All Forum Posts by: Jim K.

@Kendall Vrana

All of this is shady as hell, as you said. It is highly unlikely you are underpaying for this work -- prehung doors are very much minimally-competent handyman work. Fitting existing doors to a frame takes some skill, some tools, and some work, but not $150 per room door. Unfortunately, this sort of thing is becoming more and more the norm rather than an exception.

Guys like this live in the shadows, as far below the radar as they can get. He's probably terrified of involvement with the police. I very much recommend you document everything, as suggested here. Pics of the vehicle, pics of him, and if he lays down any sort of personal threat like, "I'm gonna (whatever)" you're on the phone to the police immediately.

The only thing I would add is that you should probably send your husband in alone for this one, or have him go with a male friend.  Guys like this can get unpredictable posturing in front of attractive women. My wife and I are completely in this together, but we've also had to deal with some of these issues ourselves. I suspect you just want out of this with the minimal possible fuss.

I would like a lot more expertise in working on exteriors. Rebuilding large porches, reroofing complex roofs, stripping and residing a house built way back when. I always feel like a bumbler on those tasks working alone, no matter how much I study and practice. And I'm terrified of working above 15 feet off the ground on a ladder.

Hell yeah, Mindy! I had no idea I was joining a social counterculture...but there it is, the Times can't be wrong!

I am really waiting with bated breath on this one for the first response: "I LOVE RENTING TO SEX OFFENDERS!!!"

A lot of people are trapped in substandard housing notwithstanding their good credit and income because a background check will report a felony. Sex offenders are an especially hated minority of this group. You can find good tenants that no one else will take a shot at here. You can also find a world of problems if you can't check these people out with a microscope.

@Gabriel Lamb

This had better not be casting pearls before swine, Gabriel. I hope you're paying attention.

The first thing I looked for was an area that was sufficiently complicated to make it worth my while. And it took some time. Others from this area will confirm, Pittsburgh is full of working-class neighborhoods that change radically on a street-by-street basis. The area that I picked to invest in is one of the most extreme cases of this. This is where a local investor can find deals that out-of-area people can't. I was also looking for pocket neighborhoods where, for various reasons, D-areas became C-areas, because once again, this is where the local handyman investor should be to maximize his advantages.

1. Pick a mature urban or near-city suburban area that is complicated, where neighborhoods vary significantly street-by-street.

2. Look for borderlines, where the ghetto morphs into a comparatively nice street of houses, and figure out what anchors that area. It may be a hospital nearby. It may be a police station or school that keeps people in place. Sometimes, it's a church whose members refused to leave while the area deteriorated around them. It may just be simple lines on a district map -- this is where one school's influx area ends and another begins.

3. Go over the same areas again and again, at different times of the day. Remember, you're walking through C/D areas doing this -- it can get weird when you turn down the wrong street in the middle of the night.

4. Look for your target style of house and make note of the addresses. I've talked about this before on BP, but as a handyman investor looking for places I can maintain largely alone, I'm always on the lookout for brick-veneer post-WWII-built 2-bedroom/1bath SFR, side-by-side duplexes, or row houses with simple, low, easily-maintainable roofs. That's where I can maximize my advantages.

And there it is, a basic blueprint to the bucks for the broke investor looking for a low-cost way into the game, and you didn't even have to buy me a gyro, let alone a McRib. Good luck, Gabriel!

@Bradley Miller

@Scott Trench tells a great story about biking to work one day and passing a guy in an F-250. I think it was Bigger Pockets Money Podcast No. 30.

I got my fat Greek a$$ out to my target areas and walked holes into my shoes again and again. I also mastered the county real estate deeds and mortgage recording system, the online county court records, the marriage license bureau records, federal census and SNAP data. Because my target area has a long history, I've read two local books about it. But the holes in the shoes were still the best way to gather the data I continue to rely on as a local investor in a complicated area of my town.

I think a lot of people are simply not equipped to think of themselves as anything other than a success in life, and anything that challenges that assumption or the external appearance of it is to be avoided at all cost. In the end, this is what vanity does to people, it turns them into fragile things unable to grapple with the crippling fear of being revealed to the world but also to themselves as less than perfect, as most definitely NOT good enough, as "losers" and "failures" and "second-raters" and all the words the most vain among us use for those they think they're a million times better than. Being able to laugh at yourself and your pretensions is a gift and a great liberation of the spirit. The concepts of "failing foward" and "highest and best use of my time," just make me crack up. The highest use of my time is helping others, not myself. And failure is failure, ignoble, miserable, and soul-crushing. The key for me is not to put lipstick on a pig and delude myself back onto a "winning track" to "get past failure," it's to remind myself that I'm not all that and never will be, and get over feeling sorry for myself.

Just don't buy a brand new vehicle. Your work vehicle, the one the tenants see, ought to be a total s***box. If you get a new truck, every time a tenant looks at it they'll be thinking that it's their rent that's paying off your luxury. Your new vehicle becomes a dangerous and stupid liability.

OK, let's run down the list for C-class rentals:

Toilets - usually Kohler, sometimes American Standard

Refrigerators
Microwaves
Stoves/ovens
Washers
Dryers
Dishwashers - Frigidaire has let us down hard in the past in multiple categories and at multiple price points (this includes the Gallery line). I am less than thrilled with the performance of GE products as well, but we're not talking the same level of flimsy. We now stick to products in the Whirlpool line. That includes: Whirlpool, Maytag, KitchenAid, Jenn-Air, Amana, and Hotpoint. Unlike @Johann Jells, Frigidaire gas ranges that have really hurt us, Whirlpools have been better for us.

If you work in C-class rentals, you're going to have to cultivate a relationship with a used appliance dealer/warehouse. We usually replace with new with long-term tenants. But there are, sadly, some people out there who will purposely damage a used appliance at the beginning of their lease in the expectation that they'll get a new one. In the long run, the hauling is no fun at all, and I'm convinced we're losing money on it, but it makes sense to start replacing with used if a new tenant with a questionable past in rentals moves in and stuff starts breaking right and left.