Where real estate meets rhythm | Developer, investor, live music enthusiast, and mountain seeker.

By Daniel Kaufman | May 2026 People ask me constantly where I see the next wave of real estate opportunity. They expect me to say Texas. Maybe Florida again. Sometimes they’re hoping I’ll say something contrarian like Cleveland or Gary, Indiana, so they can nod and feel sophisticated. I’m going to say Michigan. Not the Michigan of the rust belt narrative. Not “Detroit comeback story #47.” I’m talking about three specific markets that most coastal developers haven’t touched — and that’s exactly the point. The Upper Peninsula. Traverse City. Grand Rapids. Three completely different stories with one connecting thread: fresh water. You want to talk about the most undervalued long-term infrastructure asset in the world? It’s not data centers. It’s not lithium. It’s clean, abundant, accessible freshwater. And Michigan sits on top of more of it than almost anywhere on earth. Let me break this down market by market. THE UPPER PENINSULA: AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER DISCOUNT Here’s a number that sho...

​ Kevin Warsh walked into the Federal Reserve on Friday as its new chairman. Jerome Powell walked out — sort of. Powell, whose term as chair expired, is staying on the Fed’s board of governors. That means Warsh will be voting on rate policy alongside the man he replaced. If you think that dynamic isn’t going to create friction, I have a bridge loan to sell you. Let’s be honest about what this moment is. It’s historic. It’s messy. And it has direct downstream consequences for every developer financing a deal right now. The Setup Is Complicated Trump pushed Powell out in all but name — hammering him publicly for over a year for keeping rates too high. Now he’s installed Warsh, a former Fed governor who served during the Great Recession, with a four-year term as chair and a 14-year seat on the board. The message from the White House is unmistakable: get rates down. The problem? The FOMC isn’t listening. At last month’s meeting, three hawks — Cleveland’s Beth Hammack, Minneapolis’s Neel Ka...

​ Last Wednesday, Las Vegas City Council voted unanimously to approve our project — Sunridge on Searles. Fifty tiny homes. 2.25 acres. A vacant lot turned into a real affordable housing community. Three years in the making. A lot of obstacles. Worth every one of them. Sunridge on Searles is a $6 million development built using Boxabl materials. Boxabl is a Las Vegas–based manufacturer building factory-produced, foldable modular homes. Their CEO Paolo Tiramani put it simply: the company exists to solve the housing crisis through technology and scale. That’s exactly why we partnered with them. Each unit is about 360 square feet and will rent for $1,000 a month — utilities included. The median asking rent in the Las Vegas metro right now is $1,423, still running 17.6% above pre-COVID levels. We’re coming in 30% below market. That’s the point. The units go on a pad, on grade, no steps. Permanent. Foundation-set. Accessible — designed with seniors in mind from the start. No wheels. No ambig...

​ By Daniel Kaufman  If you listen to the national media long enough, you would think America’s major legacy cities are collapsing, everyone is fleeing the coasts, and the only smart real estate investment is somewhere in the Sunbelt. As a real estate developer and investor who actually studies long-term fundamentals instead of headlines, I can tell you the reality is far more nuanced — and far more interesting. A new framework called the Geography of Prosperity Index, created by Bradley Schurman and Jaymes Cloninger, attempts to measure something most rankings miss: long-term civic viability, not just short-term economics. That distinction matters. Too much real estate analysis today is driven by lagging indicators like last year’s population migration numbers, temporary interest rate impacts, or political narratives. Serious investors look at durability — not noise. And the results of this study challenge a lot of the simplistic narratives dominating real estate c...