All Forum Posts by: Account Closed

@Michael L.

A lot's been said, and quite a bit of it has been said by people who are following the same basic plan that you are. I congratulate you in your decision. I thoroughly agree that if you're looking for passive income and you're not already rich as hell, this business is not for you.

I say "business" because I am utterly certain landlording is fundamentally only worth the effort it takes if it is run as a going concern over the long haul, not as a passive investment vehicle. As you correctly point out, it takes a crapload of ADDITIONAL WORK and ADDITIONAL EXPENSE to put systems in place to take the burden of LANDLORDING WORK that falls directly your shoulders the first minute you buy a rental property -- it is not an easy organic process that just happens, and this additional work is not worth it unless you plan to be at landlording over the long haul with an every-growing number of properties.

Real estate is not "an alternative wealth-building investment strategy for gaining financial freedom," or any of the other glib code phrases you'll find on this site for sitting on one's untroubled *** and letting the money roll in.

Good luck in your future investments.

@Eddie Litalien

"Don't be afraid to fail" is advice that is given very often. "Be prepared to be humiliated, scorned, treated with disrespect, tricked, lied to successfully, cheated, betrayed, and beaten down to the point where you wonder in the night if God is personally out to make a mockery and a warning of you and your efforts," is not given often enough. Be prepared for your friends to laugh at you, for your family to pity you, for your spouse to turn from you in disgust and certainty that you are not going to succeed. Be prepared to lose faith in yourself. For months, years, decades.

Be prepared to fail miserably.
Contemptibly.
Laughably.
Pathetically.

Be prepared to be the joke of your family. Be prepared to be the laughingstock of your neighborhood. Be prepared to be dismissed as the village idiot. To be cast out as diseased, to be spit on as unclean, to be rejected as inhuman, to be rubbed out like a mistake.

You will be broken, in the hideously impersonal way that the world breaks things. And you will not recover from the breaking. Ever. You will always be a sad, broken, wreck of a man, no matter how well you learn to pretend and how loudly you protest otherwise.

It will happen to the point that you will know in your bones that you are a habitual failure, that no matter what you do, you will never be good enough to erase the stain of the shame of what you've been through. You will fail yourself, your friends, your family, and everyone who means and has ever meant anything to you.

What I'm getting at is that if the reasons you want to do this are internal, your efforts won't survive the first flaying, the first evisceration, the first castration. And there will be many. Your good opinion of yourself will be the first casualty of this struggle.

@Karen S. @Joshua H.

In my experience as well, if you're laying tile in a 100-year-old house in Pittsburgh, you're going to be dealing with a diagonal plank subfloor in urban residential neighborhoods. What we typically do is either lay 1/2 ply or OSB over the planks screwed into the joists w/ 3-inch deck screws, then put a standard waterproofed cement board thinset tile installation in bathrooms and kitchens. This is a lot of work and money compared with tiling a more modern home with an existing plywood/OSB subfloor.

Typically to start with in this homes, you also have to pull out vinyl flooring and the 3/4 in. wood plank flooring beneath it, which is typically covered in multiple layers of asbestos-laded cutback adhesive.

If the plank subfloor is in seriously bad shape (which we can only know after we get down to that level) we take off the planks, install 2x8 sistering and blocking on the joists, and put in a 3/4 in. tongue-and-groove OSB subfloor, followed by a waterproofed cement board and thinset tile installation.

This costs a lot of money even if you do it yourself with your own crew, which is what we do and is the only reason who do as much tile as we do.

So, as otherwise stated in this thread, I would also not recommend planning to tile large areas of such homes in this area to any passive investor, and most especially NOT any out-of-state passive investor. There really aren't enough solid tile guys in this region. The ones that have a good reputation are all just as busy as we are making money in our own renovations.

It's the stairs.  If you want the stairs done in laminate, you're going to pay through the nose and it's going to be ugly if it's done correctly and safely. If you want the stairs recarpeted, it's just going to be expensive.

I would think very hard about doing laminate flooring in your kitchen.

@Nolan O.

Have you noticed that in our culture, there are a million stories about those who overcome their fear and a comparative minuscule number of stories in comparison about those who overcome their greed?

I don't have a good answer, unfortunately.

I have seen a lot of people in this business carry their greed to the point of stupidity. The thing is, the outcomes of investment fear are often unmistakable as the outcomes of fear. The outcomes of greed are often not as easy to diagnose.

