First Rental Property

I felt like throwing in the towel today folks…

As real estate investors, we have our great days and we have our, not so great days.

Some days you feel like an absolute genius, whereas other days you fear that your house of cards just may come crashing down on you.

The key to success with real estate investment is perseverance.  We hear that with everything though.  People tell us that we got to ‘stick to it’ if we want to succeed.

Yes, that may be true in some situations, but not all. I think that this is an old school way of thinking that does not necessarily always apply to the younger generations.

However, for the most part, if you ‘stick to it’ with real estate investing, you will win big.  After all it was our good friend Andrew Carneige that so eloquently said,

“90% of millionaires become so through owning real estate”

So, if real estate investing is such a ‘sweet deal’, why do people end up quitting after a short period of time?  Why don’t they ‘stick to it’?

Well for starters,

1)  It is not easy.

People think that it is very glamorous, but there is work involved with every rental property that you own.  Often people get the false impression that once they have purchased a rental property, all of the hard work is over. They think that the property goes up in value, and then you eventually sell it.

Although, that might be the eventual outcome, there is a lot of other work that goes into it.  This work involves, finding and screening tenants, overseeing repairs and maintenance, conducting regular inspections, dealing with any potential issues with the property and/or tenants.

Another one of the biggest reasons that people end up bailing on real estate investment, I believe, is because of,

2) Frustration

Wow, was I frustrated today!  Read this story, and tell me honestly if you would be frustrated at this.  Place your comment at the end of this article.  I would love your feedback.

Okay, so it all started in September of this year when one of my properties went vacant.  The tenants were really great people so I was sad to see them go.  Whenever there is a turn over with my tenants, both myself and my tenants contact the respective utility companies and have them switch the utilities back into my name, until there is a new tenant who ends up moving into the property.  Once the new tenant moves into the property, they switch the utilities into their name.  Simple enough, right?  Well, that’s what you would think…

The tenant and myself called the utility company in order to let them know of the upcoming move.  I usually always follow up with the utility companies about a week after the initial request in order to make sure that the request was processed.

As a result, I called in a week later in order to see if the change had been made.  When I called in, they said that no change was made, and that the utility bill was still in my tenant’s name. So,  I kindly asked them to make the change again.

Having depleted confidence in this utility company, I phoned in a couple of days later to make sure that the change had been made.  Sure enough the change was not made.  So I then asked them for the third time to kindly make the change, and ensure that the bills were no longer in my tenant’s name, rather that they were now in my name.

Guess what happened when I called in a few days later to check to see if the change was made?

You guessed it.  No change.

At this point I obviously realized that the people that I was talking to either did not care what they were doing, or there must have been some sort of gap in the training of these people, as they were not able to process this change for me.

After I called in for the 6th time and no change was made when I checked in a few days later, I physically went to one of the head offices of this utility company to see if I could talk to someone there that would be able to make this change.

I was told that there was no one there that would be able to help me, but I was given the telephone number for the ‘Office of the President’.  Sounds impressive, right?  Well not really, especially since I called the ‘Office of the President’, 3 more times to request the change.  The first time I called, I did not get a call back.  The second time I called, I talked to some guy that was getting confrontational with me (great customer service, eh?!) and then the third time I called they said that they would make the change but I never got a call back.

I did some of my own independent research and found out that a portion of this company got outsourced to another company. So, being the resourceful individual that I am,  I called this other company today, and they were much more helpful. The first person that I talked to was able to answer my questions properly.

It turned out that my information was not switched over at all by the other company.  It was a complete nightmare for me dealing with this previous company.

This issue is still not fully resolved, however, I now have some increased confidence dealing with this new company.

As you can see, by reading my uncharacteristic rant, real estate investing can be very frustrating at times. You deal with a lot of unnecessary B.S.

However, if you have the ability to endure this nonsense, you are going to be okay.