Overcoming my fears in Real Estate Investing

Hi everyone. This is my first blog post so I'm not really sure if it will come out ok but I'm going to give it a try anyway. (Learn by doing. Right?) I started my investing a little over a year ago. I spent 37 years working for the same company when I lived in NY and was very happy working there. I always felt blessed because I enjoyed going to work everyday and enjoyed the many jobs that I learned to do and did while working there while many of my friends would go to jobs that they hated everyday. I always felt bad for them as this, in my opinion, is not how life is meant to be spent. I thought about investing in Real Estate over the past 30 years but because of being content in my job I was always complacent about investing in Real Estate.

I moved to FL 3 years ago to help my aging parent as they were getting to the point of needing help as they progressed in years. I  got a job doing QC work in a media plant. The QC was basically non existent at this plant so I worked an average of 70 hrs. a week for over a year to bring this plant to an acceptable level of quality. (Almost world class status.) The plant manager rewarded me by hiring his cousin to "help me"  after the plant reach an almost world class status and gave her the QC job after getting the plant to the level it was at. Long story short, I quit my job the day after he gave her the job and decided to try my hand at real estate investing. That is how I got into this business and hopefully will never have to work for anyone else ever again.

My business plan was to buy foreclosures, rehab them, rent them out, finance the properties to pull my initial investment out, and then reinvest into another property. The BURRR process. I pulled money out of my IRA and bought my first foreclosure. It needed mostly landscaping work so I did the landscaping and had the place rented within 2 months. I bought my second house that 3 people inherited but it needed the house wiring to be brought up to 2015 code and none of the children that inherited the house wanted to spend the money to sell the house so no one could get a mortgage on the place. I found out about it and placed an all cash offer on the property but asked for a concession to help me with the expense of the new wiring and bought the house. I had the service upgraded to 2015 standards, did some other minor work on the house and had that rented out in a matter of a couple of months.

Then I decided to try my hand at a flip and bought a condo  that needed major work. I spent 5 months rehabbing the condo but it turned out beautiful. I listed the property in Nov. of last year and received an offer within 2 weeks of it being on the market. We just closed on this condo last week because to the mortgage broker constantly messing up the paperwork. They switch lenders (FHA to USDA0 in the middle of the approval process, didn't turn in the proper paper work, didn't turn in the paperwork at all but said they did which held up the process for almost 3 months. We had 6 addendums to the original contract for extensions. Then the kicker was when we sat down at closing, the money to pay for the condo was never wired to the tile companies escrow account. We all did the paperwork for the closing anyway and the title company just waited to file the paperwork until the money hit their escrow account, the next business day.

In the meantime I bought another condo the needed the entire plumbing system replaced and some cosmetic work. Now that the condo is done,  I'm looking for my next project for a flip. I'm anxious to start on another project and hope to start one soon.

This has been my first year in business for myself. I have learned about the contractors I want to avoid and the ones that I want to do work for me. I also know of one mortgage broker to watch out for. I've also learned a lot about Florida rules and building codes. I plan to do mostly flips this year to earn money to reinvest in the business to build a portfolio of rental properties for a steady income stream as I approach retirement age. I do enjoy this business and plan on building my company into a multi million dollar business.