You Will Fail As A Landlord

It will happen at some point.

It might be something small, it might be something big, but you will fail at some point as a landlord and sorry it’s not an option.

It’s what you do with that failure though that will separate you from the landlords that simply quit after there first bad situation.

As many of you are aware, I have one website that teaches landlords (and tenants) about the eviction process where I’m located (www.AlbertaEviction.com for those that are interested). I have thousands of visitors each month and many of them are landlords who have just gone through their first eviction.

And often they are so disappointed with having to evict a tenant for the first time they are telling me they will be selling their property and it simply baffles me.

What the hell were they thinking and what lesson are they learning? They failed to have the proper tenants in place either through a mistake on their part, or bad fortune and they are taking their ball and going home? Not only did they fail, but they failed to learn and that’s far more depressing.

We all fail.

It’s how we learned to crawl, it’s how we learned to walk, it’s how we learned to run and it’s how we learn to grow. If we quit every time we failed we’d all still be sitting around on the floor in diapers never taking a chance to learn to crawl, walk or run.

Yet here are people who have invested typically their hard earned money into property and becoming a landlord and turn tail once it gets hard. These people are destined to continue failing as they won’t learn from their failures and use it to improve.

The few landlords that I do get to talk to I try to break it down for them.

They’ve just gone through one of the worst problems a landlord faces, the eviction process. They’ve gone through it and they now understand the process which does three things.

First it educates them (yes I am a big proponent of landlord education surprise right?), second it makes them highly aware they don’t want to do this again and leads to better screening, more diligence about their property and a renewed interest in treating their property like a business and third it shows them what they need to do if it ever happens again which takes a ton of fear, uncertainty and doubt (also known as F.U.D) away from being a landlord.

Now that you’ve gone through this and are better educated and informed, is it really the best time to walk away? That is an even bigger failure than going through an eviction.

Learn From Your Failures

Failures are lessons we need to learn from and adapt so we don’t repeat them.

And the more painful the failure the more we should learn to avoid repeating them!

Whether it’s evicting a problem tenant, discovering your property is illegal and is getting shut down, discovering your lease is inadequate or a million other instances or problems that can pop up in the life of a landlord these are all lessons we need to learn from rather than accept as failures.

I’ve failed more than most, but that’s simply by sheer volume, the important part is I try to learn from each failure and not repeat it.

I’ve learned about partners the hard way, I’ve learned about mortgages the hard way, I’ve learned about bad tenants the hard way, I’ve learned what needs to be done when tenants die in your property, what happens when sewer pipes collapse at your property and so much more.

Some of the problems were out of my control, some could have been avoided I learned after the fact, but I learned from all of these examples and a multitude more. Many of these lessons I now try to share through these articles and posts so you too can avoid them.

So it’s your choice, you can fail and quit, or you can embrace failure as an opportunity to improve, to rebuild and to come out better than ever. Just make the right choice!