Rent to Retirement my experience

[Johnny Haygood]

I wanted to share my experience with Rent to Retirement.

I bought my first turnkey in Indiana around October of 2022. It was rented out in January 2023. It was $50 less than expected but not a big deal.

I bought 2 more properties in Kansas City in May of 2023. Both of those properties came with tenants in place. To make it easy I'll say property A and property B.

The Indiana property went as expected, with some misc. things like changing the air filter but nothing out of the ordinary.

For the KS properties - I had a call with the property management company owner and ops manager when I first bought the properties and everything sounded good, tenants are in place and everything is going smoothly.

KS prop. A - I got a rent check the first month, partial rent the 2nd month, and bill for $550. So I reached out to see what is going on and the manager I first talked to said, "the $550 is the eviction cost from the lawyer." So then I asked what do you mean eviction? I thought everything was going well? and the PM manager said, "I have a note in my system that "the owner of the PM company" contacted you and said this tenant hasn't paid in months so we wanted to cover the first month's rent."

So without my knowledge, I bought a turnkey property with a tenant that wasn't paying (never paid), I had to evict them (pay for the eviction), I had to pay for the turnover cost which was thousands of dollars, and I've been lied to by at least the property manager that came with property within 2 months of signing on the property (August).

So I got everything fixed, the PM wanted to get the property rent ready. I reached out to the property management if they have got any updates on getting the property rented out or what we need to do to get the property rented but the property was vacant from August 2023 to March 2024.

In March 2024 the PM team said the property had been broken into and vandalized. The repair cost will be around $10-$15k to get rent ready again.

I reached out to Rtr a couple of times before this to voice my concerns/frustrations to see how I should navigate what has been going on with the property and PM company. This time I called Rtr and they said, "we need to switch PM companies to "PM company B", we have had a lot of complaints and have been moving a lot of Rtr customers over to this new PM company for a few months.

I moved over to the new PM team and the property is still getting repaired and it happened 3 months ago.

I've basically paid the mortgage on this property for a year with no rental income and a ton of expenses.

The other properties had their own set of issues (the IN tenants trashed the property) but this KS property was so stressful, a headache, a hassle, such a financial loss, and I've just felt lied to the whole time I want to sell all of them and get away from it.

The IN house has been on the market for 76 days (since this is the first property ready to sell, KS prop. A is still being renovated, KS prop. B is going through an eviction) The realtor said the main issue is whoever did the initial renovations cut a lot of corners and it shows when you go to the property, it looks perfect in pictures but in person not so much. The RE agent said the floors have large gaps, the flooring is bowing in the kitchen, and other problems that buyers notice.

I've talked to realtors about the value of the 2 KS properties and they all say it's going to be hard to get anywhere close to what you paid for those. But I'll cross that bridge when I get there, neither property seems like it will be ready to sell any time soon.


Overall, I wish I had never gotten into the turnkey business it has been very stressful and a huge financial loss.