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2023 Investing Mistakes That Lost Us Hundreds of Thousands

On The Market Podcast Presented by Fundrise
26 min read
2023 Investing Mistakes That Lost Us Hundreds of Thousands

We messed up. Our real estate investing mistakes in 2023 totaled up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and although On the Market is THE show where expert real estate investors come together, today is proof that we all make mistakes. From forgotten tax bills to landscaping debacles that cost six figures in interest, letting your property manager run your short-term rental into the ground, and forgetting about a house you own—these mistakes are rough.

If you feel like you made severe investing mistakes in 2023, worry not, because on this episode, our expert guests will talk through some of their most painful real estate losses of the past year as entertainment for you to enjoy! Ever forgot that you owned a house that had interest accruing on it? Thought that deal you lost money on was over? Didn’t pull a permit, and now you’re stuck paying six-figure holding costs over some shrubs? You probably haven’t made these mistakes, but our guests have!

Stick around to hear exactly what you SHOULDN’T do in 2024 (and beyond) and how you can turn a terrible situation into a profitable deal…or at least a lesson you don’t repeat.

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Listen to the Podcast Here

Read the Transcript Here

Dave:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to On the Market. I’m your host, Dave Meyer, joined today by James, Kathy, and Henry. And today, we are going to be talking about the biggest mistakes that each of us made in 2023, at least so far. I guess we still have a couple of months to make even more and make mistakes, but at least I don’t know about you guys, I’ve got plenty of mistakes to fill out this show with.
We could have a very long episode today, but let’s just start. Before we get into each of your individual mistakes, I’d love to just know what mistakes you’re hearing about right now. Henry, I know you work with a lot of students. You coach a lot of people. Are there any common mistakes or threads that you’re hearing from about the current investing market?

Henry:
Yeah, I think one of the most common mistakes people are making right now is not factoring in enough holding costs, because the cost of money is so high, and so people are budgeting. They are budgeting for their holding costs when they’re doing the flip, but then it may end up that they have to take out loans at a higher interest rate than expected, and then holding the properties for longer than expected.
It’s much more costly now the longer you take to finish a project. And I think people aren’t being conservative enough when factoring in the holding costs.

Dave:
Well, I think that’s probably going to be a theme. That’s actually a similar thing I was going to say. But Kathy, are you seeing any common errors that you think our audience should be trying to avoid?

Kathy:
I mean, the big errors I’ve seen over the years over and over again is people for buy and hold buying properties that look really good online, look cheap. They trust the agent. They don’t get the appraisals and the inspections and get the third party people to verify that the properties in a good area and that it really will perform the way that they want it to and the way it says on paper.
So it’s basically don’t trust the pro forma, what’s on paper. You always have to find out the reality of it. So not putting in the pro forma an assumption that rents are going to continue to rise. We just don’t know that. We don’t know that prices are going to continue to rise. The property just needs to make sense right now and be able to do the pro forma if things went well, stress test it, or if rent went down, could you still handle it?

Dave:
Have you heard this advice that people are saying? It doesn’t have to cashflow in year one because rents will go up. And yeah, two years ago that made a lot of sense. But I think another common mistake is thinking that rents are necessarily going to keep going up. They could, I don’t know. But if you’re counting on that to make your deal work, that’s a little bit risky.

Kathy:
Yeah, I think I do say that kind of, so I will defend myself here.

Dave:
Okay.

Kathy:
And that is that your costs are the highest in your first year. You’ve got acquisition costs, your closing costs. So if you’re just looking at your year one pro forma, it’s not going to look very good. So just be careful of that.

Dave:
I just mean your run rate. If your run rate isn’t looking good and you’re going to be down not counting those one time costs that occur in your first year, then perhaps look elsewhere.

Kathy:
Yeah, we just don’t know. We know that we had massive rent growth, and maybe it’s just going to stabilize for a while. Some of that rent growth was, what, 20% in one year of rents going up, so we should count that as rent growth for the next five years, honestly.

Dave:
Totally, yeah, yeah. What about you, James? Any common mistakes you’re seeing?

