Game Selection: From Pro Poker to Mobile Home Parks
Most LPs spend their time picking the deal. Pasha Esfandiary spent seven years in a profession where picking the deal is the amateur move, and picking the game is the whole job.
He played poker professionally from 19 to 26, then walked away and started buying real estate. What transferred wasn't reading faces. It was game selection: find a table where the other players are worse than you, and your edge comes from the table, not from your brilliance. He now runs a portfolio of mobile home communities, which is arguably the same bet applied to real estate.
This week Litan and Mike talk to Pasha about how that translates for an LP:
Game selection. Why he chose mobile home communities over the asset classes everyone else was bidding on, and how an LP can tell an under-competed market from a merely obscure one. Bet sizing. How a poker player thinks about position size when the downside is real, and why "conviction" is usually the wrong reason to size up. Folding. The discipline nobody markets: passing on deals that look fine. He spent years being paid to fold. What changed. Blackstone, Apollo and Carlyle are all in this sector now, alongside public REITs like Sun Communities and Equity LifeStyle. When institutional money arrives at your table, does the edge close? And what does that mean for the people who actually live there?
Bring your questions. Pasha will take them live.
Pasha has closed over $350M of real estate since 2011, working through auction flips, boutique motels and multifamily before concentrating on mobile home communities, where he now manages 2,450+ doors. He's also the author of Raising the Stakes.
Live and on camera. No pitch, no slides. Just a real conversation.