All Forum Posts by: Kai Hicks

Good evening BP community,

I have a tenant who has requested a full power washing of the house. My wife and I like her quite a bit, she is a sweet and very polite older lady who keeps the house in immaculate shape. She signed a 3 year lease, which is great as well. One of the reasons we got into real estate was to be the kind of landlords who are not just concerned with collecting rent, but providing people a decent place to live that they also enjoy. My only concern is that if we agree to the power washing (which my PM says will cost $150) this will open a floodgate (sick pun) of other non-essential requests. The wife and I are very new real estate investors and have zero experience with this sort of thing, so I humbly ask BP: what would you do?

Welcome to BP guys, +1 on the dangerously addictive nature of the podcasts!

@Adrian Chu

 Thanks for the great tips about local areas, I will definitely be investigating further!

@Melissa Melia Thanks! I'm expanding my search outward from our lovely town of Seattle, the prices here are a bit steep :0

@Jeremy Cochran I forgive you. I'm not familiar with house hacking, but it sounds pretty awesome. Will you be doing the rehab work yourself, or hiring out contractors?

@Eva Salas Definitely agree with controlling your own investments! I was getting that feeling when you're watching your hometown team on a horrendous losing streak, and you're like "gimme a shot, i can do better than that!"

Hello Bigger Pockets! My name is Kai Hicks, I'm currently a resident of Seattle, WA, and I confess to being a lazy, no-posting lurker for a couple months. I think I started with the podcast after googling "best real estate podcasts" which of course led me to these awesome forums. 

My wife and I had been pretty steady adherents to the tried-and-true invest in low cost index funds and don't touch them model for retirement planning. I really don't like the investment horizon right now, personally; I do a lot of reading about the market (US and global) and various corporations, and I guess I just got tired of being an invisible cheerleader who had no real say in what was happening with his money.

What really draws me to real estate is that since you own the property, you DO have total control over what happens with it. The more I consume on BP, and the more articles / books I read, it looks to me like investing in real estate is more line with what my wife and I want out of our cash. We're open to anything profitable (and ethical) but thus far haven't found anything that beats the appeal of buy-and-hold. So far the plan is to buy a couple turnkeys to get our feet wet, and because we both work way too much :( So if anyone has recently done any business with turnkeys, please give me a shout. Really looking forward to interacting with this very cool community!