James:
Just the abuse of debt and really setting up the deal correctly. It doesn’t matter if it’s hard money, town home financing. Any type of debt out there is substantially more expensive, which is slowing things down. What we’re seeing is people are getting a little bit of trouble. Just like Henry said, these deals take a lot longer and they haven’t adjusted their pro forma to account for those extra hold times. I mean, your typical house two years ago would sell in three days. Now it can take 30, and that debt racks up.
It costs more money. In conjunction with that, people still are going in and they’re only buying because they want to get the deal done, and then they’re not setting their exit strategies. I’m seeing some people get into trouble because they close with a development loan. They’re planning on refinancing the property rate and term, and then they didn’t really understand the commercial debt side.
And they’re having to bring a lot more money in because the loan to values have shifted so much with the debt ratio coverage, and then they’re running out of liquidity. And so I feel like people are getting their liquidity locked up and getting stuck in very high payments and it can be very disastrous.

Dave:
All right. Well, those are some good common mistakes that we’re seeing right now that everyone listening should obviously try to avoid. And after this quick break, we’re going to get into the maybe uncommon mistakes that all four of us have made this year. So we’ll be right back. James, let’s hear about your mistakes. I feel like you take a lot of big swings every year. You’re comfortable taking some risks. So does that come with making a few mistakes?

James:
Well, the first thing, one of my first mistakes I think I’ve made this year is I didn’t buy enough in the beginning of the year. The market was in this overcorrection mode for a second where we’ve seen pricing jump up since the beginning of the year, probably another 5% on a rebound, not in growth, but rebounding back.
There was some no-brainer deals where you’re looking at them and you’re like, “No matter what, this is a good buy,” But we did a pass because we had so much stuff going on. They were like, hey, this is the smarter thing to do. But really the smarter thing to do is to make a bunch of money. So it’s like buy the deal no matter what and figure it out.

Dave:
Before you go on though, James, when you didn’t buy more deals, is it because you felt like you had too much risk already out there, too much money in the market and you were uncertain about it, or you didn’t have the capacity to handle it?

James:
There’s numerous reasons why we didn’t. Part of it is every time the market changes, we feel we have to rebuild our businesses and our systems at that point, like how we’re doing our renovation plans, what kind of contractors we’re bringing in, how we’re going to issue permits, what kind of staff do we want on, and how we’re implementing the plan needs to be different today than it was two years ago because it’s a completely different market. Even though the market’s still healthy, inventory is low, it’s still different, right?
Cost of money’s way up, so it makes more sense for us to bring in more higher caliber contractors and pay them a lot more because the debt will trade off. And so what it does is we’ve been rebuilding all of our construction teams, our development team. We actually brought everybody in-house so we can keep speed going. So it’s a lot of moving chess pieces around to get you going for that next market. That was one of the pauses we did. The other pause that we did is we have a lot of stuff.
We’re building 80 town homes right now. We have $20 million in flips going, which are…They’re just bigger projects. And so we wanted to get through the inventory. But as you get through your inventory, you’re not going to make what you when you bought it 12 months ago. Your performance is not going to hit the way you thought because the market has changed. And that’s just part of real estate and investing. But the best way to offset that sometimes, if you’re a no-brainer deal, you should still buy it and figure out how to…
Rather than pass or sell it off, it’s like still figure out how to collect that revenue even if it’s a simple plan. So we could have done some very simple things and still made some pretty good money, but we took that pause. Now, the pause was good because it let us reset, but we probably left a quarter million bucks at least on the table.

Dave:
Yeah. All right, good. Thank you for explaining that. That makes sense. But obviously in retrospect, it hurts a little bit. Let’s hear about this mistake.

James:
One of the biggest mistakes that I’m dealing with right now… It’s funny because people are like, “You’re dealing with that? You do so many projects.” It just happens. We are flipping a very expensive home. We have a loan for $1.8 million on it. It’s worth four and a half million. We have a great buy on it. We went through a substantial, huge renovation where we put in about a million bucks into this property, or it’s about 800 right now. Rebuilt the whole thing. It took us about 18 months to get permits, get it built through.
Actually it took us about 20 months to get the tenants out, get the permits, and rebuild it through. We’re coming to final. And one thing that we had been talking to the city about was they’re like, “Oh, hey, when you go to get your landscaping permit, just pull clear and grade. We’ll be all good.” That’s an over the counter permit typically. So during this 18 months, we could have pulled this permit at any given time. But as you’re going, you’re buying deals, you’re moving forward, you’re working on the project, you’re focused on the house and getting it stabilized.
We’re done with the house, and we go to pull our clearing and grading permit. It turns out when we already knew there were some wetlands on the property and we have to go through a formal CIPA checklist for this landscaping plan.

