Doing Real Estate Deals for Cash vs. Loans, Hard Money, JV, Wholesaling, etc.

[Seung Lee]

I wanted to hear from veteran investors on here whether I'm being shortsighted and costing myself opportunities and money.

My history is that I did about 200+ units of condo-conversions back in 2003-2008 and then lost a good part of my shirt (at least the sleeves, leaving me a nice wifebeater tanktop), and came back by starting a property management company and purchasing properties here and there for buy and hold (and manage, since I have a management company).

There is a lot of talk of wheelin' and dealin' on here and lots of bird-dogging and wholesaling, and flipping real estate.  Maybe I'm getting long in the tooth, but I don't know where everyone is finding such plethora of great deals that they are happy to just take a little bit of the pie, when they can take the whole pie.  Isn't it better to just eat the whole pie every once in a while?  It seems like a lot less work to me.

What I mean is, if you can find a house that is worth $200,000 fixed up and you can buy it for $100,000 purchase + $30,000 rehab cost, why would you flip it for $200,000, pay closing costs and maybe net $50,000-60,000 and pay income tax for it and start over?  Isn't it just easier and less work to rent it out for $1500-2000/month and get around 10-15% return, cash on cash and then cash out years later when you are ready to put the cash to use?  And if you really want to take cash out of the deal, just refinance every 5-10 years when the market is favorable.

Am I being too conservative to make it Trump rich?  Reading some of the posts around here, I feel like I'm missing out on the excitement and maybe missing out on some returns, but am wondering if the extra hassle is worth it.

Also, having had partners, and having had deals that soured because I couldn't control what the senior partners did (idiotic things), I vowed never to JV or do any partnerships in business or real estate deals ever again. Am I missing out? I guess it's kind of like never getting married after a bad 1st marriage, but is the extra hassle worth it? - the real estate deals, not the 2nd marriages...

Thanks for your thoughts.