/MuCvcvk
