All Forum Posts by: Joey English

I’m often asked when talking to aspiring real estate investors what a “full timer’s” daily schedule consists of. So far my reply has not been that we push computer buttons for 10 minutes each day, in order to make a bazillion dollars a day while enjoying umbrella drinks on exotic beaches. I say that because that’s how infomercials portray us. My experience, however, has been… well let me tell you about today.

This morning I was startled awake at 6 a.m. to an amazingly loud alarm clock. That’s because my four-year-old likes to experiment with the volume knob. Being startled awake from my precious few hours of sleep (said 4-year-old had a cough all night) didn’t start me out on my A game.

I happily greeted my morning coffee and headed toward my home office.

The first thing I needed to do was work on rental applications. We have a few houses on market right now, and we’re sifting through potential renters trying to find a good tenant. We had already identified a few who were out of the running, and I needed to notify them they didn’t get the house.

As I sent out those emails, I noticed a letter in my inbox that looked like a hot lead. When you see a hot lead in today’s market, you stop what you’re doing and investigate it right away. For me, this meant I needed to jump in the shower, choke down some breakfast and get over there before anyone else.

Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, except I had a closing for a flip we were buying at 11 a.m. that I needed to prepare documents for -which of course, I hadn’t started. Not to worry. I took a lightening fast shower, ate breakfast and was on site to look at the property before 8 a.m.

When I say you have to stop what you’re doing, I mean it. By 9:30, I was getting calls from agents telling me about the house. Like I said, it was a hot listing. All the agents in town had just gotten to their offices and were calling all their contacts to tell them about the lead. Just another instance of the early bird getting the worm.

Next, I made my way back to the office to work on the closing documents. This closing was a subject-to deal, which is where the seller’s mortgage stays in place after the sale. These deals take more paperwork than a traditional closing, and I had about 45 minutes to make sure I dotted my i’s and crossed all my t’s before I headed down to Lee Perkins’ Office.

We finished down there by noon, which was great because I needed to get by the bank and be up in Calhoun to show a house by 1 p.m. This gave me about 45 minutes to call all the people who had left messages while I was in the closing.

I stopped by my house to take lunch, and immediately got a call from my project manager who needed keys for one of the three rehabs we have going. I literally almost swallowed an avocado whole and headed right back out the door so we could get a bid from a painter.

Finally, here I am at the end of the day writing this article. (I have to leave again in a few minutes to go to another property, btw) Needless to say, an investor’s day is always slap full, so realize if you’re going to go full time, it is Full Time. Regardless of whether you start your day with enough sleep, being an investor is a lot of work, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

You may be thinking that “Happy New Year” is a strange title for this column since we’re in the middle of April. Well it’s not. That’s because I’m talking about the Hebrew New Year. It just started, and we’re currently in the first month, the month of Abib.

The month of Abib is rife with Biblical awesomeness. Yahweh plagued Egypt and brought the children of Israel out of slavery; He parted the red sea and the death and resurrection of our Messiah all took place during this month. Hope and the promise of great things to come has always been at the center of Abib.

Something I love about celebrating the Hebrew New Year is it gives me another opportunity to set goals. Interestingly enough, Abib falls at the beginning of the second quarter. If you’re like most people, this is when you’re either in the thick of working towards the goals you set in January, or you have already let some slip.

If the latter circumstance is true, it’s OK. Goals are meant to give you a destination as well as a point of reference. Once you have a point of reference, you can adjust your course in life as needed in order to reach your destination.

Abib is a fantastic time to revisit the goals you may have set in January and adjust as needed. If you didn’t set any goals, it’s a great time to start.

Before you begin brainstorming about goals, let me challenge you with this poem by Jessie B. Rittenhouse.

“I bargained with Life for a penny, And Life would pay no more, However I begged at evening when I counted my scanty store; For Life is just an employer, He gives you what you ask, But once you have set the wages, why, you must bear the task.

I worked for a menial’s hire, Only to learn, dismayed, That any wage I had asked of Life,
Life would have paid.”

When you’re identifying and writing down your goals, you’re negotiating with life on what your wage will be. Make sure you dream big during this process because life will give you what you ask of it.