Dave:
Oh no.

James:
We’ve been sitting on this deal for seven months, paying $18,000 a month as we’re waiting for approval and the house is completely done. And not only that, we don’t want to sell it because part of the huge value of this property, it’s on two and a half acres in Downtown Bellevue, which is very hard to find. So it’s very exclusive, but we can’t do anything until we get this permit. There were so many things that triggered based on that.
Even though we had been talking to the city and they said, “Everything’s going to be fine. Everything’s going to be fine. Don’t worry about it,” then they changed their mind and they can do that sometimes. So the best thing to do is just lock down your permits and your game plan immediately, and we waited too long. And as of right now, if I hit the 10-month mark, which I’m probably going to hit, that’s $180,000 that cost me. When we bought the deal, we were on an 8% loan. Rates have gone up and now we’re on an 11.5% loan.
So we’re just eating that cost. And what that comes down to is just always… Even if you think it’s not a big deal, just put the plan in motion, get it checked off, and then move on. Because we’re literally finaled on our electrical, our plumbing, our building, everything, we just can’t get a landscaping permit.

Kathy:
Unbelievable.

Henry:
That hurts. That hurts.

James:
It hurts. What a waste of money.

Dave:
Do you normally just pull all your permits right at the top? Or how do you avoid that in the future?

James:
What you should do, because we knew it was a big lot, a lot of times you don’t think to pull a clearing and grading permit, but because we were clearing out two and a half acres… And we weren’t grading the whole thing. It was because we should have looked into the code more, and I would’ve done it a little bit differently. So you need a clearing and grading permit in the specific city once you clear more than 5,000 square feet. And that’s not like with a tractor. That’s just clearing out shrubs.
And because we thought we were just removing sticker bushes but not touching the soil, it was going to all be good, which in the code it says that’s okay, unless you do more than 5,000 square feet. Well, we have an 80,000 square foot lot. And honestly, because of the 18 months, the sticker bushes kept growing. If we would’ve kept maintaining it throughout the whole project, it probably wouldn’t have been a big deal either.
But why spend money maintaining it when you’re going to rip it all out, throw 100 grand in the landscaping anyways? And so it’s just one of those things where you coulda, woulda, shoulda. It would’ve been very easy to put it into our plan. We just didn’t, and now we got to pay the piper on it.

Dave:
That hurts. Sorry to hear that, man.

Kathy:
Yeah, that’s just another day in California, right? That’s just how it works here. That’s why flipping in California terrifies me.

Dave:
You just expect a 10-month wait.

Kathy:
Yeah.

James:
But you know what? It’s my fault. It’s my fault. And you got to own your own mistakes as an investor, and that’s just the way it goes sometimes. It sucks, but the good thing is we’re going to get through the project. We’re going to sell it. We’re going to make a little bit of money or get our money back, and then we’ll go do it again.

Dave:
Well, that’s a good attitude to have, and luckily you have 180 grand to lose. In the deal, I mean. There’s so much equity in it. Not you personally. But if you could still lose 180 grand in potential profit and still even break even, it shows that you had a great buy on that deal.

James:
A great buy, but I mean, think about what you can do. You can go buy another house with 180 grand.

Henry:
You can buy a couple in Arkansas.

Dave:
Oh yeah. Let it go, man.

James:
You could be making a high interest rate loan. You could be buying a deal. What a waste of time and money. Again, sometimes the plan goes bad.

Dave:
All right. Well, thank you for sharing that one with us. Henry, what’s your biggest mistake of 2023?

Henry:
Oh man, my biggest mistake of 2023, so I just closed the deal where… This was my first flip where I lost money.

Dave:
How many flips have you done before you lost money on one?

Henry:
A couple hundred.

Dave:
Oh, okay. That’s an excellent win percentage.

Henry:
I got pretty close to losing money earlier in the year, but actually when I did the math, I made like $8. I still counted that one as positive.

Dave:
Just don’t count the rate of return on that one. You made money.

James:
As long as you’re in the green, it’s all good.

Henry:
Green is green, my man. Green is green.

Kathy:
Just lost time.

Dave:
What was your hourly rate on that deal?

