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Another Landlord Down – When You’re Tired of Being A Landlord

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What Would Make You Quit Being A Landlord?

Would You Quit Being A LandlordAs you gain knowledge being a landlord you do it two main ways, through good experiences and through bad experiences. As a landlord bad experiences can be problems with tenants, lenders, insurance or even neighbours.

It’s one of those bad experiences that drove another landlord out of the business.

As many of you know, I help landlords in my area (Alberta) get through the process of evicting tenants. It’s knowledge I’ve gained through many bad experiences!!

One way I help is I’ve created an easy to follow step by step guide that walks landlords through not just the eviction process itself, but what to expect along the way. I really take the unknown out of the situation for landlords and give them confidence to get through an eviction.

Confidence they didn’t have before.

Now I’ve sold a lot of these guides over the years, we’re talking hundreds!! And I’ve only ever had to do a handful of refunds. So whenever someone asks for a refund I get curious.

Half of the time I know they’ve just taken advantage of my refund policy and the other few occurrences they’ve had very valid reasons. Well I had another refund request this week…

And the reason for the refund? Well the tenant left before the landlord could start the eviction. And he left a ton of damage behind. And he’s tired of being a landlord so he’s quitting…

Another landlord down.

Now it’s too late for this fellow, but the question comes up, could it have been avoided? And more importantly would it make YOU quit?

Be Prepared

You will have problems, challenges and bad experiences as a landlord. Solving them and getting through them will differentiate you from being a landlord who simply quits when the going gets tough or worse yet has to quit.

Now I’m not saying this particular individual gave up too early, I don’t have enough of the details I just know there is an important lesson here.

Unprepared landlords have fewer options to recover, fewer options to get them through tough situations and most often few or zero reserves to deal with a financial hit like lost rent or larger repairs.

If you want to survive the bad along with the good you need to be prepared.

This requires setting aside cash reserves to deal with bigger expenses, it involves understanding eviction rules so you can get tenants out quickly when necessary and it involves understanding potential financial, insurance and other pending challenges.

So really it involves being prepared and educated! And that’s the important lesson!

If you go blindly in thinking you will become wealthy by just buying and holding you may get a big surprise along the way. A surprise that can set you back significantly if you’re not careful.

Be prepared to not just survive when times are tough, but to thrive!

Today’s question, could you survive if you had a $2,000 hit against your rental property? A $5,000 hit? what about a $10,000 loss? Would you be forced to sell or could you make it work?

Leave me a comment below and share your strategy or plan during a bad experience with others. Also please share this with other friends and landlords you know so they can start thinking about being prepared!

Standing Out From The Crowd

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Or Better Yet, Hanging With a Like Minded Crowd

Stand out from the crowdDo your “friends” visibly start drawing back when you start talking about your rental property?

It used to happen to me all the time when I first became involved with Real Estate and the problem wasn’t them, it was me.

You see, I didn’t understand at the time that I was simply talking a different language, a language they didn’t care to learn about and that involved concepts they couldn’t wrap their heads around.

Things like good debt versus bad debt, accruing assets versus liabilities and long term goals versus working for the weekend. Yet I continued to babble on to anyone that would initially listen.

Eventually I started to see that people were looking to avoid me talking about Real Estate and I slowly became wiser about it. So rather than talk to people who’s entire goal during the week was to get to Friday so they didn’t have to work, I looked to hang around people with similar goals and aspirations.

This involved participating in Real Estate investment groups, meeting up with other like minded folks and moving forward as a group rather than being isolated and standing out from the crowd. Oh what a difference.

How Quickly We Forget

The challenge with being a full time or even part time Real Estate investor or landlord is you need to make an effort to find these people who are following a similar path.

Working from home or traveling from one property to another isn’t like going to a job and being surrounded by your coworkers. I’d seemed to forget about this as I often find myself sitting at my computer for days on end. I’m getting stuff done, but I wasn’t hanging out with people who could help inspire me.

I was reminded of this over the weekend as I was invited out for dinner by a fellow Real Estate investor I had assisted through some challenging times over the last several months and she brought along several other investors.

What I expected to be an hour long evening, possibly even 90 minutes, ended up being three and a half hours of sharing stories and tales of our experiences as landlords and investors and it was a fabulous evening.

And it was also a lesson!

