Fixer Jay’s Mom & Pop Millionaire Blog

The first thing you need to do is understand tenants: what do they really want, what should they expect their living plans and, of course, what they are entitled to when they pay rent dollars for living in your properties.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the years as a landlord is that there’s no such thing as a $500 per month apartment that rents for $500. I can prove this easily enough by inviting twenty tenants to one of my apartments and asking each one individually: “What’s this apartment worth?” Ten of them will guess about $450 and the others will say something between $400 and $485. No one is likely to agree with the current rent I’m charging. In their mind, it’s too high!

The quicker new landlords learn to under¬stand this basic adversarial relationship between the payee and the payor, the better they will fare. It’s easy to understand why tenants and property owners seldom make the best of friends.

Tags: Landlording Success by FixerJay
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The guru on the late night TV cable said it was easy as pie to become a millionaire buying real estate. He said you don’t even need any money for the down payment. I musta dozed off because I can’t remember if he ever told us how.

What caught my attention however; was a stem warning to his audience –­”Don’t ever allow yourselves to become landlords”, he told us. “You’ll end up fixin’ toilets in the middle of the super bowl!” Wow, what are odds for that happening!

Years ago, watching Jackie Gleason and Art Carney on the popular TV show; “The Honeymooners”, I learned that toilets are flushed 14 times a day on average! Now Mr. Carney understood toilets ’cause he spent his whole career working 5 days a week in the sewer pipes. Based on Carney’s flushing knowledge, I quickly applied some mathematics to my own rental properties. At the time, I owned 186 units, apartments and duplexes – 12 with two toilets each, all flushing every day. When you multiply 198 toilets by 14 daily flushes, you’ve got twirling water 2772 times a day. That breaks down to 115 flushes per hour, which means my tenants are pulling the handles two times every single minute.

The point is – I know about flushin’ toilets just about as well as anyone. Not only that, but I’ve been personally involved fiddlin’ with toilets for nearly 50 years now! In fact, I probably have more toilet seniority than Mr. Carney! In all my flushing years, I’ve never once been called out to fix a toilet during the super bowl. Can you just imagine the odds? So from my point of view, the TV guru on my cable channel is completely full of baloney. I’m even thinkin’ about getting’ a new cable. Let me say this loud and clear, especially to all the new investors who read this — There’s nobody fixin’ toilets on Super Bowl Sunday. That would be totally sacrilegious! Don’t you agree?

Tags: The Big Picture by FixerJay
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If you ask folks who are successful long-term real estate operators what made them that way – I’ll bet I can tell you their answer. It’s their ability or skills to handle the people who live in their properties! Do-it-yourself investors like me don’t become successful without landlording skills. No one is born with these unique set of skills, but it’s nearly impossible to succeed without them.

To make the big bucks in this business, you must hold onto your rent-producing properties. Flip-flopping and selling off assets might sound a little more sexy, but its short lived at best. Selling works in direct opposition to retaining income, depreciation credits and avoiding the tax collector. Combined with appreciation, these are the main ingredients for wealth. Obviously, keeping properties requires handling the tenants, who pay you their money every month – but as your collections grow, landlording becomes ~ much more tolerable, and eventually, more fun!

JOIN ME ON NOV. 19, 20, 21^ST 2010 AT MY ANNUAL MANAGING TENATS AND TOILETS SEMINAR

FOR DETAILS —-CLICK ON SEMINARS OR CALL 1-800-722-2550.

Finally, learning “street skills”, as well as rules and regulations in the book, will make your landlording job 100 times easier. This is where I can help you the most. I have years of “tender loving” tenant management under my belt and I’ll share my triumphs, as well as some pitfalls. When you finish my seminar, you’ll have enough street knowledge to gracefully handle most tenant intimidation (#1 cause for landlord suicides). When you learn my special techniques for handling routine renter business by mail, as opposed to personal confrontations or obnoxious phone calls, you’re gonna totally fall in love with my training – I’LL GUARANTEED IT!

Tags: Managing Tenants and Toilets by FixerJay
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When you acquire properties with financing, which most of us do, you should always insist on long-term paybacks. The longer the better, but nothing less than 10 years.

Be very careful when you agree on the amount of the mortgage payments. In my opinion investment properties that have combined mortgage payments higher than 50% of the scheduled income are a bit too risky, unless of course, you have adequate back-up resources to pay for negative cash flow.

I’m always satisfied when my mortgaged properties earn me a small positive cash profit consistently every month. Little profits allow me to buy more properties, which in turn provide additional little profits! First thing you know, little profits add up to big bucks.

Walt Disney was delighted to draw the first cartoons that moved on a big theater screen. He was paid just $12 apiece for each one, but he kept drawing lots of them, over and over again. Needless to say, his $12 drawings eventually made Disney a very wealthy man. It didn’t happen overnight, by any means, but when you consistently keep the profits rolling in, you have the money to take on bigger and better opportunities when they present themselves.

Tags: The Joy of Cash Flow Investing by FixerJay
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