Not a Real Estate Success Story

[Nick Rutkowski]

We see everyone posting their success stories about their properties, here’s my “not successful” real estate story. I hope someone can take away experience from this.

My girlfriend and I bought a 4plex a few years ago. We bought the property and an existing land lot for 85k altogether. Total rehab from the foundation to the roof and everything in between.

Her and I fixed the whole place by ourselves, day in and day out until all the units became rent ready. We spent about 50k getting this monster house livable again.

We decided it’d be a good time to implement our exit strategy and move forward to our next house. We went to our bank and asked to refinance into another loan. Bank said yes and we began the process.

Few weeks later we got our appraisal back. We only made 16k in equity! Ouch. Not what we were hoping for. Far from.

Am I surprised? No. Am I disappointed? Yeah but that’s fine. What did I learn? A lot.

Going in to our next deal, we decided not to take on a huge rehab but find decent properties with easier rehabs. We’ll try to get places with more rent ready units.

Not all hope is lost, my girlfriend and I have a new running joke about this monster house, it’s our new “tax shelter”. What doesn’t make you money, off sets your profits! Right?