I cannot believe how ancient the technology is that comes standard in the apartments we rent and buy. As I explain in the video, we are living in apartments that pretty much could have existed in 1880!

The apartments I develop come with up-to-date technology, like built in HDTVs or wireless tablets. Soon I will reveal my latest development which I think will blow some of you away.....

Until I reveal my new apartments, I hope you enjoy this video that lists my predictions of futuristic apartments! 

I am sitting in Logan Airport about to board the 14 hour flight to Japan. The flight is direct and going over the North Pole. So awesome.

I have 3 big development projects in the works right now. I am nervous about leaving them, but having great contractors, architects, business partners helps ease my nerves. 

I am so pumped to be going to Japan. Besides the fact that I could eat sushi for every meal, everyday of my life, I am excited to explore and see the real estate. As you may know, by seeing any of my real estate projects or reading my blog, I am obsessed with homes that are gorgeous, high tech, and wastes no space. From what I have heard, Japan is the leader of this type of real estate. I have read articles about some really incredible innovative housing in Japan such as this one that describes a few projects, or this one that shows a building that was built on a single parking space.

I am going to Japan with a college friend named Vik who I have been close with since we were roommates during orientation before Freshman year at Boston University. Vik has seem my progress in real estate from the absolute beginning. If fact, Freshman year I wrote this on his Facebook wall: September 26, 2006: "Vik I signed up for the real estate club today...they said something about a weekend class (just for one weekend, but it is intense) where you can get your license...I emailed them for more info so when I find out more I will tell you. We're going to own this city!!"


Vik is equally as obsessed with making moves as I am, and is a world traveler. He is perfect to travel with for this trip. We are visiting our friend from Boston University named Jesse who lives in Kyoto. We are so lucky to have a friend living there, he will be able to teach us so much that we would not have learned otherwise. 

I cannot wait to learn about all the technology they have. I hope it inspires me to add a few features in my current developments that I have not thought of yet! 

Okay, I need to board the plane now, sayonara!

My dad is my hero. He was also my teammate in 2004 (man I can't believe that was almost 10 years ago now) when we won a fantasy football league for $2k. When we won, he asked me what I'd like to do with the money; go on a vacation? I had always wanted to own a business, so I asked if we could start a business. He said sure, what kind? 

I was really into playing poker at the time, so I decided we should sell sets of high quality poker chips online. I bought a domain name, hired a web designer, and ordered 100 sets of clay poker chips from China (no easy task as I know how to speak zero Chinese). The business boomed and I was able to buy my dad out of the company. By the time I sold out of chips, the demand for chips was dying down since large department stores starting to carry them. I decided to save my profits for the next business opportunity.

This was the first development deal I ever did. Vinny V and I teamed up on this and crushed it. One day I will blog the full story of what we went through to make this deal happen (spoiler alert, it was not easy and we lost a lot of sleep over it). For now, just enjoy the video! 

First of all, if you do not know anything about 3d printing watch this video before you read my blog. This will blow your mind: 

TheDrum – “Despite being a decade-old technology, 3D printing is still very much in its infancy with mass adoption still likely to be some way off. The falling price of printers and materials, however, is making it a potential household appliance of the not-too-distant future.”

“Human behaviour, however, invariably wants what it can’t or shouldn’t have, and 3D printing currently offers the opportunity for adopters to print off and create objects that infringe on the IP and copyright of major companies. This is an issue that has yet to be met with serious legislation, but many in the know believe such legislation will be introduced and enforced at some stage in the future as digital regulation develops”

I believe 3D printing will one day be as standard in our apartments as a refrigerator. One day this technology will become so inexpensive and fast that we will be able to download CAD files for chairs, tables, beds, and even clothing directly from the internet and print them in our living rooms. This will change the way we shop forever!

Mark my words, open sources for 3d printing objects will be the next Napster. Manufacturers are going to have a tough time stopping people from printing expensive items that will be easily recreated in CAD format.  For instance, do you think a college student is going to pay $500 for a kitchen table or just print one out for a few dollars?  While this is similar to the problems we have seen with illegal music downloads, this is not a $1 song we are talking about. These are potentially expensive items. Also, while the music industry has adapted, manufacturers will have a tough time with this model.  Many musicians now give away their music for free to create a fan base and then make money on concert tours, but I don’t see how this model would work for a manufacturer. Nobody is going to download a Tommy Hilfiger shirt for free online and then get so excited by it that they pay lots of money to see Tommy Hilfiger on tour with their friends.  I am very interested to see how laws are created to protect manufacturers and even more excited to see 3d printing go mainstream! 

I know 3d printers are not really necessary in apartments at this point, but I think it might be cool to provide one in the next development I do as an experiment. We shall see.....

