OK, if you ignored my first tip about buying rentals as an investment (which was, in a word, DON’T) and you are determined to make a go of it anyway, I will tell you what I know. This should be a short series. (This self-razzing is just par for the course.)

When we first visited the infamous $35,000 house, it was an eye-opener. Greg began his usual inspection once we decided we were really interested in this place. Now, we’ve sold some things over the years including a car on eBay where the guy backed it up two inches in the driveway and handed us a wad of cash (and we saw his description on the evening news with counterfeit money but we’d already deposited it), and so I know a little bit about what buyers do when they look at your house. But my husband is a different kind of buyer. (Too much downtime with New Yankee Workshop.) Most buyers don’t walk on the roof and crawl in the crawlspace and bang on the walls to find the studs, but most buyers are not my husband.

So, Greg is doing his thing on the roof and I am doing my thing, which is, to envision knocking out walls and adding a little paint here and there, and voila. It’s all so easy in my dreams; I’ve seen Extreme Makeover Home Edition, but my life is not like that. I proceed to get the dirt on all the tenants because that’s what I do best—make people confess weird things to me. As is our usual way, I look around and think up some more extravagant ideas, and Greg reminds me that you can’t knock down load-bearing walls all the while grumbling about money and money. It’s the way we work; it’s our system.

As it happened, two of the three tenants were home that day. The first tenant was a quiet woman with a rich uncle who paid her rent. If you are keeping notes, this is good because the rich uncle doesn’t blow his wad on Wild Turkey and give stories about dogs and homework. The second tenant was a little crazy—for real crazy, not in the slang sense—and we would learn a lot more about him later when he tried to kill the cops and our property manager. For real kill, not fake kill.

The third tenant was not at home, but upon entering, I saw that his stash of crack cocaine was. We would have our first eviction case upon closing, and since the place was trashed, our first major clean up job. No matter, though, because you can’t let these details derail you when you are on a mission. I barked at the kids to not wander off—no, get in the car right now—as I processed that this was the kind of job where a person might need to pack some heat. I’m so down with the drama. So much for “family business.” For some reason, the homeschooling folks have never asked us to pose for a cover. No matter, as this was going to be a launching pad for the rehabs and our ticket out of the big cooperation flying Greg all around the country. I was tired of answering the door as the FedEx man handed me tickets and travel information for the next day on a trip I didn’t know Greg was leaving for. I mean, what if we had, you know, something to do with our weekend? Hypothetically. It’s like 007 without the money, fame, or fun.

About right now if I didn’t give you ADD with that last paragraph, you’re wondering why we didn’t buy houses that attracted tenants with regular jobs with regular recreational activities and such. The reason was simple: over time, we were going to turn these units into higher end rentals. The kind where you don’t have to post “No Trespassing” signs outside. We’d put on brass fixtures, granite in the bathrooms and kitchens, and refinished hardwood throughout. I was so naïve.

We rehabbed one unit completely, hiring out the work to make it clean and new. And just like that, we were back at square one. It would’ve been easier to flush the money down the toilet, except that you never get a working toilet returned to you to flush it all down. Why buy a new, sleek refrigerator when you are guaranteed to have it broken in a couple months? In fact, every time a unit turns over, it is returned in unlivable condition. I think you can turn these over, but not without an incredible amount of detail management and taking an upfront loss for several years.

From our informal education on the streets, we learned quickly that landlords do not provide maintenance. There’s no money (or thanks) in it. The tenants turn over so often due to nonpayment that it’s really not in a landlord’s interest to spend money on a unit that isn’t making money. The exception would be long-standing tenants, but that’s pretty rare in this sort of market. Besides, the thinking goes, it’s next to impossible to please people who think they’re entitled to everything. Before, I thought these rich fat cats were exploiting the poor, but I see the other side somewhat differently now. It’s complicated. For our part, we felt a moral obligation to stay on top of repairs (and still do), and additionally, go a step beyond. This is what it means to live a God-centered life, and that’s what we were going to do.

Here is an example. An inherited tenant tells us the story of live termites on his walls, but when he brought it to the attention of the woman we just bought it from, the former landlady tells him, “Too bad. I have a baseball game to go to.” We love baseball too, but it’s criminal to walk away from that. We wanted to be a different kind of landlord. We fixed up his apartment and Greg is over there our first day of ownership putting on a screen door he said he wanted. We had no obligation to add a screen door, but we wanted to show him that things were different now. In return, he never pays a dime of rent and calls the county on us for a fuse box placement code violation the very first week we owned it. Thanks.

So, in our first month of owning rentals, our property manager almost gets killed (more on that later) and we receive a letter from the county telling us that our building is going to be condemned for this fuse box thing in 30 days. Oh, and all the rent got stolen. Can anybody say, “Refund please?” The day the We’re-Going-To-Shut-You-Down letter came in the mail was an Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day type of day. Greg is having night sweats by now anticipating having to pay for lodging for tenants who’ve been evicted from our condemned building that we’ve owned for a whole 14 minutes. (We did fix the fuse box, along with the 342 other repairs, but not before Greg lost 3 years off his life for the stress.) But it can only go up from here, right?

Greg tells me that my series should be called either Rentals for Dummies or Dummies for Rentals. Either way, my tip of the day is to avoid units that cost less than, say, 10 million apiece, unless you think flushing money on repairs is your idea of an exciting way to spend your time. The only other option is to ignore the repairs, but in our opinion, that isn’t an option at all.