Real Estate Addicts

Hosted by Marc Savatsky, Ray Hurteau, Dan Rubin

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Episodes

156

Latest episode

Oct 2026

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About the show

Marc Savatsky, Ray Hurteau, and Dan Rubin open up and discuss their own deals, budgets, and mistakes every Tuesday. Not guru content. The stuff that decides whether a project makes money: what a triple decker really costs to build now, the retroactive Newton tax bill that landed on unsuspecting condo buyers, the helical pile surprise that cut a deal's IRR from 70% to 40%, the eleven-week-old demo company doing $6K a week against a $20K burn. They read their own numbers on air, including the ugly ones. A typical week is some mix of: a breakdown of one of their active projects (an 1874 adaptive reuse in Amesbury, a Dorchester three-family held fourteen years, a waste and demo business), a guest who does one thing extremely well which include zoning attorneys, architects, labor lawyers, energy consultants and brokers. Ray's Multifamily Minute on the news that actually moves the needle, and a round of Overrated / Underrated / Appropriately Rated. Heavy on Greater Boston and New England, because real estate is hyperlocal and pretending otherwise is how people lose money. Useful anywhere the same problems show up: permitting, capital stacks, subs, tenants, and the gap between what the spreadsheet says and what the building does. For investors, developers, GCs, agents, and anyone still holding a W-2 while they figure out deal one. Co-hosted by Ray Hurteau, Dan Rubin (Instagram: @rhinvestgroup), and Marc Savatsky (Instagram: @choose_boston) Follow the Real Estate Addicts Podcast on YouTube: @RealEstateAddicts

Listen to episodes

60 recent

November 3, 2026Episode 15636 min

9 Units Almost Done, Then Fire and Flood: Cam Denommee of ServiceMaster

A smoldering fire, a burst PEX line and water pouring through three floors of a nearly finished nine-unit building, about a week before the certificate of occupancy. Marc, Ray and Dan sit down with Cam Denommee of ServiceMaster by Gilmore, whose team had two crews on Marc's site right away. They walk through what actually happened, from a line set soldered in a ceiling to fire suppression that wasn't turned on yet, and what to do in the first hours: shut the water, stay calm, salvage what you can and document everything. Cam explains moisture mapping, demo-and-dry timelines, why bleach doesn't kill mold, how Xactimate and photo documentation decide what insurance pays, and how a restoration franchise wins work when people call three companies and hire whoever shows up first. Plus the plan to get a temporary CO on the six unaffected units, and the questions every developer should ask before turning on the water in an unoccupied building. If you build or own buildings, start here. Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/-2ZYhTKCuaE

October 27, 2026Episode 15535 min

#155 - AI Assistants vs. AI Bots: Building a Team of Grok Bots

Marc and Dan are back for another AI episode, this time on the difference between an AI assistant and an AI bot. They compare assistants like Instinct and Muse with a roster of Grok bots that each have a job: Sue Pervision the chief of staff, Cash Flo the podcast editor, Val U. Add on social media, Duke Diligence on research and Walter Jarvis as admin. You'll hear how one bot got Best Buy's executive team to refund a TV by lunch, why 20 to 30 two-minute tasks a day add up to more than an hour back, and the real privacy trade-offs of handing an assistant your logins and cards. If you want to use AI to save time in a real estate business, not just read about it, start here.

October 20, 2026Episode 15424 min

#154 - What Poland Gets Right About Building: Drutex, 20-Inch Walls and Steel Tariffs

Fresh off six days in Poland with Drutex Windows and a group of Boston developers, Marc and Dan break down what American builders can learn from how the Poles build. Marc toured townhouse communities 30 minutes outside Warsaw going up for about $100 a square foot and selling around $280,000, delivered as vanilla boxes: the missing middle the U.S. doesn't have. They get into 20-inch exterior insulation, hollow-core block for exterior and interior walls, how 800,000-plus Ukrainian workers reshaped the Polish labor market, and why their buildings are so quiet. Plus why 49% steel tariffs led American mills to raise prices 48% instead of adding capacity, blower-door results with European windows, and the food.