Now that doesn’t mean all your goals should be huge. On the contrary, you need some small and some intermittent ones, but you definitely need the huge ones. These big goals will help encourage and inspire you on your path to success.

And you need to keep them where you can see them. Take my buddy Mike Hicks for instance. Mike is an awesome guy and a super-successful investor. He got that way by setting good goals, writing them down and looking at them regularly.

The other day I was having lunch with Mike at his office and I noticed he had a poster board hanging by his desk with pictures and inspirational quotes glued to it.

I asked him what the poster was about, and he replied it was a vision board. The pictures, he said, were images of what the end of his goals look like. Seeing them helps him envision what his success will look like. These pictures and quotes encourage and inspire him to keep moving forward. Seeing them daily, not only keeps the goals in the forefront of his mind, but it also proves to him that his goals are attainable.

In essences, this practice gives him hope

Hope is at the forefront of all the stories we read about in scripture during the month of Abib. Remember how Yahweh gave the children of Israel a column of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to look at and to lead them in the right direction? In the same way during this month of Abib, use a vision board to give you hope and lead you to the good things to come as you work towards your goals.

@Mike G., Congratulations. That is awesome!

@Mike G., PM me your email address and see if I can put you in touch with the right people to get you that pamphlet. 

I agree. Normally I wouldn't either. Part of my application asks them what construction skills they possess. This particular one used to be a plumber. 

These are some greats stories Ya'll. It might give you a complex about sitting on the toilet though. lol. 

You often hear tired landlords complaining of midnight calls from their tenants about leaky toilets. We’ve never experienced those calls. That’s because our tenants know that if they call after 5 p.m., they’ll get a response the next day- unless it’s an emergency of course. We’ve received a couple of those late-night calls for things like busted water mains, but they’ve been few and far between.

The issue I’m about to tell you about, though, will probably go down in the record books as wackiest toilet tale of the year.

We got a call about 10 a.m. from a tenant saying something was wrong with their toilet. It was a Monday, and they said the issue had started the previous Friday. They couldn’t get anything to go down when they flushed.

Over the weekend, the tenants had plunged the toilet and had done everything else they could think of to get it to flush. Finally, they pulled the toilet to see if the blockage was in toilet or the sewer line.

When they called that Monday about the issue, they said something was – I quote – “in there.” They have a six-year-old, so naturally my first question was, “Did he flush anything?”

Their answer was no. They really couldn’t describe what they were seeing, so they sent me a picture.

A Glacier Bay toilet combo is $88 at Home Depot. And from what I saw in the picture, I was willing to trade $88 for not having to touch whatever it was that was “in there.”

We got the toilet switched out with no problems and took the old one to a flip we were working on around the corner that had dumpster. Curiosity got the better of me, and once we had the toilet in the dumpster, we decided to break it open to reveal the blockage.

Ya’ll, it was the biggest gray squirrel I’d ever seen.

Somehow that poor thing had gotten into the drain line, possibly through a broken clean out in the yard or through the vent in the roof. Either way, it had been trying to get out. It had made it all the way to the toilet and gotten stuck in the P-trap with its head pointing towards the toilet bowl. It had gotten very close to freedom.

When I told the tenants what we’d found “in there,” the lady of the house let out a shrill yet guttural sound that I can’t replicate with words. Then she had a realization. With a wide-eyed expression, she said, “Could you imagine if I’d been sitting there and that squirrel had come out of the toilet… One of us wouldn’t have made it out of there alive.”

Could you imagine? That poor squirrel never had a chance.

This story has it all: it’s both peculiar, wacky, and is a great lesson in landlording.

First, did you notice how much effort the tenants put into to remedying the problem before they called? That’s because as part of our lease, we offer our tenants a discount on their rent for both paying on time as well as fixing the little things around the house that need doing each month. These tenants knew that, and didn’t hesitate to try and fix the toilet on their own.

Next, they didn’t call in the middle of the night. They called during normal business hours; both of these circumstances are a direct result of the proper training we gave them.

Lastly, we replaced that toilet within three hours of receiving the call. Our tenants do their part, and we make sure to give them great customer service in return.