The tenant moved out and in resentment of the frequent rent increases, completely let the place go in the last year they lived there. The stupid-greedy landlord will dismiss this as: "OMG, tenants are all just slobs."

The tenant lived in fear of things going wrong with the house, knowing that the landlord would take advantage of every service call as an opportunity to argue for raising the rent. So the tenant fixes little things around the house that go wrong without telling the landlord. When they leave, they remove their fixes and replace the non-functioning parts. The stupid-greedy landlord says, "OMG, the toilet didn't flush. What a pig!"

On a renovation for a 1920's-construction house, the owner wanted to forego the expense of a general contractor, so they decided to handle subcontractors themselves. Knowing squat about construction, they simply compared the renovation quotes they got to online national averages for houses typically built from anywhere from 1910-2010 and insisted that the subs were all robbing them. Six quotes later, they got a quote from "a nice guy" who promised to do the job for well below the national average price. The guy totally screwed up the job and then quit in disgust, never properly finishing the work. The owner's response, "OMG, contractors are all untrustworthy incompetents."

All these are the outcomes of greed carried to the point of stupidity. But not one of the people who are at fault think they really are, or will admit that their greed caused the outcome. Introspection doesn't help these people much, because they're not too good at it in the first place.

@Andrew Medici

Greater Pittsburgh is literally bursting at the seams with small, low-value MF properties like this that have enormous deferred maintenance problems but were built solid enough back in the day to still be highly viable properties once you address those problems. The city is changing and recomposing itself and quite a few D neighborhood slums in close proximity to the health care and technology job centers within the city are reversing course and turning back into C neighborhoods.

Your biggest problem isn't the financing you think it might be. That's just part of a larger problem. You'll need to find a partner here in the city who works well with outsiders yet has the regional knowledge and connections to get you to the right local banks/credit unions, put solid workmen on your job sites, and play nice on your behalf with all the various code enforcement entities in the idiosyncratic governmental arrangements of Allegheny County. I tell this to everyone I know who is thinking about investing in Pittsburgh. The area is just plain weird, and Pittsburghers as a rule do not work well with non-Pittsburghers.

I am up to my eyeballs in work and even my involvement here on biggerpockets.com is a luxury that I can barely afford. I am also not at-at-all the kind of local guy you need -- I'm a fixer, not a money man or a people guy. I would urge you to look hard for that guy, and for other local Pitsburghers reading this to think hard about becoming that guy.

@Carson Wilcox

The sky's the limit. Post up your specific ideas for this place with pics. There are plenty of people here who can help you.

I have to second Jeremy's opinion. It's a "no" on the Mexican War Streets. Realistically, that ship sailed about 5-10 years ago. Investors mined the gold and moved on. What's left is barely profitable even for full-rehab outfits interesting in making significant investments in the area.

@Sam L. American Standard Americast, Bootzcast/Mauicast. The Bootz tubs are sold at Home Depot and have a slip-resistant coating.

These are all really porcelain-on-steel tubs with additional undercoatings that help deaden sound and insulate for soaking bath temperature. Really, they're all DIY products. The American Standard Princeton tub is the non-undercoated version of the same thing. The Bootz Maui and Aloha are the "plain" Bootz versions. 

If you heavily insulate a standard 16-gauge steel alcove tub like the Bootz products with a roll of unfaced insulation, you get much the same results. In the age of acrylic and fiberglass tubs, there are a large number of "professional bathroom designers" who either do not know this or make up total BS excuses for why they choose to stiff you for an additional $100-$200 on materials costs for the "cast" versions of these steel tubs (because they're easier and faster for unskilled people to install).

Here's an out-of-the-box idea on your shower, invest in a European shower bar mixer system where most of the plumbing is outside the wall. That way, if something goes wrong with the shower, you can pull the whole thing off the wall and replace it with another quickly.  Do a search on Amazon for "Rovate Complete Thermostatic" and you'll see a bargain-brand one that you can put in cheap. If you want to upgrade, there's always something like "Grohe 26490000." Replacing the whole shower system once you have the basic plumbing in is a handyman job, no plumber/license needed, and there are far fewer soldered connections behind the wall.

A thing to watch for with these is that American pretentious middle-class wannabes just love them, but actual Europeans are not always impressed. Great stuff in Pittsburgh, probably great stuff in Joliet, not so good with European immigrant populations.