Henry:
But this one, so this is a house I bought. It was in a more rural part of town, but it was on three acres. It was a good deal, man. I paid 180 for it and ARV was 350 to 375. Needed about a 70,000 to $80,000 renovation. And so I bought it thinking and understanding I had multiple exits. So a lot of things factored into what made this a mistake. It was a good deal. I bought a good deal. It wasn’t that I bought a bad deal, but it was a case of I grew too quickly.
And so during the time after I bought that, I ended up having to hire a project manager because we were buying so many deals at the time and working on so many projects. It’s not like I had this established project manager process in place. I was coming to train this guy, and he’s fantastic. He’s doing a great job. But the timing of it was just not great because the holding costs were expensive. I mean, we had owned it for four months before we even looked at what are we going to do with this thing?
Are we going to go ahead and do this renovation or are we not? Because we had so many other projects that needed to get done. So by the time we got around to figuring out what we’re going to do with this project, I just decided to go ahead and stick it on the MLS and try to whole tail it. And I tried that and I couldn’t get a bite. So the mistake with the property was the layout just seemed difficult for most investors.
So in order to make this one work, you were going to have to essentially create a hallway in the middle of what’s an existing bedroom, because you got to essentially walk through one bedroom to get to another and a bathroom to get to another. So the layout was just funky. And so if you’re going to flip that, you got to fix that. And me, that’s not a problem to me. I’ll just fix it. I’m optimistic enough to know we can go and we can fix that, but a lot of investors just didn’t have that vision.
They didn’t want to deal with that problem. And so when I stuck it on the market, it was hard for me to find somebody from an investment standpoint that wanted to solve that problem. We ended up selling it on market to an owner occupied who’s going to live in it and fix it over time, but we sold it at a pretty significant discount. Everybody else made money. My agent made money. My money lender made money. Everybody involved made money. I was the only one that didn’t make any money, but it was more of a conscious choice.
I just wanted to stop the bleeding of the high interest, sell the property, get done so I can move on to the things that I know are working and are going to generate the income that I want, plus the opportunity cost of what I can do now that I don’t have that sitting over my head ahead. I could have done the renovation myself and spent the 70 and then sold the property for a higher amount, but it would’ve took me another four or five months, maybe six with everything else I have going on.
Just doing the math of that monthly payment and I said, you know what? Let’s just go ahead, call it. I think I ended up losing about 11 grand, so it wasn’t the end of the world. Call it and move on. So everybody else made money. So it was good for everybody, just not me, but a case of growing too fast and the market conditions. And if I had it to do again, I probably still would’ve bought the property and just made sure I got to it sooner and probably just managed that one myself, because it was a great opportunity. I got too busy.

Dave:
I mean, that’s sort of what happens. I guess since this is the first one you lost money on, this might not apply, but when you do the volume of deals that you and James both do, do you give yourself an allowance knowing I’m going to take a lot of swings this year, and if I miss on two of them, it’s okay. Do you think that way, or does it really hurt? I guess I’ll ask you, James, since you’ve lost probably money on more than just one deal.

James:
Definitely more than one deal. I’m a 2008 get your butt kicked investor. I always have that kind of little bit… I call them battle scars. That you’re just like you kind of remember that things can go wrong really quickly. I always tell people, if you buy 10 deals and you’re really good at this, you’re most likely going to lose money on two of them. Three if you’re going to get pretty average, or maybe be duds. Two are going to go a little bit better than average and you’re going to hit a couple two.
Two are going to crush, and that’s if you’re good at it. And that’s just the law of statistic. I mean, that’s just statistical averages. It’s going to happen. You’re in a high risk environment. It’s going to go great, it’s going to go bad, and you want to blend it together.

Dave:
Well, Henry, I appreciate for your first loss. You’ve got a pretty good attitude about it.

James:
Your batting average is pretty good, Henry.

Dave:
Yeah, yeah, you’d be in the hall of fame.

Henry:
I mean, the expectation is you’re going to lose some, right? I don’t expect to never lose money. I’m really fortunate that it hasn’t happened before. I’m fortunate that even though I lost money, nobody else did. My investors got paid. Everybody got paid, and that makes me feel good. I’m okay losing some money. I don’t want to have anybody else ever have to lose money because of a deal I’m doing.
And so we didn’t have to do this. All in all it’s like a win for me because now I’ve moved on and I’m making money on other deals. But it wasn’t fun having to bring a check to closing on a deal I’m selling. That wasn’t a good feeling.

