Once I had a dozen rentals ... this is the story of how I lost them ..... got rid of them .... or had them taken from me!

So here's the story....in all it's Flaming Glory

1987...after being on Workmen's Compensation for 9 years, due to a back injury I received while working as a Diesel Truck Mechanic (Class A Certification), I received the notice in the mail that I'd exhausted my benefits and that I had no more Workmen's Compensation coming to me.   BANG...I'm now unemployed with no unemployment benfits.....what to do? I'd been buying cars and rehabbing them since I was 16,  had worked electronics,  had gotten my Realtors License,  my Accident & Health Insurance License,  was a Certified Class A Gas & Diesel Mechanic and had been the Vice President of a sales firm previous to my accident....laziness was never my problem.....finding others who were willing to work was.

So I decided, at that time, that I would enter the world of "Landlording" and I started reading everything I could get my hands on about Real Estate. I started with Mark Haroldsen's Course on buying, rehabbing and renting single and double family properties. I also joined my local chapter of the "Real Estate Investors" and started devouring all of the courses they had in their library to educate myself as to the ways and means to buy and fix up properties and make it financially rewarding. At the same time I bought my first single family house.   I had a 1979 Ford Mustang Indy 500 Pace Car that I'd bought for $1,200 (and put in another $200 in parts and did the labor myself) and a chevy van I'd resurrected (I had $1,400 in it after I did all the bodywork and painted it and rewired the dash in it) and I gave both of those and $2,500 cash for the house, put in another $1,500 (on my Credit Cards), about 4 months of my labor (40 hour weeks) and started renting it for $350 a month.   Then I went to several Banks (7 as I recall) before I found one that would refinance it and they handed me a check for $26,000 (non-taxable since it was borrowed money) .... I bought 2 more houses, one with cash down and assuming the sellers loan , the other I traded an old Winnebago I had even for.   One didn't need anything..the other needed foundation work, interior work, a new electrical system and vinyl siding. I did all of that (about 3 months of 40 hr weeks) and had 3 rentals up and running.   I found yet another house (used a Pontiac Firebird that I'd bought for $500 and hung new rear quarter panels on and put into primer for the downpayment on this one) that needed about 3 months worth of work to get it up and running.  Did the work all by myself,  and rented it out and I was going strong.

All the sudden I've worked about 2 years and I had 4 rentals providing me (after payments)(but not expenses) about $1,500 a month income. Of course the tenants came and went, and every time they did I had to go back in and repaint and have the carpets cleaned and do any necessary repairs,   but I was managing that and still had a spare 20 hours of regular workweek left.   BUT my credit cards were getting maxed so I started looking for refinancing.   I went to 17 Banks before I found one that said that not only would they refinance the 5 that I had (4 rentals and my own residence) but that they would be glad to refinance any houses I did in the future...in their own words"YES...we love your kind of people". So I refinanced.   They gave me checks that paid off all of my credit cards and present mortgages and left a whopping $34,000 in my hands.   Not bad...that was in 1993.

I bought 2 more houses and rehabbed them both, but in the meantime my wife wanted and got a divorce and all the life and energy I had just got sucked out of me.   I was devastated.   I cannot describe the feelings I felt watching my wife and child leaving....but it's something I never want to go through again and I don't recommend it to anyone.

And it was time to move.   Since I'd had my residence before I'd married the Ex-Wife,   I got to keep the house but it was just  misery staying there without my daughter & family so I found another house to buy, and did so.   I bought that house using a lease purchase that stated that all of my payments would come off of the princiapl of the loan and when I went to refinance it I asked the seller for a Pay-Off amount.   He would only give the banks HIS loan payoff amount which was MORE than I owed him!   This act caused my credit report to show that a creditor had reviewed my account and not granted credit ( I had to stop the loan process because of the Seller's unwillingness to honor the Lease Purchase agreement) AND at the same time the Seller decided not to make payments on his loan and the house was reposessed by the bank he owed the money to.   I probably do still have a legal case against him, but I have yet to persue it (lawyers and their fee's being what they are).

