A car literally drove through my rental house - a happy ending

[Tim Bradley]

This story is almost too crazy to believe but its all 100% true.  This was my wife and my 1st investment property.  Technically when she moved in with me we started renting her townhouse she owned out but the property that this "incident" happened to  was bought as a true buy and hold rental.  The numbers on the purchase and rental aren't super important here.  Lets just say it was cash flowing nicely and we had no tenant issues.  One day I get a call from my PM telling me a car had driven through my house.  No exaggeration, a car had literally driven through our house.  The house is on a 90 degree turn in a neighborhood and apparently the driver missed the turn.  It wound up being a 92 yr old woman who basically just shouldn't have been driving anymore.  So the car drove through the house, through the screened in porch and then wound up in the lake behind the house.  Luckily no one was hurt and the tenants weren't home.  Thank goodness too since the woman drove over the bed in the master bedroom!  

These are some of the pictures that our PM sent us so that we really understood they weren't exaggerating.   When we got there the fire department was gone and the house had been deemed unsafe until a structural engineer could evaluate it.  As you can see the woman basically took out the master bedroom and the second story was being held up at that point by a single 4x4.  Now we are only about 1 yr into our real estate investing career here and we have officially had the craziest thing possible happen to us.  

Long story short, the woman's car insurance actually paid for all damages, lost rent and the tenants belonging replacement.  In the end we actually came ahead about $3K b/c the repairs were less than expected.  Additionally the market had seriously picked up in just the 1 yr that had gone by since we rented it originally so we were able to raise the rent by $200.  

Finally, the tenants obviously needed a new place to live.  Our PM company was showing them some places near where the "incident" happened.  Coincidentally we had just closed on another rental in that area and it was available.  The tenants took one look at it and declined.  It was also located on a 90 deg turn.  I mean come on, what are the odds of that happening twice?  Still they decided to pass.

So at this point basically nothing phases my wife and I when it comes to tenant issues. We made it through this within our first year of real estate investing and it didn't slow us down a bit. We closed on our fourth SFH last month and are now moving on to trying out the BRRRR strategy.