The Dark Side of Real Estate

[Joe Splitrock]

Share your darkest experiences in real estate. List your five worst experiences. Here is mine to get started:

- Kitchen fire due to tenant frying chicken on the stove top. Over $10K in damage. It was my first property and first tenant.

- Seller covering up cat pee soaked carpet. Candles during showings and at my walk through masked the smell. Carpet needed to be replaced plus odor blocking primer on the floor. 

- Water in a basement due to a bad sump pump. Wrecked the carpet and took hours of time. 

- Saw a professional tenant on the news that had trashed another landlords property. They applied at my property and I denied their application. This "close call" still leaves me freaked out every time I screened someone.

- Verbally threatened by a tenants boyfriend over a security deposit deduction dispute. It was a series of texts, calls and in person encounters. I caved on most of the cost, because some battles are not worth fighting over a couple hundred dollars.  

[Jay Hinrichs]

to me those are just normal landlord experiences..

I think some of the worse things we deal with is contractors doing crappy work or flat stealing money.

being a lender in 08 meltdown that one was rough.

building a home that was 6 inchs to low and had to raise it up.. BRAND new home that boo boo cost 25k.

framing a house where in you dropped a ball at one end and it runs out the next.. get vertigo in it. ( another builder not me LOL) but he hired cheap unlicensed framing crew.

on the landlord side I have had everything you can imagine.. from suicide to destroying the house.. in one of my storage facilites we woke up one day and someone was living in the unit and had it stacked to the rafters  Hoarder .. LOL.. 

it just goes on and on.. if you landlord long enough or have enough homes your experiences are pretty normal.. and are to be expected.. 

One thing that I liked was I looked at a group of homes in Hattisburg that were all section 8.. this guy built them with concrete floors.. stainless cabinets concrete counters and block walls.. with a drain in the middle of the living room and bathroom.. he did a turn over with a high pressure hose.. fairly indestructible..