I feel so grateful when I think about our real estate journey. IT wasn’t easy. The rise of the pricing in the big, short era led me to believe buying a house at that time was a great idea. And… it was. We overpaid. We were under water… we had a ballooning 2nd loan. Fortunately we could afford it. We also had a realtor who did not have our best interests in mind. He advised us not to get an inspection, so when we moved in we found gas and water leaks and then the roof leaked…We survived though.
A few years later we stumbled into watching income property with Scott McGilvery and it peaked our interest in owning an investment property…We met with our accountant that year and asked if she thought it was a good idea…
Well, she said, we love real estate… we put our daughter through college on 1 home… we own 23. So, off we journeyed into investment properties. I guess I wish I’d known how valuable it would be to own real estate.
My 1st year of college a friend of minds dad bought him a home to live in with friends when he first came to college… His dad put up the down payment and they paid rent to my friend. That was 1997. He sold it a handful of years later earning about 300k in equity… paid his dad back the down payment, and then bought a few more multi-unit homes. Imagine what we could accomplish in life if we were all set up like that.
If I could do it over now, I’d have stayed even more aggressive with purchasing homes the past 6 years. If we had stayed the course, we would have been able to capitalize more on the really low interest rates, cash out refi and bought more homes… earning more equity, more debt reduction, and increased value over time. What I’m working on now is to understand our cash on equity and to figure out what our next steps are. Because we have too much money sitting in these homes to keep it there.. So, we’ll be looking to sell and upgrade to 10-15 unit buildings in the next year or so.
Real estate is an amazing asset, especially investment properties We’ll go into all of the reasons why on Oct. 12th with Rich Arzaga, CCIM