True confessions from the realty trenches
“What No One Ever Tells You About Investing in Real Estate” by Robert J. Hill II is the most unusual real estate book I’ve reviewed. It contains 112 mini-chapters about realty investors and lessons to be learned from their experiences.
Many of the stories are humorous. Others are educational. Some should be subtitled “Don’t let this happen to you as a real estate investor.”
The author, a Nashville real estate attorney, is also an active investor in Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia. Apparently intrigued by the stories he heard at a Christmas party of the local realty investor’s club, he decided to collect and publish stories from fellow investors.
Hill sent e-mails to 500 realty investors, asking for their good and bad investment experiences. The results are amazing.
Having talked to many realty investors, I know we tend to focus on our worst experiences. Rarely do I hear a great success story without problems. This book is similar. Most of the stories involve difficulties, though often very funny.
The stories, each one or two pages long, will make you laugh and cry. One of my favorites is about the rental house owner who, when his tenants don’t pay the rent on time, erects a “For Rent” sign on their front lawn. He reports that the sign gets the result he wants: The tenant either pays the rent immediately or moves out without an eviction.
Another story involves an investor who agreed to rent to a church-sponsored family who the landlord was assured were fine people.
Two weeks later, the landlord discovered about 50 people living in his two-bedroom duplex. The tenants said they were just having a family visit. After the landlord got them to move out, he discovered the huge family had been stealing water from another unit.
Some stories show how to take advantage of profit opportunities. One landlord charges a $500 fee for each pet allowed in the rental. But there is no extra monthly rent for the pet.
An Atlanta investor bought a house that had a for sale sign on it for more than a year. The buyer immediately sold or “flipped” the house at a $20,000 profit to a nearby resident who drove by that house daily but never saw the sale sign because it was buried among the overgrown weeds.
The last and best story, called “Confessions of a Quadriplegic Investor,” will inspire anyone. It is about a 20-year-old realty investor, injured in an auto accident at age 17, who invests with his partner, who is blind and in a wheelchair. This young man has completed 12 transactions in less than a year and now owns three properties.
I hope this is just the first of many books by this savvy author, who obviously understands the real estate investment business.