Training your tenants well and rewarding them for doing the same is best way I know of to make the rental business go smoothly.

As I write this I’m 15,000 feet in the air, courtesy of Delta Airlines, somewhere between Atlanta and Springfield, Mo. I’m on my way to go see one of the strongest and bravest people I know. Her name is Kaleigh, and she’s my little sister.

What makes Kaleigh so brave you might ask? She’s fearless. Well that’s not true. She frets on the inside just as badly as any of us. But then her strength takes over, preventing those fears from beating her into submission. She just looks them in the eye and defiantly marches past them, daring them to get in her way as she continues on her quest of obtaining her dreams.

She has no idea how much I admire her.

This particular story started back in Adairsville when she and her husband, Michael, decided their dream was to move to a little town in Missouri, personally build a log cabin and start their own farm. After a few years of planning, we said our teary-eyed goodbyes as Kaleigh and Michael left Georgia for their property in Missouri that would be the setting where their dreams would play out.

As Michael cut the trees and formed the logs that would become their cabin, Kaleigh worked on growing their collection of goats and chickens. I have to tell you, it was quite a sight to see my five-foot-five, 100 pound-nothing little sister wrangle the goats in, milk them and turn them back out to pasture. I always kid her that she’s the toughest chick I know, but she really is.

As these things often go, the process of working toward their dreams wasn’t easy. The drought took its toll. The crops barely came in, and the free-range chickens couldn’t find enough to eat. They lost an entire herd of goats to a parasite that doesn’t affect goats in Georgia. During those adversities, Kaleigh’s strength took over, and she optimistically soldiered on.

Michael finished their cabin and they moved in. They established a new herd of goats, planted their gardens and settled their chickens in. They even found out there would be a new addition to the family. Things were really looking up.

But then something happened. The baby was born safely, but Kaleigh had some complications revealing that she’d had Lymes Disease since childhood. And with the state of her now weakened immune system, the Lymes quickly progressed to stage 3 -the worst it can get- wreaking havoc on both her body and her mind.

I’m not flying for business, but I wouldn’t call it pleasure either. Kaleigh called back to Georgia asking for help because of the condition the Lymes had put her in. And for my strong little sister to ask for help, I knew things were severe.

When I told her I was coming, she responded, “But Joey, you have to work.”

But the truth is I don’t.

At the get rich quick seminars, they flaunt flashy cars, big houses and expensive vacations trying to tout those things as financial freedom. Not being tied to a job that requires me to be present in order to get a paycheck, however, is what I call freedom. That’s the beauty of rental property. Whether I’m in my home town, or nearly halfway across the U.S., I’m still getting paid.

Because of our rental income, I have the freedom to fly out to help those I love. I’ll be gone for a week. When I get home, Ashley will take my place. That means we’ll have effectively been absent two and half work weeks– yet our monthly income won’t miss a beat.

Can your pay check do that? If not, I’d consider replacing it with rental income.

I was talking to an investor recently about a property tax lien sale. These take place when counties auction off the tax liens that have accumulated due to unpaid property taxes. It’s a good way for local government to recoup some of their lost funds.

For investors, it’s a great opportunity. If you know what you’re doing at the tax sale, you’ll get either a guaranteed 18 percent return on investment or end up with a property. With banks accounts offering less than one percent interest, a worst case scenario of 18 percent ain’t bad.

The investor I was talking to said he’d never participated in the sale but that he’d watched the last one as he was waiting for the foreclosure auction. He said he couldn’t believe how many people showed up and how emotional they could get.

He told a story about two guys who got carried away. They were bidding on a lien where the property lay between their two personal residences. Most of the time, a tax lien is only two or three years old, so the opening bid is often only a few thousand dollars. He said these guys started at $5,000 and ended, faces all red with visibly bulging forehead veins, at $40,000.

I’ve seen things like this happen at auction before. Because of that, I’m very careful to leave my emotions at home and rely only on my predetermined numbers when I head to the courthouse each month.

Something happened this week that reminded me to keep my emotions in check no matter where I’m going for the deal. The owner of a house in Dalton contacted me and said he had a property he needed to sale quickly. He said he owned it free and clear but that it needed some work. That’s music to my ears.

