Every two weeks, I’ll share bite-sized highlights and cliff notes from the latest episodes of The Building Culture Podcast. It’s an easy way to stay inspired and catch up on conversations about crafting a more beautiful, resilient, and thriving world.

Stream the full episode now on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or Desktop.

Episode #35 with Moses Kagan

The “Indefinite Hold”

Moses Kagan is not your typical real estate developer or investor. While most of the industry is fixated on IRR, flipping deals, and short-term returns, Moses is playing a different game—one inspired by families that have quietly built generational wealth over centuries.

His approach? Buy well-located assets. Renovate with a long-term mindset. Manage in-house. Finance conservatively. Refinance when it makes sense. And keep holding. Indefinitely.

After 100+ apartment renovations, $200 million in assets under management, and a roster of repeat investors, Moses has proven this isn’t just a cool idea—it actually works. It’s a remarkably simple yet radical approach in an industry obsessed with speed and short-term metrics. 

Meeting Moses and studying this approach has profoundly influenced the way I think about real estate in the past couple of years, shaping our long-term strategy at Building Culture as we build a vertically integrated development company – that still does incredible design and masonry work! 

Side note: I love taking a multi-disciplinary, holistic approach to the built environment. Finance + design + craftsmanship + science + stewardship + culture. It’s so much fun, endlessly interesting, and enables all kinds of possibilities.

A Pathway to a Better World

While Moses focuses on multi-family value-add, his “indefinite hold” blueprint perfectly aligns with our ground-up projects at Building Culture. We’re aiming to create generational real estate—assets that are incredibly tough to replicate in growing, supply-constrained markets (walkable, infill urbanism). Moses said the moment he saw what we’re doing, he had the same thought.

But this isn’t just good business. It’s also how we build a better world. If you plan to flip fast, you’ll never invest in true quality or manage with genuine care. But when you commit to holding long-term, you design and build differently. You make choices that pay off over decades, not quarters. You become both a steward of the asset and a stakeholder in the wider community.

And crucially, if you’re managing the property in-house, you’re hyper-aware that your reputation in the community—and your residents’ experience—directly affects performance. It pushes you to treat people well, keep up the property, and deliver great service. It incentivizes being intentional. Moses personally reviews every tenant application for his properties, which is pretty wild considering his scale.

These structures and incentives, paired with genuine good intentions, are powerful. They can build generational wealth for investors, while also making our communities better–and yes, wealthier. 

Rather than extracting from a community, you’re investing in a community.

Some Key Takeaways

• The IRR Trap
  Traditional real estate finance can warp decisions. A laser-focus on IRR leads to over-leverage, cutting corners, and selling properties that benefit the GP (developer) more than the LP (investor). Moses focuses instead on Unlevered Yield on Cost, and other qualitative parameters.

• IRR Favors Tax-Exempt Money
  Institutional funds like endowments and pensions don’t pay taxes. Their fast flips and high IRRs make sense for them, but it’s not necessarily so great for normal, tax-paying investors. After taxes, high IRRs often shrink dramatically.

• Redeploying Capital
  If you sell, you trigger a taxable event. Then you face the riskiest part: finding the next deal. You might use a 1031, but that puts you under a tight deadline, which almost never leads to the best decisions. Plus, once you sell, your IRR goes to zero while that cash sits idle waiting for redeployment.

• Tax-Advantaged Returns
  Holding real estate long-term means operating cash flow and depreciation/interest deductions that flow through every year. You also get to opportunistically refinance, pulling equity out tax-free when conditions are right (e.g., rates drop). Moses rarely exceeds 60% LTV to ride out downturns safely, and the cycle of returning equity can go on and on.

• Oldest Investment Strategy on Earth
  IRR wasn’t even used until the 1960s—Excel came even later—yet families grew wealthy for generations long before. We used to build with more permanence because we used capital with more patience. Why can’t we “build like we used to”? Because we don’t fund our projects the way we used to.

• The Role of Trust
  Moses talks about how he built a network of investors willing to fund deals without requiring a co-investment from him—because his record speaks for itself and his incentives are aligned with theirs. He also discusses “building trust at scale” for raising capital.

• Is ‘Indefinite’ Forever?

  Moses starts with an “indefinite” mindset but acknowledges that not every asset stays in the portfolio forever. If the right opportunities appear or unusual circumstances demand, he sometimes sells. Plus, investors always have off-ramps if they need them. That said, once your initial capital is returned—typically within 10 years, usually much faster—there’s little incentive to cash out. At that point, you’re simply collecting passive income, essentially forever.

In addition to Moses’ development and property management company, Adaptive Realty (reach out if you’re in LA and need property management), he’s also the Co-Founder of ReSeed, a platform offering long-term GP and LP capital, along with mentorship for emerging real estate operators nationwide. This is a really cool business, by the way. He also hosts Reconvene, a highly regarded annual “unconference” for real estate operators and passive investors to connect and share knowledge. I attended last year, and it was awesome!

And lastly, he is a Twitter personality and avid blogger, sharing valuable insights on real estate and business. I highly recommend you follow him.

To Wrap Up

Moses has brought so much clarity to my perspective over the past couple of years, and I love how it fits perfectly into Building Culture’s overall mission and philosophy. It’s like a missing piece of the puzzle clicked into place as I was trying to figure out how we go about building a better world, at scale.

If any of this piques your interest, you’ll definitely want to catch the full interview. We only scratched the surface here—he offers a wealth of insights drawn from serious experience. 

Stream the full episode now on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or Desktop.

Let me know what you think! Just hit reply.

Until next time,
Austin

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