The Creation of a House Monster!

[Roy N.]

I have a 2 1/2 year old who is one of the main reasons I've taken real estate investing beyond the 2-3 properties needed to develop and test our building monitoring and management software.

"Little Guy" has been coming on walkthroughs of buildings since he was four months old. In the first year of his life, he was the proverbial "canary in the coal mine": If we walked into a property he didn't like - he would wail until one of us took him back outside. Coincidence or not, my due diligence would prove his 'judgement' was correct 80% of the time.

Over the past year, walking properties became one of his favourite activities. At first it was all about discovering whether a dog or cat lived there, but now he is actually curious about the properties themselves. He has even found issues that those of normal size might miss - such as the gaping hole in the floor under a set of kitchen cabinets discovered because he saw "kitty" poking his head out from behind a kick-plate {BTW: "kitty" turned out not to be a cat}. He is even on a first name basis with several realtors :) In fact walking houses has become such a thing for him that when we are visiting other people, he has no inhibition about sneaking off to see the house.

Things reached a whole new level today. We were cycling home from daycare when he hollered, from his Charriot, for me to stop. He had seen a realtor sign in the yard of a house that "wasn't there yesterday" and wanted to go and look inside. I explained to him that we cannot simply go and look in houses whenever we want - that we need to make an appointment. He told me "Call John {my buyers agent}, we can wait for him to let us in."

After a complete meltdown and much hollering on the remainder of the trip, we did arrive home and an episode of Dinosaur Train seemed to put the house out of his mind.

However, I'm planning to take an alternate route to the daycare in the morning ... just in-case.