Dave:
Yeah, that’s probably a weird feeling.

James:
I got to give Henry some props on this because I was actually, turns out, I was the lender on this deal.

Kathy:
And you made money.

James:
I made money. That’s why I love private money lending. It’s less work. But at the same time, as a borrower or an operator, I didn’t even hear about this. Henry borrowed the money. He had to step to the plate, do what he needed to do, move on. That’s a good operator. So hats off to you, Henry, because I never even heard about this.

Henry:
Thank you. I need you to give me more money, so that’s why I didn’t want…

Dave:
Pretend you didn’t hear any of this, James.

Henry:
But in all seriousness, that’s a phenomenal… I tell my students this all the time. I’m like, if you’re going to borrow money, guys, you got to make your investors whole no matter what. No matter what. You’re going to have to bite some bullets sometimes if you get yourself into a sticky situation. But if you want to grow in this business, man, you got to make your investors whole, period, point-blank. That is the most important part. You eat last, man. That’s just always how it’s going to be as an operator.

Dave:
Absolutely. Well, Kathy, as someone who raises a lot of money from investors, what is your biggest mistake in 2023?

Kathy:
Well, in 2023, it’s been a good year. Like James, I would say my biggest mistake was not raising more money for our single family rental fund, it’s coming to an end, and buying more because it has been phenomenal. We just have not had competition. We’re the only people at the table so often. The only one the wholesalers call and our deals have been phenomenal.

Dave:
That’s great.

Kathy:
That’s the positive side. But the issues that I’m dealing with in 2023 come from decisions I made a decade ago when I didn’t know the things that I know today and the reason why I love to teach and share so that other people don’t make these mistakes. Back then, I was, like Henry was saying, growing too fast, had too many opportunities, too much money being thrown at me.
And I would get excited about cool things. And one of the projects that came to me, things like a wine village, something that a lender doesn’t know what that is. Basically it was just commercial property where wineries would lease from you and have tasting rooms and so forth because they only need a small space.

Dave:
I mean, a wine village sounds pretty cool.

Kathy:
It’s very cool, and it’s in California. And it’s in a part of California that doesn’t have this. It was outside of Napa, on the way to Shasta. All of it looked great. The pro forma looked great, but what we discovered is that lenders didn’t understand it well enough, so we had trouble getting the financing. So the big lesson… Okay, that’s one, but I learned that years ago. But this year the thing I learned is that in some of these syndications, the way I would structure it, and I know the way that other people structure it, is different layers of lender.
And we’ve been talking about lending. Some will be a bank loan, some might be private equity, some might be where you have a syndication. You have an LLC and you bring in one kind of investor who’s on the equity side, and then you can bring in another investor that gets a lower rate because they’re coming in as a lender. And that tends to be you get paid first as a lender. So I would structure these because a lot of people investing in their IRAs… I’m going to get a little technical here, but it’s important for people to understand this.
If you invest in your IRA, you take your IRA money and you invest in somebody’s syndication, somebody’s apartment deal or a wine village, and you are equity, meaning you’re a part owner of it, you get what’s left after everybody else gets paid. Well, in your IRA, it’s considered investing in a business. It was an operational business. If you’re building homes and selling them, that’s an operational business versus an apartment that’s more passive. You get UBIT, unrelated business income tax, within your IRA, and that could be like 50%.
So that’s a big shock, but it doesn’t happen if you’re passive. So I would bring investors into a deal that was… They could come in as a lender, but then they’ll also be equity investors. Well, if the deal goes bad, and I have one from 10 years ago that did, which a lot of people say, “No one can lose money in real estate over the past decade,” but you know what? You can when you invest in things that are different and weird and shiny objects and so forth. So in this LLC, we had lenders and equity investors.
Now what I’m learning is if there’s losses and you can’t pay everybody back and you can’t pay the full amount of the loan, the equity investors pay loan forgiveness tax. In addition to losing their money, they pay tax on the loan forgiveness, the part of the loan they didn’t pay. So here I’ve got two groups of investors. It’s just complicated. So again, before you ever do any syndication, always make sure you’ve spoken to your CPA and they truly understand the position that you’re in and what the tax consequences would be.
But I’m concerned that a lot of people in these multifamily deals where there was like 10% equity and then there was like 10% that was a bridge loan and then the bank loan, well, those equity investors, if there’s losses, they’re also paying debt forgiveness on the part of the loan they didn’t pay. So I think there’s going to be a lot of investors out there shocked that not only did they lose their money, but now they pay tax. Hopefully the losses offset.
But if the loan is massive, and I didn’t do any of these multifamily deals, I’m just saying for those who did, if they leveraged up to 90%, which again I would never do on multi. My mentor was like, don’t leverage over 60%. He was conservative, but that’s why I didn’t do any deals. Going to 90%, let’s say… You’ve seen some of these deals that have gone bad where 20% is lost. Now those equity investors pay. They’re paying taxes on top of losing their money.

