In learning any trade, art, craft, or skill, it's pleasant to have people to cheer you on. But it's not very useful. It's nice, for example, when your grandma tells you she loves the chair you made. But it's much more useful when your crabby old grandpa says, yeah well the dern thing squeaks every time I sit in it, and here's how you do it better next time.
BP has a lot of cheerleaders, and that's nice. But if people really need to be encouraged, congratulated, and flattered on what they're doing with their money...and if skeptical people who offer criticism are called "haters"... something is badly wrong with the business climate.
Obviously Mr. Picanco is free to invest his money as he sees fit, and best of luck to him, of course. But I'm not sure these deals are as solid gold as he seems to think. I think some of the numbers are unrealistic in the longer term, for one thing. For another, these houses are both in small towns. And as we've seen repeatedly in this country, anything can happen to the economy of a small town, it can happen very quickly, and it ain't always good.
Then there's the whole OOS issue. I know it can be done, because I know a guy who has done it successfully. One guy. He invests in my city from 1100 miles away. And he has spent so much time here that he knows the place about as well as I do, and every waitress and bartender is on a first-name basis with him. He is handy and does a lot of fixup work himself. He knows the neighborhoods intimately, he has bought very very smart and cheaply, and he has built good personal relationships with all sorts of people here. And he knows the metrics here enough to trust that the economy will probably keep chugging along, neither booming nor busting.
That is how you invest OOS, if you must. I don't know a single other guy who is doing it anywhere near as well.
What really surprises me is that people are seeking advice from Mr. Picanco. You know, if you want to learn this trade...and there is a lot to learn...you can go to local meetups. You will meet people who have made a living in RE for 20 and 30 years, and they will gladly share what they know. All Mr. Picanco has done so far is...he has bought two houses. He has not yet shown that he can weather an economic downturn, a factory closing or two, a unit that won't rent, breakins, a stolen AC, vandalism, plumbing leaks, falling gutters, frozen pipes, flooded basements, tenants with pitbulls, tenants with angry felonious boyfriends, tenants who won't pay, property managers who take the money and flee to the Caribbean, and the whole list which runs to so many pages.
In fact, I was about to respond to this thread several hours ago, when I got the strangest phone call about a house we just bought. I had to drop everything and head over there, try to figure out why there was a huge puddle of blood on the floor and at the same time improvise a quick temporary fix for an (unrelated) leaky pipe. It turns out everything is fine, everyone is recovering nicely, and all it cost was my time. But if I had to have that done by an OOS property manager, and a plumber, what do you think that would have cost?
If Mr. Picanco can weather a few years of this sort of thing without going broke or burning out, his advice will be well worth listening to. But at this point he is, no offense, just an optimistic guy...maybe over-optimistic... who has bought two houses, and started a business which may or may not pay off.
And those of you who want to learn the real estate trade, should be learning it not from him, but from the grumpy old guys who've proven that they can make a living at it.
