TheLandlordBlog.com

This week’s edition of the Carnival of Real Estate Investing is now posted at Fliperati.

I am honored to have my recent post on deadbeat tenants chosen as the top pick (thanks Fliperati)!

Seems the carnival did not flourish with participation this week.  Bloggers, let’s get involved and grow this community!  This is one way to cut through all the extraneous noise that we sift through everyday and present ourselves with a concentrated set of relevant information.  We can learn from each other and prosper in today’s market of opportunity!

You can write and submit your post for the next edition of the carnival here, and you can even volunteer to host.  See you at CoREI 3.

Last week I started the Carnival of Real Estate Investing as a way to pull together some of the best REI blog material on the internet.  There are many REI blogs hidden in the nooks and crannies and I figured this would be a great way for us all to find them and to get our own exposure too.

I’m working together with Zillow, who founded the Carnival of Real Estate, to cross-promote our carnivals and grow our collective real estate blogging community.

All you need to do to participate is write a blog post and submit it to the carnival weekly.  The cut-off is noon each Sunday so you always have the weekend to get your post written.  You can do that right?  While you’re thinking about it, go ahead and choose one of your recent posts and submit it for this week’s carnival now.

See you at the carnival!

I’ve been writing recently about the situation across the street with my neighbor’s rental house.  My neighbors built their dream home and decided to keep their house across from me as a rental.  At first they put it up for sale, but it sat there for three months and after several price drops they decided to keep it.  The numbers allow it to cash flow a few hundred a month and it seemed like a great idea at the time. 

It would have been a great idea, and still IS a great idea, however… attention get rich quick investors… effort required!  If not on the investor’s part, on the property manager’s part.

It all started with an arbitrary pick of property management companies.  My neighbors called a For Lease sign on our street and gave the company the business without checking references or asking too many questions. 

Look.  When you have a 100-unit building, you want an experienced management company.  When you have one single family home, said management company does not care about you! (more…)

Welcome to the very FIRST edition of the Carnival of Real Estate Investing! This is a brand new carnival that fits a great niche in the blogging world.  There are plenty of REI blogs out there, albeit scattered and hidden in the private home offices of individual investors vs marketed by corporate umbrellas.  Hopefully this carnival will bring them out into the forefront and allow us to meet each other and learn from our wide variety of experiences and perspectives.

There were a total of 17 submissions for the first edition.  Not bad considering it was a dry launch and the carnival has not been marketed at all yet.  Look for a surge in submissions as we all get the word out and participation grows.  You can definitely help increase awareness by mentioning the carnival on your blog!

My #1 Top Pick for this week comes from… drum roll please… Lording the Land - always a great read and this week is no exception!  The rest of the runners up are presented in no particular order.  Thank you to everyone who participated.  Enjoy the posts!

The Landlord presents Schadenfreude posted at Lording the Land, saying, “Sometimes it’s fun to watch the tide go up and make everyone rich. Other times it’s fun to watch the tide go down and see the fools get their come-uppence. Guess which time we’re in now?”

Runners Up:

Frugal Duchess presents The Frugal Duchess: Flipping Houses: Reality TV Disconnects on Real Estate posted at The Frugal Duchess, saying, “House Flipping — as portrayed on reality TV — is not plugged into reality. Here’s a list of ”Five Reasons Why Real Estate “Reality TV” Isn’t So Real,” based on the book: Buy Even Lower: The Regular People’s Guide to Real Estate Riches by Scott Frank and Andy Heller”

Brian Brady presents Real Estate Blog - Stop the Insanity in the Mortgage Marketplace posted at Stop The Insanity in the Mortgage Marketplace.

Joel Burslem presents Two Easy Steps Towards Mastering Craiglist posted at Future of Real Estate Marketing, saying, “Some tools to help investors get the most out of Craigslist”

Wenchypoo presents Book Review: The Weekend Millionaire’s Secrets to Investing in Real Estate posted at Mental Wastebasket, saying, “An oldie (from 2005) but something to get the ball rolling.”

Brad Wozny presents If You are Thinking About Real Estate Investing, a Good Mentor Can Help posted at REI Diary.

Gina presents Gina’s Tax Blog: Guaranteed Rental Agreement posted at Gina’s Tax Blog, saying, “Thank you for considering this submission!”

