Lender · Asheville, NC · Member since 2020 · 463 posts · 507 votes
Hi friends. Most of what we hear is how well some model or approach is working for someone, and often with some hype. What could be really instructional is to hear about what failed for you, and why. For example, my MTR in Asheville has done great for 5 years now, but several of my local friends have tried MTR lately and haven't had success. There are lessons to be learned there, such as property type, size, location, etc. Maybe you tried glamping, flipping, renting by the room, STR, LTR, multi-family, build to rent, you name it, and it failed. Perhaps it's painful to have to explain, but we could all learn from stories of what hasn't worked well for you. And hopefully the comments that members make in response won't be condescending.
Owning small houses in lower income areas out of the area…property managers don’t make much on these kinds of properties. These kinds of properties don’t go up in value much and renters seem to be harder on them as well.
I sold my last one yesterday. Oddly enough I felt a bit emotional since it was one of my first properties.
@Mitch Davidson my first SMF did great for me year one and taught me a lot about management. While financially it did good, it hurt me from expanding. It was in a c- area and the problems it came with were not worth the cashflow. The last upswing helped offload it for a better than expected return, but without the huge uprun it would of been good on paper as long as you didn't count the time it took. ON a unit basis it had over 3x the service load on admin side while bringing in the lowest amount per door.
Like @Bjorn Ahlblad said they all work just some took longer than others, and in my case some took more time than others.
@Mitch Davidson my first SMF did great for me year one and taught me a lot about management. While financially it did good, it hurt me from expanding. It was in a c- area and the problems it came with were not worth the cashflow. The last upswing helped offload it for a better than expected return, but without the huge uprun it would of been good on paper as long as you didn't count the time it took. ON a unit basis it had over 3x the service load on admin side while bringing in the lowest amount per door.
Like @Bjorn Ahlblad said they all work just some took longer than others, and in my case some took more time than others.
Cheers!
Thanks for sharing, @Chris Davidson. It seems really common in REI for us to not put a dollar value on our time, to let some properties suck up way too much of it, etc. Thus I appreciate the reminder.
When we started out around 2016 our 2nd investment was in 2 lots next to each other inside an HOA. We intended to combine them and build on them. We'd done a flip and thought we were prepared for a new build. The numbers looked good until we found out from the HOA that they require tile roofs in that particular area. Not on other streets - just on that one that faced the river. Because tile is so heavy it completely changed the engineering requirements and it ended up increasing the cost of the build by about $30k. The numbers no longer worked. It would still have been a profit, but not enough to justify the time and expense. So we sold the lots. We never have gone back to doing new builds and I'm not sure we ever will. The other thing I regret is actually selling our first flip. Looking back, it would've been a great LTR had we Brrrr'd it but we didn't know about that opportunity back then.