Dave:
It’s just kicking someone while they’re down. That’s just rude.

Kathy:
I don’t get it, but the IRS looks like it. Well, you took this money to do this deal. So if you’re not having to pay that money back, that’s income. That’s how they see it. I hope that wasn’t way over complicated.

Dave:
No.

Henry:
You explained that well.

Dave:
That sounds terrible, but I’m still focused… Can we go to the wine village? Does this exist?

Kathy:
So we never could get the financing on it, so no. We’re just trying to sell it now is land with all the entitlements. And if anybody out there wants a wine village, it’s ready to be built. We just couldn’t get the financing. It’s a cool project.

Dave:
I want to visit a wine village. I’m not sure I want to build one.

Kathy:
There’s some really good ones. We were modeling it after some in Washington, actually. I don’t know. James, do you know of any wine villages because there’s been successful ones in Washington State?

James:
Are they in Yakima probably or Chelan?

Kathy:
Isn’t there a wine area of Washington? I think it’s there.

James:
Yeah, Yakima has gotten pretty nice wineries now down there, but I don’t do wine. I don’t even drink.

Henry:
You need a rockstar village.

James:
You repurpose it to a rockstar village.

Kathy:
A rockstar village. These ones in Washington are killing it because you’re just leasing a tiny little space. Because they’re not making the wine there, they’re just tasting it. They make their wine elsewhere. But all these wonderful wineries that are hidden out in the hills, nobody’s going to go visit.
The wineries could come and have little tasting rooms in areas where there are people and they’ll pay a lot because then it’s direct to consumer versus having… They pay like 50% to go through a wholesaler. They were willing to pay a lot more to rent the space. So the numbers looked fantastic. Just you have to build it to make it work.

James:
It sounds like a cool concept.

Kathy:
It’s permitted. Anybody got money, let’s build it.

Dave:
Well, for my biggest mistake, I guess my biggest investing mistake for this year, because there have been plenty of other ones, is probably something that everyone here identifies with, but it was not firing someone as soon as I should and just waiting too long, even though I knew I had to, but I was being lazy about it. And it’s going to cost me a whole lot of money. I have a short-term rental. Most of the deals I buy now are passive. So I still operate a couple of deals in Colorado, and I have this short-term rental that I hired a full service property manager for when I moved to Europe.
And they’ve just been bad since the beginning. And every couple of months, you probably get this, you get on them, they start doing well for a couple months, and then it slacks off again. And it goes up again and it goes off again. And I just waited for so long. And finally it got to the point where we were getting really bad reviews. There were some issues with the property that really needed physical rebuilding, and so we figured that. I came to the conclusion that I just finally had to pull the bandaid off, but it was right at the beginning of the summer in Colorado, which is the busiest season.
And so I lost all of my bookings for June, July, and August, which was probably 10 or 15 grand. And then I also lost all of my reviews, which when you think about all the money you lose from losing 50 or 60 good reviews, all the lost bookings for the last year. So if I had just done it in a smart way, Colorado where the short-term rental is, there’s like a mud season, I could have just done it from March to May and it would’ve been completely fine. But I was lazy about it and now I’m licking my wounds a little bit.
So that one hurts. And I think probably relatable to everyone, because whether it’s a property manager or a contractor, sometimes you just delay that inevitable, uncomfortable situation that you know you got to get yourself through.

Kathy:
Hire slowly, fire quickly.

Henry:
It’s easier said than done, man.

Kathy:
Yeah, it is.

Dave:
I know. Living so far away, I didn’t really want to figure it out, to be honest. I just wanted them to do a good job and they didn’t. But it’s okay. Like you said, you get a lot of good years. Sometimes you miss for a little bit. But as long as you’re trending upward over time, it’s good.

