All Forum Posts by: Levi T.

Just hire a call center or answering service that routes everything to assigned vendors such as plumbers, hvac tech, etc. Each vendor schedule everything with the tenants, no keys required.

You should checkout Appfolio, they offer a call center for $200, plus with their software you can manage the portfolio more easily yourself or hire your own manager to do it for you at some point, etc.

@Scott Trench I guess I'll step up to that plate... Long ago when I was a much younger man, I came into millions from selling one of my first tech startups I built, and thus I started my journey into real estate investing.

My first peace of advice to anyone that comes into any amount of money that they deem as a lot of money, is to wait and not invest it. They should just sit on it, put it into a banking account and stare at it for weeks, months, maybe even years if needed. The opportunities you miss wont even matter if you make ONE bad investment, or get wiped out and defrauded. Don't worry about that rate of return, focus on what matters most, finding a STRONG win.

Money is hard to make, easy to spend. As this thread already has shown, vipers will hunt for you, and want you to invest into their ideas, intentional or not, good or bad, they can't help themselves. Because of this, your choices need to weight heavily on you before pulling the trigger. At the end of the day, there is only winners and losers when making deals. Whatever deal you make, make sure are winning and not losing.

The problem your going to run into with your article is that one size does not fit all. If you landed 10k, 100k, or 1 million or more, your options and choices will not just be reflected in the size of your windfall, but also by the level of your experience and risk tolerance.

My first investment was a 9 unit apartment building next to a university in my local market. It was an on market deal, and with a little luck and smart maneuvering, I managed to get the seller to come down from a $1m purchase agreement, to just under 800k. We cleaned up the property using cashflow, raised rents, hired and fired lots of PMs, and finally the gross performance was raised by 152% over it's gross when we bought it. 

At the time, the building was just the right size, provided a nice incubator or proving ground for myself to make mistakes and not get wiped out.. I already had a lot of business experience, but it was something totally new to me, and I knew mistakes in real estate where very costly, plus I did not have BiggerPocket to guide me like people have today. I had to invent my own wheel.

As you can guess, I applied a style of BRRRR to that building with them performance numbers, and the story wrote itself from there.

So to recap:

1. Find a low risk investment to the size of your capital, something you can withstand a loss if things go sideways. If that means you only invested 20k-30k out of your 100k, on a 99k purchase. You know you have time to sort it out if needed, pay it off, sell it, but not lose your shorts in the process. If you master it, move on to doing the next deal, and keep on going, you will never run out of that 100k.
2. Only invest in A-B areas. Buy B-C properties in A-B area, and only buy in towns that have seen continued population growth for multiple years, otherwise your in a flippers market trying to play the gentrification game as the market is flat, or worst, declining.
3. Forced appreciation is everything. Don't wait for market to earn you that equity and cashflow, instead, wait and find a great deal that you can quickly improve on and turn it into a huge win. My investment group picks up properties that needs 10% of purchase price in repairs, rents are at $600-$900 coming in the door per unit, and time we do our thing, rents are $1,000-$1,200 or more.. That's what forced appreciation is about. That's what risk is about, it is about having a property as-is performing, then improving on it. If you failed to reach your goal, your still in the black at the performance level you bought it at or a little better. It's always about the purchase price to value, that sets the tone of the entire venture for years to come.
4. BRRRR or BRRRL (L is for Leaning the next loan on the old property's free equity), rinse and repeat!

At some point and time your going to get bigger and bigger.. Maybe you started with a SFH, or a Small Medium or Large MFU, then rolled up to doing your own syndication or just out right owning your own apartment complexes. That's the name of the game. Take your windfall cash, and find where it fits into the scale of real estate, keep on folding it till your a real estate mogul. Best

 Now I see why you got your pilot license!

@Ivan Barratt congrats, very nicely done. If you don't mind me asking in this thread, what was the equity raise offering to the limit investor?

Simply put, no. You would have to buy a large region and convert it all.

You need to adjust your model a little. Find/get the capital for CapEx to do the work, then take cashflow. Time you get to year 2..3... you will buy something else, it just continues the pain perpetually.

You already know the end game. Most of us started the ball rolling in this threads years ago, and we only have 3 optione. Keep buying, stop buying, sell it all. 

Most guys keep with option one till their later years, then somewhere around age 65-75 they start unloading fast. 

I've personally bought up many portfolios from guys in their 70, it's becomes clear, once a landlord always a landlord, but pulling down a few hundred thousand per month is not bad!

If your lucky, your children will want to take over, and you can get true retirment, otherwise your riding this beast till the end.

Do you care if you insult them? I know I insult dozens of people every year with my offers.. hell, some people go as far as to make death threats... does it stop me, nope, does making them offers work, yup. It's hit or miss. Haters are going to hate when you land one, because they never tried!

@William S. I've built handfuls of successful companies over my life, all of them have some level of stress. Being a landlord is one of the most stressful businesses that I can recall. Since your number one criteria is no stress, I'd go find something else to put your money into frankly.

Over the last 60 days with C-A properties, we average 28 repair tickets in 30 days, per 100 units. We also executed 5 leases per 100 units, 3 of them being new, and 3 more being turned over.

Fact of life is 10% of tenants don't pay rent on time, so your also running a micro collection company. Being a landlord is like a furniture rental place, your handling junk debt on people who can't afford to own, but man do you make good money that can't be wiped out by competitors inventing the next hot thing. It is one of the very few businesses that you can build using a blueprint model. Try to do that in the tech space, you will lose your shorts!

It's not stress free, you still have the repairs, the employees, the the turnover and collections. However, like all businesses, if you take the time to build a good business, it becomes a very nice operation to own while your sipping tea on a beach somewhere.

For starters, buy and hold is a business. That's is where people run aground, they overlook this simple fact. 

Small businesses can not always afford some of the nicer things, like management. It becomes more logical to self manage, or handyman for some people when they only own a handful of units.

Like all businesses, this industry is about scale. It's about owning or managing not just a few units, but a few hundred, if not a few thousand units.

Once you scale the operation, like most businesses, that when you can afford to pay employees to run your businesss, while you go do whatever floats your boat, all while calling it a "passive investment" — In other words, there are people who own businesses, and there are people who run their business. It all comes down to how large of a business we are talking.