Real estate

someone was telling me how great a family member of theirs is doing,they got their real estate license. i started rofl'ing and they got mad at me

yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, surprisingly no

not very likely

Unless you can somehow manage to pwn banks then no, it's not become rich for dummies and you'll be hard pressed to beat the street.

>Spent 100k in 1999
>Now "worth" 220k
>paid off 5 years ago
>work 6mths of year min wage
>still save 5k a year
Living the dream

my dad's family is fucking dumb and they live off their real state, so yes

Ur half right

Yes 100%. Made 55% gains a year on my first apartment.

You don't have to be brilliant to make a good living doing real estate. It's just not a get rich quick scheme.

The big winners are the people who plan ahead for the long haul. Renting property, residential or commercial, can pay off massively, and lets you leverage to incredibly high amounts, on top of ridiculous tax havens.

tell me more, how'd you start it up?

Wait so this thread consensus is basically doing something like buying a duplex and renting them out is a big NO? Would I be losing money if I tried to do this or something? I sorta figured the easiest way to live without working was just buying property and renting it out since people will always need a place to live and the population keeps going up.

Yes, but it's a risk investment in the long run.

Care to elaborate

You run the risk of your property deteriorating and will have to make repairs, tenants fucking your shit up, you have to pay insurance, and the market dropping and losing money.

Also, you'd need multiple properties to make significant return, specifically to live off the return. Additionally, the more properties to have, the larger risk that something will go wrong with one of them, and you'll need to pay money to fix it, etc.

That's actually one of the best ways to get a small investment in real estate going. Because you live there, a lot of tenant protection laws wont apply (varies a lot by state), so you can get rid of people more easily, and you don't have to run around all the time to figure out small problems.

Great way to learn the basics for a few years.

Hence screening tenants properly. 95% of all problems can be solved by just being willing to let a unit sit vacant for a while while you search for a good tenant. Market collapse can be avoided by looking for specific houses.

For example, a large state run building is going to have workers forever. Houses in the area will always be in some sort of demand, no matter how fucked the market becomes. Additionally, if the economy goes to shit, all that means is you can buy houses on the cheap.

This is just basic financial planning really. Don't spend every cent you get from rent. Long term costs will accrue. A new roof every few decades. Random vandalism. Plan for them. So what if you need a few properties to make a living? Having more makes the random acts of destruction easier to deal with because you have a larger cash flow, so each cost requires less time spent saving.

More you have can spread the risk

my parents both own 3+ rentals (divorced)

biggest misconception in my opinion is that they're passive income. If you want / need to squeeze that +25% profit to make it work you manage it / repairs / manage renters yourself which can be very stressful and time consuming. My dad has had to evict 2 separate shitty mexican families from his property with law enforcement and lost thousands from it. Takes like 3 months to evict renters in CA and that's best scenario. I'm talking eating 3 months no rent and they already know their credit is ruined so they'll just trash the place. One family drove around construction when they were repaving the street and onto the driveway when they were moving out on the last day and left streaks of black tar on the nice concrete driveway.

My mom just lowers her rent to -10% market and takes the pick of the litter in terms of her renters. She likes single, 30years old or older, respectable job.

Both my parents manage / oversee repairs personally / do their own paperwork on all their places.

Overall it's a good long term investment. Both of them are way above water long term. NOT passive income for them lol

Can "Become rich for dummies" become a new Veeky Forums meme?

It's passive income when you have more properties, because the likelihood of many properties having expensive incidents on any given month is insignificant. Simple application of the law of large numbers. Any given property might incur a sudden significant expense and be 'under water' for upwards of 5 years, but as you said, a properly managed property will dig itself out in the long run. If you have a lot of properties, a few of them will currently be 'under water' at any given time, but as a whole, they should collectively be above it.

It sucks for small landlords because they can't absorb the costs into general overhead as easily. They need to keep proportionally larger cash reserves on hand to handle emergencies.

Doubly so when they are in shitholes like California where a good professional tenant can stall you for months. The variance becomes so significant that it takes more than a few properties to properly mitigate the risk. Even disregarding the increased risks, it makes everything more expensive. You want to be absolutely sure a tenant is a good tenant because getting rid of them is difficult. You have to jack up the rent prices because your vacancy rates, and nonpaying tenant rates go up. Then people complain, so they put even more restrictions on how you handle tenants, and repeat. It's just a vicious positive feedback loop.