When I went to meet with the seller and inspect the house, I found “needing some work” was an understatement. In one bathroom the tub was sinking into the floor. In the other bathroom I could see daylight under the toilet. The subfloor was rotted under both doors, there was trash everywhere and don’t get me started on what I saw with the plumbing.

The reason the owner wanted to sell was because the previous tenant had trashed the house, and he didn’t have the money to fix it. He was also undergoing cancer treatments which were going to be canceled if he didn’t pay some of his bills by the end of the week. He was hoping to sell this house for enough to bring him current on his medical bills.

My heart went out to him. Because of the property condition, I told him I’d have to talk the purchase over with my wife. At home I showed Ashley a video. When she saw its condition, she gave me an emphatic “No!”

Would you believe I tried to haggle with her? I started listing all kinds of reasons why this house might just be a deal. But I hadn’t told Ashley the guy had cancer. That kept her from being emotionally affected, allowing her to easily see this was a bad idea. Flat out, it would cost too much in an area where the rents wouldn’t support it.

Needless to say, we didn’t do the deal. I’m reminded of what my main teacher Bill Cook told me, “Some of the best deals are the ones you never do.”

There’s a second part to this story. The next day I went to look at a house with a similar seller situation. We bought it for just a little bit more than we would’ve paid for the other property. The difference was this one was in way better shape, the rents would support it and I’d relearned to take my emotions out of it.

A strong fence makes for good neighbors:

The prospect of renting to friends and family is something that comes up from time to time. Some people like to steer clear of that practice because of the potential damage it can do to relationships. I’m normally one of those people because our relationships are too important to put in jeopardy. That being said, we’ve done it in the past – both successfully and unsuccessfully.

This topic came up when I was talking to a couple who’s planning to rent a property that adjoins theirs to some friends. The conversation was a really good reminder about what you should and shouldn’t do in order to rent to a friend and not lose the friendship. First, let me tell you what we did wrong and then how we fixed it moving forward.

We had a friend who was moving to town and needed a place short term. After dinner one night, we sat down and laid out an agreement. Basically the friend would receive discounted rent; this was to keep costs low so they could have a down payment to buy the house they were looking for. In addition to the low rent, they were required to do some maintenance on the house. We set a term on the agreement and they moved in.

The first couple of months everything was great, but then the maintenance responsibilities started getting neglected, and payments began to be late. They eventually stopped.

When this happened, Ashley and I pulled out the agreement to see what we should do. That’s when it hit us like a ton of bricks: in our haste to help, we hadn’t drawn up a true lease. What we did was make an agreement with a list of obligations that didn’t define any recourse should those obligations not be honored.

Because we were dealing with a friend, we didn’t think about defining what would happen should things go sour. We didn’t think we had to – and it nearly cost us the relationship.

Moving forward, the best advice I got on this subject came from my buddy Mike Tarpey and again from my main teacher Bill Cook.

Bill put like this: anytime you enter into a business relationship with a friend, you should draw up your agreements as if you don’t know each other. Taking your friendship bias out of the equation will help you both clearly define your expectations of what will happen if things go well or if they go sour.

Tarpey told me he never has a problem renting to friends. That’s because he and his friends have a frank conversation before the arrangement begins. He tells them something like, “Renting houses is how I make my living. This agreement we’re making is a bunch of promises. I’m promising to give you a nice place to live and to take care of my landlord duties while you live here. You’re promising to do all the things a tenant is supposed to do that are set forth in this lease. I plan on keeping my promises, and I want you know that if this ruins our relationship, it will not be because I broke my promise. It will be because you chose to break yours.”

The wisdom Tarpey shared in that conversation is enormous. The point of a lease is to clearly define expectations for both parties. It lays out what the landlord expects of the tenant, it tells the tenant what the landlord will do for them, and it also lets both parties know what will happen if either of them doesn’t do what they promise.

In the case of the couple I mentioned earlier, the lease is a fence that clearly defines boundaries and expectations between friends. And as the husband so eloquently put it, for them, “a strong fence will make for good neighbors.”