The Stereotypical Landlord

I receive frequent criticism from wanna-be real estate "gurus" who make their living trying to convince gullible newbies that they can get rich "on autopilot". Of course, that means that the newbie can hire everything out and simply sit on their butt while the money rolls in. It's a completely ridiculous idea, yet literally millions of people have wasted money on guru courses that promise riches without work.

ALL of the successful landlords that I know are very involved in their businesses. In fact, I am friends with many multi-millionaires and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM has worked very hard to get where they are.

In my business, I do almost everything, including the management and maintenance. I do that because earning the management and maintenance expenses myself more than doubles my spendable cash each month. It is a great deal and an excellent use of my time. My critics will often have some sarcastic comment like "I'd rather spend my time finding deals than fixing toilets". Of course, that is absolutely ridiculous because it doesn't take much time to "find deals". Let's think about "finding deals for a moment". What could you really do each day to find deals? You could read the classified ads in the local newspaper to see if there are any new ads since yesterday. If you're a slow reader, that might take 2 minutes. Then, you could check the MLS to see if any new properties have been added to the MLS overnight. That might take another 2 minutes. You could drive around your target market area and look to see if any new "for sale" signs have popped up overnight. Depending on the size of your target market area, that could take an hour. Of course, in reality, you probably wouldn't drive through your target area every day. You could even spend an hour licking envelopes everyday so that you could send out a mailing. Even if you did all that every single day, that's about 2 hours a day. As you can see, this whole argument about having time to find deals is totally ridiculous.

Ironically, I find most of my deals by getting out of the house and meeting people in the normal course of my day. I'll chat with the guy in line at Lowes. I talk to neighbors near my rentals as i see them. I talk to city officials when I attend various meetings. I talk to my fellow investors at the REIA. I talk to other landlords at eviction hearings. In short, I tell everyone I know and meet that I buy property, at a big discount of course.

The point of this rambling post is that I actually was the stereotypical "toilet fixing" landlord yesterday! A tenant called to say that the toilet had overflowed and kept running. I stopped at Lowes on the way to the apartment and picked up a new Fluidmaster toilet valve. Unfortunately, when I arrived at the apartment, it became apparent that the problem was a little more involved. This particular toilet has 4 bolts that attaches the tank to the base. One of the 4 bolts had broken and this allowed the water to leak onto the floor. This would still not have been a big job, except that the 3 remaining bolts were severly rusted and I couldn't remove them. So, what should have been a 10 minute job ended up being a 2 1/2 hour job. I ended up using a sawsall to CAREFULLY cut the bolts off. Finally, I got all the bolts off. Then, it was back to the store for the additional parts and once again, back to the apartment to assemble everything. Fortunately, everything went together easily and there were no leaks!

So, yesterday, on that one day, the wannabe gurus were right - I was the stereotypical toilet fixing landlord!