October 6, 2026Episode 15350 min

#153 - Factory-Built ADUs, Light Gauge Steel and the Massachusetts Housing Shortage w/ Steve Vettori

Steve Vettori went from 15 years of enterprise software sales to developing the 34-unit Beacon in Newton, and now he runs MassDwell, a factory that builds accessory dwelling units out of light gauge steel. He walks Marc, Ray, and Dan through why he switched framing systems, how the factory turns out about one 560-square-foot module a day, and why his crews are on a customer's lot for roughly 30 days instead of seven or eight months. They get into the $350 per square foot price, the 900-square-foot by-right ADU law, why septic is the real bottleneck, and a Sudbury town project that only worked off site. If you own land in Massachusetts and have wondered whether an ADU pencils or what it costs, start here.

September 29, 2026Episode 15228 min

#152 - Make Building Easier w/ Brian Vizarreta

Brian Vizarreta has been acquired twice in four years, from StructionSite to DroneDeploy to Procore, and he came back to explain what all that money is actually betting on. He and Marc, Ray, and Dan get into facade mapping that finally settled a four-fix water leak, why the most valuable thing to ask an AI is what isn't there rather than what is, and whether any of this makes sense for someone building six-unit multifamily instead of $300 million towers.

September 15, 2026Episode 15148 min

#151 - Urban Development and Starting Your Own Site Work Business w/ Nicolas Beaujean

Nick's first deal was a $50,000 Dorchester lot bought with no attorney, no due diligence, and a 13% hard money loan. Plus a deed restriction that took three years to kill. He walks Marc, Ray, and Dan through the code interpretation that turned $140,000 of steel into a $300,000 line item, why two "at cost" GC partnerships ended up in court, and how he found 40 to 50 percent margins hiding in site work and foundations.

September 8, 2026Episode 15032 min

#150 - Business Lab Featuring Circa Demo and Disposal w/ Special Guest Ricky Beliveau

Eleven weeks into a new demo and disposal company, a text from the business partner laid it out plainly: $70,700 in revenue, about $6,000 a week, against a burn rate that requires $20,000 just to hold even. In this first Real Estate Addicts Business Lab, the hot seat opens the books on Circa Demo. The transfer station lines eating billable hours, the overtime nobody planned for, and the $15 hourly margin left after payroll taxes and an $80,000 truck. Listen in as Ricky Beliveau is back as we pull back the curtain on Marc's latest venture.

September 1, 2026Episode 14953 min

#149 - Shooting the Shit w/ Ricky Beliveau

When a two-and-a-half-acre Weston lot landed in Ricky's inbox at a price he could hardly believe, his first thought wasn't excitement, it was "why am I getting screwed here?" In his fourth appearance he walks through the two-week due diligence sprint that followed, from the zoning attorney and the wetland flags to the 1943 setback rules that determine whether the whole thing pencils, plus what's quietly killing Boston projects and the helical pile surprise that cut one deal's IRR from 70% to 40%.

August 25, 2026Episode 14819 min

#148 - Rents Are Falling While Prices Keep Climbing

Greater Boston's median single-family price just crossed a million dollars, and Marc, Ray, and Dan spend this episode explaining why the math no longer works for anyone hoping to build their way out of it. They dig into why a triple decker now costs seven figures to construct, why Boston's permit numbers have fallen to a fraction of what they should be, and the strange split where rents are softening while sale prices refuse to move.

August 18, 2026Episode 14725 min

#147 - Assessing, Retroactive Tax Bills and When to Record Condo Docs

The guys trade war stories from the least glamorous corner of real estate. The assessor's office. They get into a retroactive Newton tax bill that landed on unsuspecting condo buyers, a phantom drainage easement that appears on the city's GIS map but nowhere in seventy-five years of title records, and the one filing that quietly turns a six-unit building into six far more expensive condominiums. If you own property, are underwriting your next acquisition, or have never once pulled your own property card, this episode will probably pay for itself.