Hey everyone! My name is Kim and I'm new to Bigger Pockets. I am a Canadian currently living in Dubai, but will be moving to Nashville TN in July-so would love to connect with others in the area once I'm settled! I plan on making a purchase in either Nashville or the Smokey Mountains areas within the next 12 or so months.

I wanted to ask for some advice re. a property purchase I made in 2023. I am an entrepreneur, and began to make some pretty solid money in 2022. I knew I wanted to get into real estate investing, but to be completely honest, I was 25 years old at the time and did NOT do my homework. At the time, I really enjoyed vacationing in Tulum-and the markets were booming there. Property prices in Canada were extremely high-the 2bdrm condo I was renting in Toronto at the time was valued at almost 2M, to give some perspective-so I thought purchasing a small condo in Tulum would be a smarter and safer investment since tourism was booming and the prices were so much more reasonable. I also had enough capital to pay cash for it-and at the time not having a loan seemed ideal, however now I realize the opportunity cost of using all that cash was massive.

Anyways, after visiting a few units, I decided to pull the trigger on a turn-key 1 bedroom condo in La Veleta (Tulum) @ 169000USD which was delivered in Jan/24. It honestly is a lovely little unit, but the area is not as developed as I was expecting it to be by now, and the "boom", to put it bluntly, has faded. There is an overwhelming supply of units, especially studios and 1 bedrooms. Because of the ongoing construction in the area and the lack of paving on the road the condo sits on, it was a very difficult sell on airbnb/guests were not happy with all of the noise and difficult drive in. This sort of forced my hand to focus on long term tenants. I had someone in for about 8 months, but they left early April, and at the same time my property manager told me he was no longer able to work with me, presumably because he's focusing on larger (more profitable) villas.

I did immediately get online and do my best to find new property managers/mgmt companies, but I found that almost everyone whose website/references/resume I was impressed by was not taking on 1 bedroom units. This left me with the mediocre options to choose from, I guess you could say. I really will also mention that its been challenging to find people with no contacts in Tulum. The real estate agent I bought the property through actually stole a deposit of 8000usd from me that I was never able to get back-so at this point with him out of the picture and the previous PM unwilling to help, I felt very stuck.

I did manage to find a PM after a few phone calls, but again, it felt like I was choosing the best of the "left overs". So far, I am not very impressed with her. It has been 2 months now and we have not been able to get someone in the unit. I have constantly been following up with her, seeing if we need to drop prices etc, and she has assured me she's doing everything she can on her end, however I'm blindly trusting her at this point, and I really do think there must be better quality managers out there.

So, I guess this brings me to where I'm at now-here are a couple thoughts/questions I have that I would love some insight on:

1) do I get out now and just cut the losses on the acquisition costs/taxes/deed creation? I know this TYPICALLY is not suggested, but I'm genuinely worried about the future of tourism in Tulum, and I'm not sure if I can see things getting back to "pandemic boom levels". Now that I am taking the time to property educate myself on everything that is real estate, is losing lets say 30,000usd on the transactions, but getting 140,000usd back in my bank account, worthwhile because of the fact that I can invest this money elsewhere in the US, and utilize loans to make my money go further? I guess this is assuming I can even manage to sell it at its current valuation, which to be honest I'm not sure of.

2) if anyone has any sort of contacts in Tulum for PM or marketing, I would really appreciate an introduction.

3) if anyone has a unit of their own in Tulum, is this normal for it to be sitting empty for 2 months?

I really appreciate any help or advice that can be offered. As I'm sure a lot of you can relate to, this is a difficult world to navigate being young and having no guidance, and in my situation no contacts where my property is. I've definitely learned from my mistakes through this whole process, and am spending a lot of time educating myself right now. I'm looking forward to a (hopefully) much more successful and less stressful second purchase.