"#2: Prospective resident calls about a pretty affordable three bedroom in Buffalo with some off-street parking(two shared spaces for three residents.)

welcome melissa. i am from buffalo, ny, originally from grand rapids michigan. i know where lansing is and have been there several times. please feel free to ask any questions along your way and good luck to you. 

hi richard. yes, you can " loose your ***" in this game. making a wrong move can be costly. but making a mistake can also be a learning lesson too. pick yourself up and move on. do the best you can with the bad investment and move on. detroit is a crappy city, but every city has its bad investment areas. what you and others here really need to do to keep this from happening again is to find a mentor in the area(s) you wish to invest in. give them a little cash to go look at the prospective investment for you. if you spend $100 to find out that it is a bad investment, well, you learned something. it sure is a lot better than loosing $30k. i live in the buffalo, ny area. although i have been here for only 13 years, i know the area pretty well. if you or anyone on BP is interested in investing here, let me know, i would be happy to look at a property for you or give you advice on a particular area. 

hi karen. you are in a tough market. sure, here in new york, i am in buffalo by the way, you can assign a house. thats cool for quick flips. finding them is another challenge. if you are not getting results from the method you are using, change the method. i drive around looking for distressed properties. i have gotten so good at it, i could spot them a mile away. you would be amazed how motivated most of these people are to sell these places. here is a little secret i stumbled upon last year. the feds put a stop to so many foreclosures hitting the market and hurting the market a few years ago. so, they limited the banks amount of foreclosures that they could market. consequently, the banks chose only the higher dollar deals they had on their desks. who wouldn't?

I've spoken with the postal workers at two post offices, and neither knew what this service was - and both said "we don't do that".

Not a huge deal over a handful of units, but who is going to collect from the other owners and what happens when it is destroyed again.The Postal service makes the decision on cluster boxes vs individual unit delivery - has to do with the route and efficiency.

I am currently in the process of buying a 3 unit rental in the Buffalo New York area.  

It's why I keep the postal caveat in and I've also given one tenant a break by waiving her rent one month (she was in the hospital and out of work for nearly three weeks), and allowing her to add $100 to the rent for the next seven months to catch it up with no additional penalties. 

I've thought about not renewing but my main hesitation is that while this is a beautiful unit finished to very nice standards, this is still a detached mother in law suite without it's own postal address which means it doesn't have it's own mailbox, and that one thing might automatically skew the potential applicant pool.

I did send the postal mail letter and plan to drive up an evening this week.