Can you just buy a $1m apartment building?

[Joe Carr]

So hypothetically if you had the money for a down payment of 25% on a $1m apartment building. Which is $250k. Say it has 15 units, and makes $1k/unit. Could you just straight up invest in an apartment building? And skip having to look through tons of houses all the time sorting through hundreds of houses for 10 years and ending up with 15 individual houses that might make you $500/unit. I set up a google spreadsheet and a website that shows apartment buildings for sale. I’m just calculating the simples parts of it, total cost, down payment cost, #units, unit income, and amount of time to pay off down payment and pay off the whole building. I’ve looked at three buildings so far, they they usually take 17 months to payoff the downpayment, and 5~ years to pay the whole thing off. I’m just wondering if there’s any error in my thought to this.

[Mike Dymski]

Yes, I went from two flips and two duplexes to a 30-unit community and the later is so much easier.  Getting one unit at a time was not going to meet my goals.