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Carnival of Real Estate Investing using our carnival submission form. Please review the guidelines for submission and remember that posts must be recent and closely related to real estate investing. 

We need bloggers to volunteer to host future editions of the carnival.  Interested?

This week Landlord Shmandlord picks the best posts within the real estate blogging community for this week’s carnival.  Check it out - there are some good ones.

Aaawww, we even made the list this week

So it seems we have a little eviction brewing at one of my units.  Over the weekend I got an update on one of my tenants who still has not paid his rent for October, let alone November.

In October he managed to land himself in jail.  Not that he did anything wrong, mind you, he was just “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”  Whatever that means.  Anyway he had to use his rent money for bail or a citation or something.  His dad co-signed the lease but he didn’t want his dad to know what happened so he refused to go to him for money.

Well a whole month later he hasn’t been able to pay the rent, with or without dad’s help.  So this weekend a letter went to the dad and on the tenant’s door - 5 days to pay or get out.

Why wasn’t this done earlier, you ask?  Good point.  This is the property manager that is being let go this week.  Lately I have found myself completely without energy to monitor or deal with anything he is responsible for.  I haven’t been able to invest anything more into the relationship.  I guess I’ve been operating in the mode of cutting my losses and moving on.  We may just be adding a little more loss to the pile now. 

Having a vacancy in November is less than ideal to say the least.  Maybe dad will save his son from being out on the street and hold up his co-signer end of the bargain.  If he pays now we’ll collect buku late fees, so all is not lost just yet.

My good friend Tom Kish is having a one-day bootcamp in Phoenix on November 11.  He’ll be teaching his trademarked money system for getting up to $300,000 in cash and unsecured business lines of credit.

I use Tom’s system to get the down payments for real estate deals, rehabs, and business startup capital. 

There’s no doubt that it works.  The question is, do you want to learn about it?

Tom’s bootcamp will teach you:

1. Where to get up to $300,000 in spendable cash for any kind of investing by using new business lines of credit instead of your own money or personal credit.

2. How to buy real estate in the name of a new business instead of in your own personal name.

3. Automatic systems for finding tenants and buyers for your real estate holdings. Learn the latest marketing technology that easily identifies buyers for the exact type of property you want to sell. You will even know how much the potential buyer has available for a down payment before you call them!

The event is all day on November 11 at the Embassy Suites at 24th St and Thomas.

I’ve heard Tom speak many times, and he’s not shy about answering every question the audience throws at him.  You will get huge value out of the day, both from content and from a networking perspective.

And very important:

Tom has secured some corporate sponsors for this event and therefore is waiving the normal admission fee.  But you must go to the website and print off a voucher so you can get in at no charge.  Also, if you tell Tom that you heard about his event through me, he will give you a gift at the door.

Hope to see you there!

I received a surprising (or not?) update from my neighbors this week who own the rental house across the street.  They moved into a new house in July I believe and kept their old house as a rental.  I posted the drama that happened as they hired a bad management company and got their house rented.

The news is that their renters are being evicted on Monday.  They’ve asked me to keep an eye out as they U-haul their stuff away and call them if I see them taking out the appliances.

If my memory serves, the tenants have been in the house for three months.  They are one full month behind on rent.  So they’ve paid two months and are being evicted.  Couldn’t help but notice a new SUV arrived in their driveway last week but that’s neither here nor there. (more…)

November is a hard month for me to stay focused on the present.  It’s a very tentative month with a slight feeling of waiting.  My mind keeps rushing ahead to the future.  I start to daydream about who I want to visit when I go back for Thanksgiving, all my family that I will see, then I start to think even further ahead about Christmas and New Year’s.

I start to hear people around me putting off projects ’til the new year.  “I’ll start that after the first of the year,” they say without any legitimate reason.  I hear about vacation plans and how “this month is shot” because so and so will not be around to get business done.

It would be easy to lose two months of productivity if these thoughts got the better of me.  So they don’t.  Every day I remind myself that it’s a new day and I’m living in the present.  Simple, yes.  Easy, no.

What can I learn today?  What deal can I go after today?  What project can I start today?  Make that to-do list, check it twice, and let’s start crossing things off.

Can’t believe I missed this one!  BiggerPockets recently posted their top 35 real estate blogs and The Landlord Blog made the list!  Of course it did

No seriously, this is a great list and a quick way to find some good blogs that suit your taste buds.

Check it out, and thanks BP for your support.