So back to my original house I went.   My credit cards continued to grow. I was using them to do the repairs and the upgrades on the rental properties & for the eviction filing fee's.   A few bad tenants....One actually stole the sidewalk down the side of a house....another ran up a $900 water bill (that in Dayton Ohio the landlord is ultimately responsible for),  another tenant switched the heat over into my name without my knowledge ($1,200 before I knew about it),  another stole the fencing from around the house....one house I put 5 screen doors on in just one year, and every time (and I do mean evertime) I wanted to evict a tenant and that tenant appeared in court on the day of eviction,  it mattered not what I said (or more importantly whatever the tenant lied about) the courts always gave the tenants another 30 days of free rent (they were supposed to pay for it but never did) and in Dayton Ohio, the Landlord has to pay to have the tenants moved out (if he's evicting them) by using a "court appointed" mover.   One tenant cost me $850 in moving costs,  this same tenant had left off the heat for the entire previous winter (of course I hadn't known that) and the house had frozen.   I had water pressure lines spewing water when I got it turned on (of course the pipes were inside ceilings so that the ceiling also had to be replaced),   I had drain lines that leaked when I put water in them, and since the house had boiler heat, the heating lines were all cracked and leaking too.

So I went to the bank to refinance the last 2 house I had bought and rehabbed and the Bank said..."uh we don't do that anymore".   Well, after moving the last tenant out and replacing half the ceilings and walls in the house, my credit cards were about maxed. I went to another 15 lending institutions and got turned down by all because most lending institutions don't "keep" the mortgages they write...they sell them to Fannie Mae & Ginnie Mae Corp. & both Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae say that if a person has more than 5 mortgages already, then they don't want any of that persons mortgages and they won't buy them from the banks.   I had good credit AND the cash flow after refinancing to handle all the payments PLUS have a nice monthly income to live off of (finally the good life would have been mine) and I couldn't find refinancing anywhere.

I paid out over $3,000 in loan application and appraising fees.   I contacted the City Commissioners trying to find funding.   I wrote the Governor trying to find financing.   I went to the internet and talked to Guru's about finding financing.   I couldn't find any, anywhere...but I found all the banks willing to take my application fee's and more than willing to keep stringing me along for months (Union Bank in Cincinnatti kept me strung out for 5 months waiting for their loan determination) before giving me their loan determination.   All the while, I kept up my places (they were some of the nicest houses in their respective neighborhoods) so that I would feel good about living in any one of my rental properties.   And more than once I actually got 13 months of rent from some of my rentals because the very day the old tenants moved out, I had new tenants who wanted to move in.

The City of Dayton , on the other hand, seemed to take great delight in handing out Code violations.   My houses were located in areas of lower income blue collar workers.   If the neighbors owned their own home, it could have paint falling off of it for years.   But since I was a landlord, if there was just one fleck of paint falling off of one of my houses, I was given a citation.   I have received citations for chairs on the porches (tenants moved a chair to the front porch and that's illegal here if the chair isn't made to be an outdoors type chair)(or the tenants were moving out that day and left a chair there in between loads while the inspector was driving by)...broken storm doors (because someone had put their hand through the screen) .... a bad piece of guttering (the tenants had knocked it off of the wall) and whenever the City wrote one violation, they then entered the premises and wrote everything they possibly could.   And I don't really blame them too much. I got the violations and fixed the problems...after all, that was my job.   But then, the City wouldn't mark off the violations, and the next time I'd get one they'd pull up a computer record of the previous ones and re-cite me for all of those too.   They cold never have prosecuted me for them, it was more of just the aggravation of having to sit down and write the City all those letters saying...this was an old violation that was cited (some date) and cured to your standards on (some date) and please change my record to reflect this (which they NEVER did!).

I could go on and on BUT...finally the application fee's, the court costs, the lost rent and me making it all up with my credit cards took it's toll.   So I couldn't make payments on the rentals properties.   The banks were particularly miffed about this, but they offered no help whatsoever. I had over $300,000 in equity and $30,000 worth of credit card bills and their just wasn't enough to cover it all so it was off to the attorney's I went.

What's black and brown and looks good on an attorney? Dobermans! They all wanted at least $10,000 up front to represent me.   If I'd had $10,000 I wouldn't have been in the situation I was in.   But that was the upfront money they wanted so,  I let the banks repo the houses (I tried selling them but there just weren't any takers).  They then sold them off at auction for a fraction of their worth (so little in fact that the loans that I had on the houses were (in most cases) twice as much as they sold for at the auctions and I was left with massive judgements.   I lost all $300,000 I had in equity and another $100,000 in judgements against me because the house's sold for less than I owed on them.

The stress was intense....the feelings of worthlessness extreme.

