The opportunity
Which property was being considered, how it had been identified, and what information was available.
Building technology around investment problems.
Software has been part of Alexander’s investment work for years: collecting information, structuring datasets, asking analytical questions, and organizing the work around an opportunity.
The capability is adaptable. A particular investment may call for a scraper, a query, a model, or a workflow built around the question at hand.
The work determines the tool.
Blinka Road began with a dataset and a question.
Alexander built a web scraper that collected foreclosure opportunities and inserted the information into SQL.
A one-off query surfaced Blinka Road because of its apparent pricing spread and land area. That signal prompted deeper research. Significant road frontage then suggested a subdivision thesis.
The investment continued through owner contact, negotiation, title coordination, private financing, acquisition, demolition, cleanup, and the sale of smaller parcels.
The software helped identify where to investigate. Property research and investment judgment determined what to pursue.
The work could answer a question without remembering the answer.
Early tools were often built for the problem immediately in front of Alexander.
A scraper could assemble an opportunity set. A query could isolate a promising combination of characteristics. Research could establish a reason to pursue or reject a property.
But the reasoning, prior analysis, contacts, and transaction history were not consistently accumulating into a durable system. When an opportunity returned, some of that work had to be reconstructed.
Repeated investment work made that limitation increasingly important.
The progression toward Deal Studio
Deal Studio grew out of the evolving effort to systematize this investment process.
The later named application was intended to make opportunity research, context, contacts, decisions, and follow-up persistent.
Blinka belongs to that operating history. Its scraper and SQL workflow were part of years of groundwork that eventually led to Deal Studio, although the transaction preceded the later named application.
The progression developed over years: bespoke tools, structured information, repeated research, direct transaction work, and an increasing need to retain the connections among them.
What needed to persist
The research
What had been investigated, what the sources suggested, and which questions remained unresolved.
The reasoning
Why an opportunity merited further work—or why it had been rejected.
The people and follow-up
Who had been contacted, what had been discussed, and what needed to happen next.
These needs shaped the system-building effort: preserving the connections among opportunities, research, reasoning, and people so that prior work could inform the next decision.
The capability today
Alexander continues to draw on years of software, data, and investment work when evaluating new problems.
An opportunity may require combining unfamiliar information, testing an assumption, building a model, or creating a way to track research and follow-up. Tools can be built or adapted around those needs.
Within Land-Based Strategies, CODE means this ability to work directly on the information and operating problems an investment presents. It does not depend on every transaction passing through a single application.
Related reading
Deal Studio: An Investment Systems History
A first-person account of how the investment tools developed over time.
An essay about preserving context, decisions, and institutional memory in software.
The investment remains the point.
The purpose of the systems work is to support research, judgment, and execution.