𝗖𝗼𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗲𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸. 𝗬𝗼𝘂’𝗿𝗲 𝗴𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗮𝗴𝗮𝗶𝗻. Reading this WSJ piece about copper theft felt like déjà vu from my earlier days running apartments. Walk a down unit and the walls look like a surgeon with no conscience has gutted them. Copper stripped. Lines cut. Sometimes eight HVAC condensers gone in one night, like they evaporated. We ended up welding cages on everything just to slow the thieves down. Not stop them. Slow them. Anyone who’s run older multifamily knows the feeling in your stomach when you pull up to a vacant building after a long weekend, and the first thing you check is whether the condensers are still there. That’s coming back. Prices are high. Incentives are bigger. And thieves follow incentives. You can add lights, cages, cameras, and patrols. You should. But as long as someone is willing to buy stolen copper with a wink and no paperwork, the game never ends. Crack the incentive chain at the point of sale, not the point of theft. Cage the condensers, and they’ll still come with reciprocating saws. Prosecute the scrapyard middlemen, and the entire ecosystem collapses. This problem exists because the buyers exist. The “unscrupulous recyclers” are the real leverage point. Without them, the thieves are holding metal no one wants. Until regulators and prosecutors treat that end of the market as the actual crime scene, we’ll keep seeing cut lines, dark blocks, stolen condensers, and gutted units across America. If you’re sitting on vacant apartments right now, don’t assume the 2008-style copper raids are a thing of the past. They’re not. If they are making headlines about stealing wiring from Telecoms, it's only a matter of time before they get back to raiding apartments and homes again. And the real question is whether we’ll chase thieves on the street or the buyers behind the counter. https://lnkd.in/e_4cbBSN