The asterisk on yesterday's rule.

McElroy's "value is operations" works beautifully on apartment buildings — and gets messy the moment a homeowner could want the same property.

Yesterday I wrote about Ken McElroy’s rule from The ABCs of Real Estate Investing: the seller’s asking price is irrelevant — you calculate value from operations, and that’s your offer.

Today, the asterisk.

McElroy spent his career buying 100-, 200-, 300-unit apartment communities. In that world, every buyer is an investor. Every buyer is pricing the same …