QOTW: What is the funniest thing to happen to you in RE Investing

[Alicia Marks]

With the stress of the holidays looming, I thought it could be fun to share the lighter side of real estate. What are some of the funniest experiences you've had as an investor? How did you handle it? What would you do differently? Did it change how you did business going forward? 

[Todor Ialamov]

I got a phone call from a police inspector letting me know that the night before there was an arm robbery in an apartment of a building I own. Apparently the tenant had a room full collection of Nike Air Jordan worth close to $200K. The robbers got greedy and were caught on their last trip to the third floor.

[Bonnie Low]

We recently looked at a severely run down red-tagged property for sale near our hometown. You can't really see the house from the street because it's down a long driveway and there is bamboo EVERYwhere. I mean like the jungles of Vietnam in a movie. The house is falling down, but the lot itself has potential if you can get rid of all the bamboo. So I said out loud to my husband 'who in their right mind would plant all this bamboo on their property??' to which the neighbor who had apparently been keeping an eye on us leans over the back fence and says 'this place used to be a nudist colony so they planted all the bamboo for privacy.' Well, that explains a lot! Also a good reminder that even if you can't see the neighbors, they may very well be watching you!

[Matt Leber]

My homeowners insurance company asked me to have a tenant get rid of above ground pool that wasn’t being maintained properly. They asked for it to be gone and submit pics.

I asked the tenant to get rid of it. They did. I had my prop manager go take pics for the insurance company. I noticed in the far distance of one of the pics, a few houses down a similar looking above ground pool. I own that house too. On the same insurance company. Gave me a good chuckle. Tenants sold it down the street to my other tenants.

Btw…pool is now gone from both yards. Just adding so I don’t get grilled on here haha

[Michael Williams]

Originally posted by @Alicia Marks: While we were house hacking our first duplex, our tenants in the front house had two pit bulls they'd leave in the backyard. The tenants would leave the food out and it started to attract rats, one night I was taking out the trash and I felt something on my foot, I looked down and a giant rat had crawled across my foot. 

With the stress of the holidays looming, I thought it could be fun to share the lighter side of real estate. What are some of the funniest experiences you've had as an investor? How did you handle it? What would you do differently? Did it change how you did business going forward? 

[Chris Prichard]

Prospective tenant opening comments/questions:

"Can you put the utilities in your name?"

"Sorry I didn't return your call sooner; I thought you were a bill collector."

"Hey--I'm kind of desperate..."

[Nick Pina]

There is nothing like having to rehab a house twice!

This was not funny at the time but now I can find the humor in it. On my second flip, the pipes froze and destroyed our brand new beautifully remodeled home. What makes it worse is that we figured it out on the closing day. We had insurance and it all worked out in the end. I still remember my partner calling me when he walked in that day yelling "Oh God why oh why is this happening to me". We didn't panic and went to work. It was a big test for our partnership and I think we came out better for it. 

[Maurice D.]

Didn't happen to me, but I toured a home rehabbed by a colleague, who went to the same class I went to back in the day.

He was 100% determined to save every single dime and did all the work himself (which is ok, if you know how to do it, and you pay yourself..)  problem was he didn't know jack and probably never got paid..

1) his idea of leveling Kitchen cabinets was to mount them flush to the ceiling.   Cabinets were unreachable for anyone under 6'5"

2) Instead of a Fridge he put in a College dorm sized tiny unit, spacing the lower cabinets according to that width.  No dishwasher.

3) he messed up the clear coat on the sanded flooring, and after a week it was all blotchy with dry spots.

House sat on the market for like a year.

[Don Gouge]

Lady calls wanting to sell her house quickly since she is going thru divorce. Get to house in a nice neighborhood which needs a little work but not much. Lady answers door and soon to be ex hubby is there. Both seem to be mild mannered average people. I look around and lady points out some features of house. Points toward a door and says there is there are the stairs to basement. "There is a storage space and a rec room down there". I head down the steps expecting to see a pool table or bar or a big screen. I open a door and turn  the light on and attacked by black carpet and red walls! I adjust my vision and look around and find hooks and chains on the wall and hooks on the ceiling along with one occupied by a swing. (Not the little tykes type) and other various pieces of "furniture". When I get back upstairs I am super careful to not mention "submitting" an offer.

[Chris Svendsen]

In the moment it happened wasn't funny but by end of day all I could do was laugh.  Was at end of a full year of renovating a house.  Was doing final inspections with county and he is testing all the plumbing.  No bid deal as we be using plumbing entire renovation. As we go through house we head to basement.  Being old house I had a dehumidifier setup to run and empty into sump pump. We heading down stairs to basement he say "oh you got water issues!" I couldn't see around him but was saying no we run that just to protect the basement as assumed he was talking about dehumidifier in basement.  He stops on stairs and turns, "no you got water issues!" and moves to the side so I can see. I see a geyser of water erupting from the basement floor drain.  Nice smelly sewer water.  All this less than 6 hours from the buyers having their home inspector showing up.  As I finish up with inspector I get on phone, 3 hours later plumber there snaking lines.  At very end of line when about to go into main sewer he pulls out 4 paint rags.  No idea how they got there but he pulls them out.  Funnies part was watching him with his bear hands pulling the once white, now black, rags apart amazed they made it into the system.  Somehow I managed to keep my lunch in my stomach.  After seeing him out, without shaking his hand, I ran to the store, bought rags, gloves and cleaners and disinfected everything in basement.  Got done and out of house a hour before clients inspector showed up.  At end of day I sat at home just chuckling as I drank a beer just thinking about the plumber sitting their analyzing the rags amazed they were in the line and just using his hands pulling them apart in all that filth.  Still gives me shivers thinking about it.  

[Greg M.]

Touring a potential property to purchase and the agent points out one of the features... toys in the shower. Proudly proclaims that the place is all set up for watersports if we're into that and maybe they'd leave them. Um, no we aren't and even if we were, we'd not be using secondhand toys. 

New tenant who asked me if it was OK if he BBQed on the balcony. Hey, if you can find a balcony, you can BBQ on it. His unit had no balcony.

[Laura Johnson]

3 years ago, we bought a our sfr to house hack. The basement had been finished by the previous owners who didn’t know Jack about remodeling.   As we walked into each and every room in the basement with our home inspector, he said aloud, “this room is a butcher job”. 

We ripped down the ceiling drywall so that we could add rock wool insulation for noise dampening. We are about half way through with the great room (~400 sq ft) when the drywall suddenly became very heavy duty and wouldn’t rip down. Turns out they installed 6 sheets of 3/4” osb board to the ceiling. Textured it to look like drywall. That was a beast to remove because all the screws were full of mud so we had to cut it down. 

In the windowless storage room they had built a second wall all around the current walls and then glued large office ceiling tiles to all the walls. AND, they left a power strip plugged in to the original wall, so it can’t be unplugged now because it’s plugged in INSIDE the wall! 

They claimed to have a kitchen in the basement. It was an oven, fridge and utility sink with an ikea bookcase turned sideways and screwed to the wall. They did go the extra step to add crown molding to the top of the bookcase. You know, trying to class the place up a bit with that crown. 

We added a laundry closet in what was a weird shaped closet that had hot and cold water lines already that were capped off.  We later found out from a neighbor that those lines used to go to a urinal for the college aged son to use. But mind you, there was only 1 set of lines, so there was one urinal and zero sinks for hand washing!!