That lesson for me was, it’s easy to get wrapped up in your day to day events, but make time to get together with like minded people. Just like I used too!

The lesson for you, is for you to find other investors, landlords and Real Estate folks who you can talk to, who you can bounce ideas off of and who you can grow with. I enjoy receiving all the emails with info from many of the readers telling me where they are from, how they got started and what their aspirations are, but you need to find other local folks you can also share your stories with and to help reinforce what you’re doing.

It can and will make a huge difference to you, trust me on this!

Are you a member of a Real Estate Group, Investors Group or even a mastermind group? Tell me about it in the comments below and share with us how it’s helped you or what you’ve learned!

Landlord Overwhelm

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Landlord overwhelm doesn't last forever

Have you been through a little landlord overwhelm yourself? You know that feeling when it just seems like this landlord business is a bit too much for you and the stress of the situation will never end?

If you have, you’re not alone as this feeling hits just about every landlord at some point and it usually occurs when we’re going through a new experience. A new typically unpleasant experience, like say your first eviction? Or maybe working your way through a rental property insurance claim?

I  know these can be overwhelming as I’ve gone through both of them and I understand that feeling of confusion, stress, frustration with the system and yes even a little fear.

If you’ve avoided it great, if you’re one of those that never get stressed greater yet, but for those of you are already getting nervous thinking about a situation my above examples, I have a couple thoughts.

Landlord Overwhelm Can Be Temporary

First, the overwhelm is only temporary. It might seem like it’s taking forever at the time, but trust me, it’s temporary.

Second, the knowledge and the experience you gain should be looked at as a positive. Initially it may not seem so positive, but if you go through a similar experience again it is much easier the second time. It’s going to be far less confusing and much less overwhelming.

Over the last couple weeks this has been more apparent to me than ever as I’ve talked to several people going through overwhelming situations. The irony is these have all been very smart people, but people going through a new less than fun experiences.

So all I did was add some perspective.

The one person is a fairly successful Real Estate investor and she’s going through a difficult eviction. I just pointed out the end goal (getting the tenant out) and how much more diligent this will make them as a landlord. It’s turned the experience from a nightmare (and the tenant was a nightmare) into a learning experience and an overall positive.

Landlord overwhelm and stress is only temporary

The second individual, also quite successful, was having a challenge in a new area they weren’t familiar with. I reminded them that many many many properties ago, their first purchase was also overwhelming, now it’s a walk in the park! With this new challenge, once they moved past the learning curve and looked back in a year the initial stress and overwhelm would be almost comical.

Sometimes when you’re feeling a heavy case of landlord overwhelm, you simply need to step back, take a big picture look at the experience and realize that while it currently feels like it’s too much, in a month, maybe six months, maybe two years down the road, if you look back you’ll realize it was just a hiccup along your path to landlord success.

Have you been stressed or overwhelmed as a landlord? How did you cope? Were there positives if you look back now at the situation? Leave me a comment below and tell me how you dealt with it!

If you’re going through landlord overwhelm, you’re not alone. We’ve all been there. It might take additional action, maybe talking with other landlords or acquaintances, but you can get through it!

If you know any landlords (or anybody for that matter!) who are stressed already, be sure to share this with them! And remember think big picture!

 

 

Becoming A Landlord – Is It Worth It?

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Becoming a landlord seems to happen to many people by accident, yet for others it’s part of a their plan.

Or as it happened in my case, it was an accident that I became a landlord and then it became part of a greater plan!

Is becoming a landlord worth it?

The question of whether it’s worth it though can be a whole new can of worms.

It seems many of the accidental landlords don’t believe it’s worth becoming a landlord, but rather that it’s something that has been forced on them. Their mindset from the beginning is that it’s a short term situation, that they aren’t going to enjoy it and that it’s going to be a negative experience.

For them it’s not worth it, it’s just a means to an end.

They’re also the ones likely to tell people how Real Estate is a bad investment.

In other cases some accidental landlords may initially look at becoming a landlord as a short term solution, but after a bit of time (and with the right tenants!), their view of the situation changes. This describes me by the way 8′].

They see some positives to the situation, they enjoy providing homes for people and they start to see some long term possibilities.

This type of landlord describes many of the people I hear from on this site and in various other spaces. They are also my favourite types of landlords as they have the capability of looking at the situation and evolving as time goes on.