James:
That’s interesting to me. So when you hire a short-term rental property management company and it’s your property, they own the reviews technically?

Dave:
They did on this one, yeah. The new one I’ve figured out a way to not do it, but I did not realize how they had structured it the first time around. So that really sucked.

James:
It’s like kind of golden handcuffs because you don’t want to leave it.

Henry:
That’s terrible.

Dave:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Kathy:
Yeah, that’s interesting because when I hired a property manager for my first out of state short-term rental, I thought they were going to handle it all and they said, “No, no, no. It should still be under your name and your Airbnb.” And I ended up firing them before we even started because they were terrible.

Dave:
Really?

Kathy:
Yeah, yeah. When they’re not answering your messages right away at the beginning of a relationship, this is problematic. And then I was so glad that I got… Oh, that’s why you’re supposed to keep it in your own account for this reason, but I didn’t know it at the time. It was just luck.

Dave:
Yeah, it’s an important lesson. And now I’m offering discounts to people I know or giving it away just so I can get some reviews. So if anyone wants to go to ski in Colorado, hit me up on Instagram. I got a very nice house. You could go visit this winter, or we can all go. You guys want to go?

James:
I will happily go check out your pad.

Kathy:
Yeah, let’s have a reunion.

Dave:
There’s no one there.

Kathy:
We’ll just trash it.

Dave:
Honestly, it’s like a 16 person house in a party town, so it gets some wear and tear for sure.

Kathy:
Perfect.

Dave:
It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve trashed it, at least. That’s for sure.

James:
Well, I’ll be in Vail for Thanksgiving, so I think we should all just go to your place for Thanksgiving dinner and have an OTM Thanksgiving proper. Henry, you cook the turkey and let’s just go.

Dave:
I’m going to be on my honeymoon. I’m going to be on my honeymoon Thanksgiving.

Kathy:
Well, we’ll just join you there then.

Dave:
You guys can go. Yeah, You guys want to come to Thailand?

Henry:
Oh, I would love to go to Thailand.

Kathy:
Where are you going?

Dave:
We’re going to Cambodia and Thailand.

Henry:
So jealous.

Dave:
I’m very excited.

Kathy:
Yeah.

Dave:
It’s going to be very nice. But you guys can have the house. You can cook your turkey there.

Kathy:
Henry’s cooking.

Dave:
All right, well, thank you all so much for sharing your mistakes. I think this is an important part of real estate investing that I think we do a decent job sharing our mistakes on this show. We’re probably going to do some more of this because today was our mistakes with investing, but we’re going to have to come clean about some of our predictions for 2023 at some point too. There will be some admissions of mistakes definitely I think on all of our parts. I know I have a couple that are haunting me, so stay tuned for that.

Kathy:
It’s not the end of the year yet.

Dave:
Yes, that’s true. We will see what happens, but we will also have a reckoning before the end of the year for that as well. If you want to learn more about our wonderful hosts here, James, if anyone wants to talk to you about losing 180 grand, where should they do that?

James:
Best way to figure out how to lose money is go to my Instagram at [crosstalk 00:32:10] jamesdavid.com. I got lots of stories for you.

Dave:
All right, Kathy, what about you?

Kathy:
At RealWealth.com is our company, and then Kathy Fettke on Instagram.

Dave:
All right. Henry?

Henry:
Yeah, you can catch me at my website, seeyouattheclosingtable.com, or Instagram. I’m @thehenrywashington.

Dave:
All right. And if you want to find me, you can do that on Instagram @TheDataDeli. Thank you all so much for listening. We’ll see you next time. On The Market was created by me, Dave Meyer and Caitlin Bennett. The show is produced by Caitlin Bennett, with editing by Exodus Media. Copywriting is by Calico Content, and we want to extend a big thank you to everyone at BiggerPockets for making this show possible.

 

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In This Episode We Cover:

  • Why you should NEVER wait to pull permits on a flip and how it could cost you six figures
  • The massive “loan forgiveness tax” you could be forced to pay if your deal goes south
  • Forgetting about a flip and the downside to scaling your portfolio too fast
  • Whether or not you missed the best buying opportunity of the past year
  • Hire slow, fire fast, and signs it’s time to relieve your property manager of their duties
  • Why you’ll want to become Henry Washington’s next private money lender
  • And So Much More!

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Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.