I was my first rehab

[Alex Allemand]

I'm presenting you the first investment I made in 2011. At this time I was still a student in internship, and I really wanted to start investing in Real Estate. I was already investing in stocks but but I knew real estate could offer a better leverage.

So I motivated my parents to invest with me as I was unble to get a loan as a student (even with a good salary). We made a company, bought it, and started rehab!

We bought this little apartment in the city of Aix en Provence in the south of France. As you can see, everything needed to be rehab. There was a strange man living in this place since 30 years, he never went out and stayed inside smoking all the day. The ceiling and walls were yellow of tobacco smoke !

We changed everything, from the wall to the floor, we even cuted the floor to put the kitchen in the other room of the apartment. It’s a small surface so everything has been thought to be useful and avoid losing space. I let you judge of the work we did:

Before:

After

After that, I lived 4 years in, finished my studies, and started working. I bought my current apartment in october with my girlfriend, so now it’s rented, it doesn’t produce a cash flow but it’s a transparent operation. (rents pay the loan), there is 8 years left to finish the loan. Its value is about 150/160 k€.

It was a good first experience but I learnt that single family apartments is not the most profitable investment (at least in my city and around here) so I decided to focus only on multi family buildings, and package of few parkings. This will be my next project.

What do you guys think?

You can check my blog for some other pictures :)