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Oak Street Assets Private real estate and alternative investments for accredited investors. Founded by Tim Fergestad, Ph.D., scientist and investor. oakstreetassets.com

"Can I really invest in real estate passively, without becoming a landlord?"Short answer: yes. The catch is that the wor...
10/14/2026

"Can I really invest in real estate passively, without becoming a landlord?"

Short answer: yes. The catch is that the word "passive" gets used to mean very different things, and the difference decides how much of your time you actually keep.

Real estate runs along a spectrum.

At the active end, you buy the property yourself. You find the deal, arrange financing, screen tenants, handle the 11pm call about a broken furnace. Done well it builds wealth. It's also a second job.

At the passive end, you put capital to work in real estate that someone else operates. You're an investor, not an operator.

The problem is that almost everything in between gets marketed as "passive" too, and some of it is anything but.

Over the next few weeks I'll walk through what actually sits on that spectrum, and where the real trade-offs hide.

Where do you land right now, more active than you'd like, or truly hands-off?

10/13/2026

Passive real estate investing can look very different from operating the property yourself.

Our Nashville property fire is a good example.

A building burned. We had to work through insurance, lost rental income, rebuilding, and all the other problems that came with it.

Those issues took a long time to solve.

For the people operating the deal, it was a major headache. But passive investors did not have to personally manage those problems.

That is part of the role of the general partners, along with the property management team.

The same idea applies when other unexpected problems happen. Last month, I talked about an ice storm at another Nashville property that we are still dealing with.

Things happen in real estate.

You cannot assume every project will go exactly according to the original plan.

What matters is how the people operating the investment respond when the unexpected happens.

When a property is operated correctly, even a major challenge can sometimes be turned into something positive.

That is one reason I pay so much attention to the people behind a deal, not just the property itself.

Here's an Arizona water statistic that surprises a lot of people:About 72% of Arizona's available water supply is used b...
10/12/2026

Here's an Arizona water statistic that surprises a lot of people:

About 72% of Arizona's available water supply is used by irrigated agriculture.

That matters for housing.

Arizona's first Ag-to-Urban groundwater approval is expected to support 825 new homes while using about 437 million fewer gallons of water per year than the land's historic agricultural use.

So the Arizona water story is not as simple as "more houses means more water use." Sometimes the prior use of the land matters as much as the future use.

I wrote a short update on what investors should actually understand about Arizona water, development and real estate:

https://oakstreetassets.com/blog/where-is-the-water-coming-from-arizona-water/

10/09/2026

Holy Cow! I finally got Portfolio control again.. Thank you Meta!

I spent years thinking real estate investing meant becoming a landlord.Buy a property. Manage it. Fix the toilets. Chase...
10/09/2026

I spent years thinking real estate investing meant becoming a landlord.

Buy a property. Manage it. Fix the toilets. Chase the rent. Repeat.

I came from a research background (PhD in neuroscience, working in a genetics lab) before I ever bought my first rental. Even with all that analytical training, it took me way too long to see something obvious:

Being a landlord and being an investor are not the same thing.

One trades your time for a return. The other lets your capital work without you.

It took a few hard lessons to learn the difference, but it changed everything about how I invest today, and how I help others do the same.

If you're standing where I was a few years ago, I put together a free training that walks through exactly what shifted for me: https://oakstreetassets.com/oakstreet101/

10/09/2026

Two Tucson apartment deals. Same operator, same city, two different seats.

Icon on Pima: preferred equity. 15% preferred return (5% paid now, 10% accrues, capped). Roughly 68% in projected 2026 passive paper losses.

Icon on Broadway: common equity. Targeted 20% average annual return, 2x over five years, no cap. Roughly 90% in projected 2026 passive paper losses.

Both are already operating and paying distributions. These are not plans on paper.

One pays first and is capped. One takes more risk for more upside. Pick your seat, or split.

Accredited investors only. $100,000 minimum. Capital must be funded before December 31 for the 2026 losses, and both close when full.

Current Opportunities: https://oakstreetassets.com/investment-opportunities/

Most families spend years planning what to leave their kids.Almost none spend an evening on who the kids will be when th...
10/08/2026

Most families spend years planning what to leave their kids.

Almost none spend an evening on who the kids will be when they get it.

Inheritance is what you leave them.
Heritage is who they are when they get it.

An estate plan transfers assets. Only people transfer values. A lawyer can draft the trust. Nobody can draft your family's culture for you. That part gets built at the kitchen table, one conversation at a time.

So I made a tool for that conversation: The Family Legacy Workbook. Eleven short sections that take a family from its roots and stories to written values, a short credo, and a family mark of its own. Printable, and made for a pen, not a screen.

Free, no email required: https://timfergestad.com/resources/

10/08/2026

One of our apartment buildings caught fire in 2023, and it turned into one of the strangest investment lessons I have experienced.

Thankfully, nobody was seriously hurt.

After firefighters had put everything out, a boy walked out of one of the units that had survived. He had been told not to leave or let anyone in while his aunt was gone.

That was a miracle.

Then came the long process of dealing with the property itself.

It took months just to work through the insurance process. From beginning to end, getting everything settled and finalized took about a year and a half.

Because the insurance covered the building and the lost rental income, and because the team negotiated a good rebuild price, the outcome ended up better for our investors than anyone expected walking into it.

In the end, we got a brand-new building.

I would never recommend going through a fire. It was a huge headache for the team.

But real estate does not always go according to plan.

Having the right insurance and the right people around a property can make an enormous difference when something goes wrong.

A quick question for anyone holding REITs "for diversification":What did they do in 2008? In March 2020? In 2022?They fe...
10/07/2026

A quick question for anyone holding REITs "for diversification":

What did they do in 2008? In March 2020? In 2022?

They fell. Hard. Right alongside the S&P 500, even where the buildings underneath kept collecting rent every month.

Here's why. Public REITs trade on an exchange, so their price is set minute by minute by market sentiment, not by how the properties actually perform. Research comparing public REIT indexes to private property indexes shows the same thing over and over: in the short run, REITs track the stock market far more closely than they track real estate itself. And the correlation spikes exactly when you need diversification most.

An index fund already spreads you across every sector, including publicly traded real estate. Adding a REIT doesn't add a new asset class. It adds another slice of the same stock market.

Private real estate is valued on occupancy, rents, and net operating income. No ticker. No panic selling at 3:47 on a Tuesday.

That's what non-correlated actually means.

The full breakdown on why public REITs behave like stocks, not real estate: https://oakstreetassets.com/blog/public-reits-vs-private-real-estate/

10/06/2026

A lot of people want the feeling of living in a house without buying one.

That is one reason I like build-to-rent.

The idea is pretty simple. We build homes that are meant to be rented instead of sold one at a time. We keep them together and operate them more like an apartment community.

But the living experience feels different from a normal apartment.

People do not have someone living above them and stomping around on the floor. Our typical townhome has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a yard, and a two-car garage.

There is another important part of the equation.

On the project I discussed in our September update, renting one of these homes is about $1,000 a month cheaper than making a mortgage payment on something similar. A renter also does not need to come up with the down payment needed to buy.

That combination fits a housing need we are seeing today.

People can get more of the home environment they want while still renting.

That is why I am excited to keep building these communities around the Phoenix metro area.

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Scottsdale, AZ

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