100 houses in Detroit

[Don Konipol]

A good friend of mine purchased 100 houses in Detroit for $300,000 about 9 years ago.  Here’s how it turned out

1. Sold 12 of the houses for about $270,000, some cash, some owner financing.  
2. Still renting out 26 houses. Multiple problems, evictions, drive by, etc.  BUT, lots of rent income (and lots of expenses)

3. Abandoned  9 houses that were destroyed

4. ‘Gave away” 4 houses for $5k each to a local charity

5. Tore down 51 houses and leases the land for a very low rental for farmland. 

Bottom line: As close as he can figure a 17-18% annual ROI.

[Travis Biziorek]

I'm not sure if this was supposed to be a success post or cautionary tale.

But that's a pretty bad outcome IMO. 

For $300,000 in Detroit 9 years ago you could have bought some really solid areas for probably $10,000/house. 

That's 30 houses. 

Those houses would easily be worth north of $100,000 today. And that's being quite conservative. 

Sounds like he bought the cheapest garbage in D Class areas he could find and ended up not getting killed on it. So I guess that's good. 

But he could have easily 10x'd that $300,000 or more if he'd just gone for decent stuff.