All Forum Posts by: Jim K.

Oh yeah, it was definitely all aboard for this pirate queen, Jim. If you ever saw her I'm sure it would shiver your timbers.

@Timothy Howdeshell

Ah, but if someone went to a special school, and did a special thing or two, and then did real estate, and then distilled down all their knowledge into a package of principles and checklists and spreadsheets...maybe you could be coached by this special person or by other special people who had already learned his special system...

I've just described every real estate guru program in America. Now clap with me! Let's get the energy in the room up! CRUSH IT!!!

@Bruce Woodruff

You definitely have to have a  sense of humor about it, or the sadness will overwhelm you.

We ran an eviction where the tenant split, left all her possession in the apartment. Going through her stuff, we found that she had saved every report card from school she'd ever received. She left all the pictures she had ever taken of herself and her family. Every letter and card she'd ever received.

When we put her stuff out for trash pickup by the borough, it was a whole life in trash bags. That's what it was worth after she started messing around with drugs.

@Steve Vaughan

I only have one raccoon story. I do not, thankfully, own an electric drum snake. I am lucky enough to be very good friends with a plumber, who is also my mentor in this business.

I inherited a guy in an apartment who used the COVID moratorium here to avoid paying almost a year of rent. When I bought the building and I started checking him out, I saw that he had falsified the spelling of his last name in order to hide three recent evictions on his record (the previous landlord was too stupid to check his ID). He had actually gone to the same magistrate twice under two different names for two different evictions. That's how I got him out. He understood that misrepresenting your identity to a landlord isn't a crime, but misrepresenting it in court certainly is.

@James Wise

Did it still have a female condom draped on it? Enquiring minds want to know, and yes, I have a picture.

Great job, Jeremiah. Take it as slow or as quickly as you want to. Be prepared for some hard setbacks. There will also be wonderful triumphs along the way. In your worst defeats you will likely find the seeds of victory to be sown elsewhere. You are NOT alone out there. We're all human, our pants go on one leg at a time, and when we drop a deuce there's an odor.

 Sadly, I have read Pace Morby's book. Ever more sadly, I paid money for the Kindle.

I have always felt that the BP forums are one of the few places where you can talk to people who have actually gotten it done, and where you can occasionally get an honest answer to a question that might be glossed over elsewhere. Without trying to pound my chest about it, my wife and I have made a lot more money in real estate in a much shorter time that I could have ever dreamed. You will never convince me that real estate is not a path to change your stars in America. We have invested conservatively, tried new things carefully, taken our lumps when we needed to, and discovered some wonderful people along the way. We have also personally seen REI destroy people, destroy marriages, destroy families. That's really why I post things like this.

Everybody I know who has actually accomplished anything in real estate will tell you that REI is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It's not a sprint, it's a marathon. Well, perhaps my favorite quotes comes from the famous marathon runner and trainer, Juma Ikangaa, "The will to win means nothing without the will to prepare."

I really, really hope these cautionary tales help temper unrealistic expectations about this business.

@Account Closed

Very early on, when I was working in Greece, I had to paint a bedroom that a seamstress had worked in for nine years. The seamstress smoked three solid packs a day. After the seamstress left, the next tenant found "two guys from the neighborhood" to paint. They laid down a coat of beige latex on the walls of the room in two days, took their money, and disappeared.

By the time I got to work on the room, six years later, there were ominous dark spots all over the room that showed through the paint. The first thing I did was try to wash the walls. Now this is Europe, so no TSP. I used a powder cleaner like Comet or Ajax.

The paint started sagging all over the place. I finally figured out that if I went down the paint and used a sharpened scraper, I could take sheets of the paint off the masonry walls. And under this coat of latex paint, there was this hot pink...stuff.

The Greeks call it powder paint. We no longer use it, but it was called whitewash here in the 1700-1800s. We typically call it kalsomine today. When I told the owner of the apartment what was under the latex, she suddenly remembered that a few years back, the seamstress had requested that she paint the room, and offered to pay for it herself. The owner had approved, and apparently, this pink kalsomine was the result.

Whitewash, or kalsomine, was a very cheap form of slaked lime paint used annually in houses that relied on open fireplace, wood stoves, and later coal-burning stoves for heat. The whitewash was used to cover up soot stains. It is the main historical reason, by the way, that ceilings are white in Europe and the USA -- they needed to be painted frequently to cover up the soot that would tend to accumulate on them, and originally kalsomine only came in white. The problem with painting over kalsomine is that the layer that it forms is soft and easily crumbles. Latex simply can't bond to it, and latex primers don't do much. Nicotine, on the other hand, sticks to it very easily.

It took two solid weeks to wash the streaks of brown nicotine on those pink walls and ceilings as clean as possible, and I puked from the nicotine stench more than once (and I smoked at the time). I still sometimes see that pink in my nightmares. After that I had to use Monox, a Greek silver-bullet primer to coat it, a product much like Kilz interior/exterior oil-based primer (your eyes burn when you apply it). I applied it with short-nap mohair rollers. No respirators were available beyond P98 paper masks.

I got it done, and finished the room, and flipped the apartment. Because that's how we do.

@Scott Mac

They could make a horror movie out of that roof. I have a picture of what the inside of a old cast iron stack looks like around somewhere...I'll look for it...

@Richard F.

Aw, c'mon Richard, you make it sound like it's a terrible gig!

I'm not a property manager, but out of your list, this is what I've seen.

Still trying to get my head around seven roofing layers.