"Just get to 100 doors." - every guy trying to sell you a course.
I know a guy with over 100 doors. Some months he clears less than $1,000.
Not
$1,000 per door. $1,000. Total. After running an entire portfolio the
size of an apartment complex, working nights and weekends, fielding
calls, chasing rent, replacing water heaters, the number at the bottom
of the page some months is less than what a lot of people make in a
single week at a job with a lunch break.
But sure. More doors.
Here's
the math not on the flyer at that REIA meetup: single-family rentals
don't scale efficiency the way multifamily does. Every door is its own
roof, its own HVAC, its own tenant, its own eviction risk, its own
vacancy period, spread across a dozen different zip codes instead of one
building. You're not running a portfolio at that point. You're running
100 tiny, unrelated small businesses, badly, at the same time.
Add
in property management fees eating 8-10% of gross rent (if you're not
self-managing yourself into a breakdown), capex reserves nobody actually
sets aside until the roof proves them wrong, and financing 100
individual mortgages instead of one commercial loan, and "door count"
turns out to be a vanity metric, not a wealth metric.
The guys selling the "more doors" dream aren't lying about the doors. They're just not the ones showing you the P&L.
Real
question to ask before you scale anything: not "how many doors can I
get to," but "how much am I actually keeping per door, after
everything." A guy with 8 doors clearing $6,000/month cash flow is doing
better than a guy with 100 doors clearing $1,000, and sleeping better
too.
More doors doesn't mean more wealth. Sometimes it just means more problems, spread thinner.