But when I saw the houses going down the tubes I cracked the books and started studying computers and networking them.  I had been a computer hobbyist since my first one in 1977 (a Commodore SX64 which I still have and used to set up and run 3 different businesses with) and had my first Compuserve account with  in 1978.   I then bought an IBM (Clone) in 1982 and started adding harddrives, peripheral devices (mice, external modems, scanners, video cameras,  etc.) swapping out motherboards and the like until I got to the point of wanting to do networking.   I borrowed a copy of Novell 3.12 and set up my first network in 1994. Since then I have set up several networks using Novell 3.12 and 4.0., Windows for Workgroups and Windows95 and 1 system using WindowsNT.

So now I'm contacting business friends and acting like a roving sysop...fixing their problems as they come up (but I must be doing too good a job cause after I got their systems up and running and trained them in the use of a network, business has dropped off except for the occasional bad power supply or bad monitor or disk drive crash), OR whenever this one Doctor I know, lays off one of his hired girls and she trashes his database before she leaves and I have to reconstruct it. And I'm getting ready for the filing of my first bankruptcy. What a thrill.

So how do I fell.....

Partly Glad...

I was able to create nice, decent, clean and affordable housing for many, many people to live in .... almost entirely singlehandedly!   I supported my family for 10 years using the old hardwork ethic and smarts obtained through readily available resources.   And probably most importantly I learned a real wealth of information.   I learned how our Court system works (or rather how it doesn't work), before I hadn't a clue.   I learned how to fix anything in a house...plumbing,  electrical,  roofing, s iding (aluminum, wood and vinyl), bricklaying,  sidewalk making and how to paint like a pro.   I learned that no-one has to go without carpet ( I carpeted 8 houses in all with carpet I obtained from dumpsters!),  and I learned that there wasn't much I couldn't do if I applied myself to it.

Kinda Sad...

Knowledge isn't always good knowledge.  I learned what it was like to see "My Investment" after the tenants had left and took with them the furnaces, the stoves, the refridgerators, the sinks and bathtubs, the kitchen counter tops, the paneling off the walls, the wiring and the plumbing out of the walls and then come back with chain saws and remove the doors and windows from the entire house....and I learned all of the above on just one house....at one time!   I learned that the worst tenants in the world are the ones who claim to be good Christians.   And I was forced to watch (too many times) the devastation that drugs can have on otherwise happy couples.   I found out that the Bankers and Loan officers aren't really interested (or actually even educated in the products they are supposed to be selling) in helping out anyone except themselves and that the City of Daytons Govt. is in real financial trouble and has reverted to forcing people,   who are otherwise intelligent,  decent and willing to take the risks necessary to improve their community,  into losing their retirements and in many cases the only source of income they have because,  they worked hard and as a result HAVE something to lose.   I've learned that by having posessions, you really are just a target and that wealth is more of an ideal to be shunned than to be sought.   If it takes more to keep it than it's worth....what's it worth? Who wants to be a man alone .... surrounded only by his wealth?

So Personally...

I feel that I did my best, and my best was good enough, but my community wasn't ready for someone who was willing to succeed, so they put every roadblock they could in my way to insure that I fell to their level....that of one who won't even try. And since that revulses me deeply, I feel I am left with only one solution, to leave this community and hope I can find one that allows me the ability to do the good that I am capable of doing, and rewards me with at least enough money to be able to support my children and myself.   I feel good about what I did......I worked, I took risks, I helped people, I raised the values of not only my own houses, but also all of the houses in the neighborhoods they were located in, and that let those neighbors go out and refinance their houses and hopefuly send their kids to better schools.   I was always amazed at how when I started working on the outside of my houses, it started a synergy of all the neighbors that were close by, which resulted in many homes getting cleaned and fixed up.   I paid out several thousand dollars to the Mortgage Co.s (thereby giving that many more employees a place to work),  several thousand dollars to local business's in parts, supplies and consultation fee's.   I paid for insurance, taxes and a host of many things that benefitted the members of my community.   Should I feel bad about that? I don't, I choose to feel good about it.   Even though, in the end, after helping out so many......I was left with no help from anyone (except for my friends (you know who you are) who graciously gave all they could in the way of moral support ... and to them I owe my sanity and a very deep and true thanks ... if it weren't for you guys I have no idea where or what I'd be today, thank you).   Which leaves me just another victim of an economic feeding frenzy. It will never happen again.

So that's it ..... I Crash & I Burn ... But I keep the memories ... and most importantly to me ... I keep the skills

I've been there ... done that ... and ... It's almost time ..... to start again!

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