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Tax, SDIRAs & Cost Segregation

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Cameron Skinner
  • Investor
  • Panama City, FL
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Wealth is never attained when sought after directly

Cameron Skinner
  • Investor
  • Panama City, FL
Posted Nov 26 2015, 08:17

Henry Ford said "Wealth, like happiness, is never attained when sought after directly. It comes as a by-product of providing a useful service."  When I first started in real estate all my goals were only financial.  As I matured I realized building wealth for the sake of building wealth is a frivolous pursuit, and you will soon tire and loose your motivation to continue.  I changed my primary goal of 100 homes to "providing a safe, clean, and comfortable home at an affordable price."  

At the time the only "affordable" rental homes were awful.  There was such a shortage many landlords myself included didn't even bother to clean them up between tenants.  The thought was why do I need to fix it up when the next one will just wreck it, and why spend 4 or 5 thousand for $100 more in rent.  I decided to change my mindset from a business purely designed as one to make money to a business that was going help families.  When your trying to get the absolute best deal on a property to squeeze another 1/2% return on your investment is a completely different mindset than trying get the best deal so you can help a nice family get more house for their money, or get there kids in a better school district.  And it's funny how you will work harder and it stay motivated and enthusiastic about the next deal, when your doing it with the primary goal of helping someone get into nice home they will love and enjoy living in and raising their family.

Once I changed my primary goal to helping my tenants not just helping myself, my growth exploded.  Nicer, cleaner, newer homes tend to make less cash flow, but you attract better tenants and when you take pride in your property the tenant is much more likely to take care of the home, and you have less turnover because your whole business model is around benefiting the tenant and they sense this and enjoy the mutually beneficial  relationship.  Many landlords and tenants go in with an adversarial mindset with the property owner thinking the tenant is trying to squeeze as much as they can out of the landlord and tenant feels the landlord is trying to fix or replace the bare minimum to squeeze every dollar out of them.   When you treat it more as a partnership of helping each other it is much easier to scale, since your not wasting time arguing with tenants. Don't get me wrong, I still have financial and performance goals, as you can't improve what you don't measure, but my main focus is to provide a clean safe comfortable home at an affordable price, and some how the financial goals take care of themselves.  Hope this helps, Good Luck!

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