First house I bought was my worse deal but best lesson learned.

[Quentin Mitchell]

The first deal that I ever bought was the furthest thing from a real state investor in my opinion but I was hungry to get into the game, that was a good thing. The bad thing is a did zero due diligence and I outsourced all the work and therefore had no idea of what was going on. Long story short I overpaid for a property right before the crash, did not pick my own tenant or pick the rental price (even with rent I was at a negative cash flow) the property had zero appreciation and I didn't calculate anything into my figures. For lack of better words I fu*@ked up big time I ended up losing the house the tenant only paid 3 months, I was an out of state investor so it was hard to even try to evict from afar. 

Those are the bad things that happened, but the good things that happened are it made me learn more about real estate so that I didn't make the same mistakes, it made me create criteria to look for when searching for tenants, it made me be more hands-on with the business, it made me look at the numbers for adequate cash flow, it made me be a better investor actually it made me an investor because that first deal I was not an investor I was just a guy that bought a house. Now I am up to 15 doors and counting and have been able to manage all properties myself without any evictions and everyone pays their rent, but I feel if the very first house had not happened like that then I wouldn't have learned or been motivated to want to learn. It is not how you start but how you bounce back from adversity so if your deals aren't working out there is light at the end of the tunnel just stick with it.