First I'll square away an obvious first questions: why if you invest in real estate do you rent and not own? The answer is that it is a bad investment for me to put equity into a property where I am not getting any cash flow, so I put my money into cash flow properties. 

When I first started in real estate freshman year (2006) I started studying how the value of real estate has gone up over the years.  I was pretty naïve.  One thing I constantly heard from veterans in the industry was how prices used to be so low and now prices are so high.  Nobody could imagine how prices could ever double, triple, even quadruple like they had in the past.  I never really thought too much about this until I transitioned from renting property to selling property.

Suddenly it hit me one day, these people all had no idea what they were talking about.

$1 87 years ago (1926) is worth $13 today.  The inflation over that time period was 3%. If inflation stays the same that means that:

$1 will be worth $13 in 87 years (2100). 

This means a property worth $1 million now will be worth $13 million in year 2100.

This means my rent of $2,175 now will cost me $28,275 in year 2100.

Obviously, everything is relative. But this is pretty mind blowing right?  Just shows you how silly it is to hold cash. 3% compounded interest per year turns $2,175 into $28,275, and I get way higher than 3% on cash flow alone from my deals. Tack on inflation/appreciation into that and that makes me smile!  

In year 2100, new construction apartment buildings around the world will have robot concierges. Our version of cell phones, which may very well be permanently attached to our bodies, will allow us to pay rent and open doors. Power to our appliances will be completely wireless. We will be able to change the layout and colors of our walls with a push of a button. We will be able to interact with the walls in our homes—from  ordering  food to turning into the 18th hole of Pebble Beach Golf Course as you virtually drive a golf ball 300 yards down the fairway. Printers will be provided with the apartment, but not just simple machines that print paper, I’m talking about 3d machines that will allow us to print furniture, clothing, and other items. Our toilets will analyze our bodies and provide us with instant health reports that are more thorough than our current trips to the doctor. Homegrown vegetables will be the norm as onsite vertical farms will be mandatory in new construction buildings. Rent will be adjusted for 3% inflation per year (87 years from 2013), so an apartment worth $2,000 now will cost $25,000 then.   

My name is Alex Hodara and I am a 25 year old real estate developer living in Boston, MA. I started my career on the ground level as a rental agent while attending Boston University in 2006. By December 2008 I opened a small real estate brokerage without loans or investors. This brokerage would give me some recognition as CNBC coined it “the first student run real estate brokerage”. By 2009 I had sold my first investment property and since I have sold millions in multi-family sales. In 2011 I began purchasing and developing buildings, and to date I have completed 6 multifamily buildings. I have been featured in Forbes and Businessweek as a Top 30 Under 30 Entrepreneur.

When I redevelop a building I focus on how I can make the building the most exciting to potential renters, while also staying on budget. I have started to incorporate things into my buildings like wireless tablets in kitchens for residents to look up recipes, free flat screen tvs that come standard in each apartment, and iPod docs in bathrooms for tenants to rock out when they shower. 

On September 1st I finished my latest developments and decided I wanted to take a step back for a few months and study where I believe the real estate market is going. I figured the best way to study the future was to briefly re-study the past. I created a spreadsheet of years going back to the big bang (14 billion years ago) and studied sequentially until 2013. This process was mind blowing to me. I realized things during my studies that I never knew before, such as, do you know how long dinosaurs were around before they went extinct? Probably not, considering nobody I have asked has any idea. The answer is about 160 million years. That is freaking mind blowing considering homo sapiens have only been around 200,000 years or .001% of how long dinosaurs were around. This was the first time I realized how primitive we are and how far we have to go as a society.

I then started studying reading about the singularity and where technology is going. It is freaky, exciting, and a real mistake that I never even thought about these things before. We are living in a time where we are going to see so much evolution in technology it is going to be hard to keep up with it. Due to the law of accelerating returns we are going to see unbelievable advances in our lifetimes.

This gets me to my field, real estate. In my opinion, real estate is among the most important and least innovated assets in the world.  Think about the current apartment or house you live in. There is a bathroom with modern plumbing, kitchen with modern plumbing, refrigerator, stove, and sink, a living room, and bedrooms. For the most part, your home’s technology was around in 1880. In 1880 we didn’t have cars, we didn’t have airplanes, and we most certainly didn’t have the internet. You are living in the past. But that will all change very soon.

This blog is a way for me to give readers information on real estate technologies as they are introduced to the world, and to put in a few thoughts in regard to how this affects the future of real estate. I am very much a real estate futurist student, not an expert, and am very open to hearing what others opinions’ on new technologies (positive and negative).

Soon real estate developers, such as myself, will begin to start incorporating unheard of technologies into our buildings that will improve tenants’ everyday lives. I believe the technologies I listed in the first paragraph barely scratches the surface of what will be around in 87 years by year 2100! Ah, so exciting and scary!