All Forum Posts by: Ryan H.

We just replaced a line on an early 1900's house. If the line was replaced or installed during wartime you may find a cardboard/tar arrangement which is what we found. We paid $2500 to replace, it looked awful and I'm positive we'd have been back to fix it again soon.

We have MFR and SFR and have property management for all. We like having the MFR's but they both have their own benefits. Our maintenance and vacancy is higher on MFR's. We have some long-term people but on average there is more turnover. From strictly my personal experience, MFR's can hurt you badly if you don't know what you're doing. My first purchase was a 4-plex and it's been kicking my a** for a long time because I had no experience in property maintenance. Knowing what to look for in terms of long-term potential fixes and damage is a huge benefit when buying MFR's. Having a large pool of SFR's to spread out the risk when you're first starting can be a good thing until you've learned something and can apply it to larger and hopefully more profitable projects.

In my area of CA it's been crazy for the last couple years. It's much tougher now as inventory has dried up severly. After prices bottomed we were picking up MF/SF and could pick and choose. By 2011 it started to get really competitive, multiple cash offers, one in particular I remember had 31 offers after the first couple days. New construction is picking up now.

I've fought this problem on a few rehabs. The only thing that worked for us was to have somebody staying in the place outside of working hours. A guy doing some work for us offered to stay in the rehabs at night at a reasonable daily rate (in relation to the overall project cost). He chased-off people a couple of times, he's since become a tenant in one of the rehabs :). We've also lucked-out on a couple and found tenants early-on who liked the other rehabs we'd done and they stayed in the places at night in exchange for a free months rent when place was complete.

That's a big decision but I'd also say go. Like others on here I'm in a position similar to you but really enjoy my job and stay for that reason only, since you're not happy with your job and given your current life situation I would say it's a good time to make the move. As David said, big salaries are like a drug, I know many in my industry that stayed in jobs they didn't like for years just for the salary and could never cut the cord. I also second doing your first flip while you have a steady paycheck coming in. On my first flip I underestimated both time and cost and it felt like I was bleeding money for a long time. It was nice to get the experience while having a paycheck coming in to soften the blow.

Thanks Al, your optimism is nice to see.

I agree with Jad that obligations end at the property lines, however, if I had a very large interest with many properties in a particular neighborhood I would be more involved. I have some properties in low-income neighborhoods which we bought as shells of former homes. They were used by the homeless and dragged down the neighborhood. We saw potential in rehabbing them and got great deals on the purchase. Rehabbing and trying to improve the property came with many problems. Frequent break-ins, stolen items, graffiti, etc. were commen during the rehabs. It got to the point where the only way we could complete the rehab was to give tenants free rent while we completed the work. Having somebody living there prevented the break-ins. One of my favorite real estate memories is when we were starting one such rehab. We boarded up the windows and put security doors on all the doors. We found one morning that not only had somebody broken-in and stolen the cabinets, appliances, shower heads, etc. they had done so by prying off the security doors with crow bars and stolen the doors! I do my best to give my tenants a nice place to live and ours went from being the worst to the nicer homes on the block. It brings a smile to my face when I drive by and see tenants bbq'ing or kids playing on the lawn. However, my experience in these neighborhoods prevents me from making to many dramatic improvements now. We still do the best job we can, but are cautious about the improvements we do make.

I use a PM company to manage all of my properties and it's worked well for me. I invest in Real Estate on the side from my day job and I'd rather not spend spare time managing property (opportunity cost). I think Joe Delia had a good suggestion by giving a PM one of your properties for awhile to see how they do. I did something similar and after watching them do a good job I continued giving them more. What time I do spend on real estate is mostly towards acquiring more and doing analysis on current properties so I can make better buying decisions in the future. My job requires frequent travel/reassignment and I now feel very comfortable leaving it in their hands for extended periods of time. Similar to Arthur, I do walkthroughs occasionally. By the way, this is an excellent forum. I recently stumbled across it, wish I'd found it earlier.