Is growing slowly so wrong?

[Michaela G.]

I've been investing in Real Estate for +20 years. Started off doing major renovation on Victorian Homes and then selling, in one neighborhood. Then flipped vacant lots in another neighborhood, where I had to do a lot of research to find heirs of owners. 

When the market crashed I started buying houses, sight unseen, from California, in a neighborhood in Atlanta that I knew well - from the time when I was flipping lots there.  At the time other investors told me that I was being stupid buying in that low-income neighborhood. 

The past few years I've created artist communities , since I have several assemblages. That brought in a completely different tenant pool than the normal tenants in this D neighborhood. And I'm slowly buying a few more houses. 

Overall, there's always this hype in real estate investing that you have to push, push, push and buy, buy, buy - bigger and more and scale it up, up, up. 

Personally, I've always just done things that I enjoyed, instead of pushing myself to do the most I could do. I made enough to have a nice life. I don't see the point of being majorly stressed out for 20 or 30 years, so that you have enough money to retire with lots of toys. I rather enjoy life now. I may get hit by a bus tomorrow - who knows? 

I've always created my own niches, instead of replicating what everyone else was doing. I was renovating Victorian homes, when most investors passed, because there was too much work involved. I flipped vacant lots, when builders didn't want to go through the intricacies involved in tracing the present owners. And I started bringing in artists to my present neighborhood and now deal with different types of tenants and create community within community. I also put in artists into my other, not connected, vacant homes and connect them with the other artists. Having a large properties for potlucks etc where all of my tenants can come and hang out and meet each other, is something nobody can really compete with here, because you can't start it off with 1 house. 

So, I don't have 200 doors, but rather 21 and a few vacant lots, but my net worth is still 7 figures, if I were to sell my properties one at a time right now. But the neighborhood is going crazy right now and investors are buying anything they can. So, holding on for a few years and selling my assemblages to a developer then will definitely get me a nice chunk.

Regardless, I'm fine with buying 1 or 2 properties a year and rather enjoying my life now. I don't feel that it's important to always have the most and be the first. 

Slow and steady is fine with me ;-)