Do You Understand How Ugly This Is Going to Be?

[Jim K.]

There is nothing sane about what you have to be prepared to do in order to make a start in this business. Please take that as a given. The only thing I can fully agree with Grant Cardone about is his statement that real estate investors should, "Forget about 9-5 and start working 95 hours a week."

But the hours are not as bad as WHAT you have to do. I see people whining all the time here about their fears of unclogging toilets at 3 in the morning. People, unclogging a toilet is EASY. Wait until you have to chop a house stack with a demo saw and it dumps a pound of 100-year-old fermented dried filth on you. Wait until the first time you get sick from some mysterious disease because you were prepping a paint job somewhere in some filthy area and some decades-old bacteria were waiting for you to scrape them up. Your first massive vanity clog in a rental where your tenant has been dying her hair in the sink for years.

There are people on this site who have knocked on one side of a door with a dead body on the other side. And it just goes from there. You may think you're going to escape the nasty by investing in a different way, or following a system, or, or, or...

It continues to boggle my mind, year after year, that people get into real estate thinking they're never going to get their hands dirty, usually just because some guru told them it was possible. The price of contractors and handymen keeps going up and up and up, but no, you will always be able to afford to pay people whatever extortionate sum they want to do something that needs to be done today, and of course they will always show up. Sure.

Come on, people. Let's say a guy in one of those annoying bright blue suits with goop in his hair walked into your life and announced that he could offer you a sure-fire opportunity to get into the port-a-potty rental business. Low starting investment, high returns, big money all around. And best of all, if you followed his exclusive franchise system, YOU WOULD NEVER EVER EVER have to smell CRAP in your business. No, not once.

Would you believe him? Would you nod your head enthusiastically along with his fantastic energy and clap? Would you rush to raise the limits on your credit cards to take advantage of this fabulous opportunity? Would you try to rope your friends into it? And yet the gurus manage to tell you you're going to buy real estate, hold real estate, sell real estate, and you are never really going to have to fix real estate, clean real estate, paint real estate, none of that, AND PEOPLE BELIEVE THEM.

I'm asking for contributions here. I know that some of the things you have to do get so nasty that some of us, like me, won't openly talk about the absolute nastiest thing we've ever done in this business. We don't even want to remember it. But can you help out and add an example here of some less-than-pleasant thing you've had to do to get to where you are? And please, nothing about how you managed to cheat someone, steal something from someone, broke the law to your great advantage. You can just save that for Judgment Day.