Becoming A Landlord Can Be Worth It

For them becoming a landlord is definitely worth it and typically rewarding.

Finally at the far end of the spectrum we have the dedicated investor.

The Real Estate investor who becomes a landlord as part of their long term plan. They understand Real Estate can be a great method of building wealth and steady income and they also understand that they need to become landlords to achieve their investment goals.

Now many of these folks eventually transition to moving out of managing the properties themselves and instead depend on property managers or staff to deal with it, but for them becoming a landlord and learning the ropes initially is definitely worth it.

So, Should YOU Become a Landlord?

So what are your thoughts, is it worth it?

I understand many of the responses I’ll get here will be biased towards the positive, but I’d love to hear from you with a comment below. Is being a landlord worth it to you? And maybe more telling was it always worth it, or did you evolve to that stage?

The Myth of Passive Income From Real Estate

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Passive income from Real Estate is only partially trueAre you familiar with the myth? The Myth of living an easy life by getting passive income from Real Estate?

It’s a pretty common theme in many of the Real Estate investing books, but it’s not reality.

To be successful in Real Estate, especially in a landlord, you need to put time and energy into your property or properties.

Don’t get sold on the idea that owning Rental Property is entirely passive, it simply isn’t.

You need to schedule property inspections, you’ll need to show properties, you’ll need to screen tenants and you’ll need to take calls form your tenants when there’s issues. Now some folks will jump in and say that’s why I have a property manager, to do all that for me!

That’s fantastic, but now you still have to manage your manager! Just because you’ve hired someone else to look after it doesn’t mean it’s entirely passive.

You’ll still want to keep an eye on your local economy so you have an idea what’s happening with rents, you’ll still want to monitor your monthly reports from your property managers to ensure you’re getting good service, you’ll still need to prepare all your tax paperwork and receipts for tax time.

In the end it’s just not entirely passive.

Partially Passive Income From Real Estate

Now I’m not trying to say it’s not all bad. You can maintain your own rental properties or manage your property managers and get partially passive income from Real Estate.

To do this though, you’ll want to make sure you have systems, you have the right people lined up and you understand it’s not quite like you may have been led to believe.

It might require networking with other like minded landlords so you have support if you do go away, it might require having a ton of contacts for repairs and maintenance and it definitely requires the right mindset.

The mindset that even if I have to work a few hours this week on my property, it’s still generating income every minute it’s occupied, it’s still getting paid down every month I make a mortgage payment and understanding if I pay off that mortgage I have steady income flowing in each and every month.

So get over the passive part and start thinking about how you can set up your property so it runs smoothly, systematically and with minimal work by you.

Your thoughts? Is your rental property passive or do you have to still put soem time and energy into it most months? Leave me a comment below, share this on Facebook, LinkedIn or your other social networks and lets discuss how passive Real Estate really is.

Light At The End Of The Tunnel – Rental Property Challenges

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Light at the end of a tunnel - dealing with rental property

Out of the blue your little rental property throws you a curve ball.

Maybe it’s the tenant who started a grow-op in your property that the police just informed you about.

Maybe the hot water tank died last week and now suddenly this week the furnace has quit.

Maybe the great tenant you’ve had for five years suddenly gives notice and you’re short of time to find a new one.

At the time, any of these situations could become a huge problem. And don’t get me wrong they can be problems, but they’re only temporary problems and rather than getting caught up in the problem, you need to focus on the solution and the light at the end of the tunnel.

Many of these challenges or issues you can’t control, so deal with what you can. If you focus on what’s out of control (like the problem tenant who you can’t control, or the broken tank that lasted 20 good years) you’ll lose focus on what’s really important.

Life as a landlord isn’t always easy, perhaps that’s why so many people feel the need to tell me how they could never be a landlord. Maybe though, they just don’t have the viewpoint long term educated landlords do.

By this I mean if you focus on the here and the now and the overwhelming challenge immediately in front of you, like a problem tenant, or a grow op or a broken appliance, you miss the big picture.  Part of that big picture includes the rental property that’s getting paid down by your tenants, the equity that’s growing in the property and the steady stream of income coming your way for years to come.

Think about that light at the end of the tunnel, think about creating solutions and don’t let the issues you can’t control dominate your life.

Have you let problems take over your property rather than finding solutions and moving forward? If so, leave a comment below, share the article with the other landlords you know and let us know how you moved forward!