Cincinnati Property Chaos? Drug Dealers Next Door & Police MIA… What Would You Do?

[Jacklyn Robins]

Bought a great 4 unit property in Cincinnati — cash cow when full, (had) solid tenants, great numbers. The problem? The city-owned Section 8 building next door.

Drug dealers ripped off my cameras, threatened sanitation workers, and scared off a tenant just for having cameras on his truck and now we have 2 vacancies. The police? Totally MIA. 

So I’m asking: do I sell or keep holding and fighting? Apparently there's a community center for art shows, youth programming, etc coming down the block. 

Anyone else deal with this kind of insanity near a “city-managed” neighbor? How’d you handle it?

(Let me know if you're interested and we can discuss an off market deal)

[Mark Cruse]

Quote from @Jacklyn Robins:

I'm in NY and we're about to go socialist.....not much better over here.

However, those that are saying this is what you get for renting to the poor in the ghetto..lower income tenants still need somewhere to live. That's not going anywhere and I agree with Remington that people need to vote in local elections, but we're obviously not solving the lack of education that gets people to vote for politicians who aren't actually doing anything in their best interests.

I fired my property manager last night and hired a new one immediately. He manages a building next door to mine and is very familiar with the neighborhood. Hopefully we can get a better result. I'm also guilty of not showing face enough so my intention is to come to Cincinnati more often to check in on things.

 I have specialized and been successful in this space or a very long time. `Unfortunately most fail because of the inability to understand the community they are investing in, and in most cases it's a money play only. I appreciate how you said low-income tenants still need somewhere to live. Mindset and mentality go a long way into making this work. Now, sometimes in these situations its unsustainable and nearly impossible to work; however, it doesn't appear that you are there at this point. If I were you, I'd see how this new manager performs. If they successfully manage the building next door, it goes a very long way into doing yours. I have never had a cut and run mindset which has helped me tremendously in this space. If you have great numbers, cash flow and future equity, Id stick it out as long as I could with this manager. I would create milestone periods to do a deep dive assessment to see where I am. If things are steadily going in the right direction or maintaining a stable trend line, you are on the right track. If you continue to try over and over with new strategies and managers and nothing works, it may be time to deploy and exit strategy. In general, the cut and run strategy in nearly all cases leads to failure and heavy losses.