I am a relatively new to Real Estate Investing. I recently found BiggerPockets and wish I had found it years ago. It would have saved a lot of heart ache and money!! I used some inheritance money to do my first flip. I bought a very cheap condo in a horrible part of town and fixed it up in about 3 months mostly on my own. I was very lucky and the first person to look at it purchased for my $1,000 under my asking price. I made about $15k on this and thought it was easy. This started me down a path of bad moves.
I paid too much for my 2nd flip and shortly after I started on it found all of the termite damage and plumbing problems and on and on. By the time I was done with it I was about $5000 invest over what I could even sell it for. So I decided to rent it. I had pretty good luck with renting it, but did not really understand the true cash flow formulas. So what I thought was doing pretty good was really pretty bad.
Over the next 3 years I bought 5 more single family houses with the plan to rent them out. The first 3 I over paid and over improved. The next two I did much better with purchasing and improving and was getting decent rents.
I also bought a commercial building in a small town close to use that had one store in it and a lot of storage. I wanted it for storage, however I ended up remodeling the whole building, and rented it out and did not end up with any storage. After I got it all rented I found out I am drastically undercharging on rents and locked in for at least a year on each one.
Anyway between buying too high, over improving and being too kind hearted I got myself in a horrible mess financially and emotionally. I do not have the personality of a Landlord. I was letting everyone walk all over me and taking to long between renters.
After everything came crashing down lately with the stress and money and my wife about ready to shoot me I am finally stepping back and reevaluating everything. I just turned over all of my rentals to a property manager today, that was like a load of bricks and monkeys off my back. Now I am going through all of my properties financials with another investor to see what my true cash flow is with each property to see what I need to get rid of and where I need to tweak rents.
I am also listening to all of the podcasts here and am up to 20 now as well as listening to the new ones when they come out. Reading as much as I can. My problem is getting to excited about too many things I think are a good idea. Trying to relax, educate myself more and position myself financially so I can get a plan in place to move forward with over the next year. Still a lot to clean up, but excited about the opportunities!!
