Buy It, Rent It, Profit! (Updated Edition): Make Money as a Landlord in ANY Real Estate Market - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bryan Chavis is founder of The Landlord Property Management Academy and author/creator of one of the top property management designations/certifications online. Chavis runs one of the top blogs for real estate professionals at LandlordAcademy.com and is a property management coach for Keller Williams MAPS. Named one of the top 40 up-and-coming entrepreneurs under the age of 40 by the Gulf Coast Business Review, he travels the country coaching real estate professionals, and consults for some of the largest housing authorities in the nation. Chavis lives in Tampa, Florida, with his wife and their daughter.

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Buy It, Rent It, Profit! (Updated Edition)

ONE

INVEST IN YOUR FUTURE

How You Can Become Wealthy as a Landlord

Gold slippeth away from the man who invests it in businesses or purposes with which he is not familiar or which are not approved by those who are skilled in its keep.

—The Richest Man in Babylon

We are all looking for ways to get wealthy. Some people might not state this so bluntly, but let’s face it—we all crave the security that money can bring. But it’s important to note that wealth doesn’t have to mean greed. Wealth can buy you more time off to spend with your family, good education for your children, better health care, and the freedom to live the life you want to live.

Wealth to me means freedom. I want to have enough money to take time off to travel with my wife. I want to be able to help my parents live out their retirement years in comfort. And I want to give back to my community, particularly to help at-risk children have opportunities to make something out of their lives. All this takes time and money. Money buys me this time, and it provides me with these things that are so important to me.

The bookstore shelves are lined with titles that promise to reveal the “secrets to success.” I was once one of those staring at a wall of titles and wondering which one would help get me to the place I wanted to be. If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably already learned what makes the “millionaire next door” tick and how to “think and grow rich.” These are great motivational books—they help you figure out what path you want to take toward building your own life of financial security and freedom. But if you’ve picked up this book, you probably want something more . . . specific advice on how to build that wealth through one of the smartest methods around: real estate.

I’ve been working in the apartment industry, where I received my Certified Apartment Manager (CAM) designation, for more than twenty years, first as a manager of large rental complexes and later as an owner. I’ve worked on every type of property—from single-family homes to thousand-unit apartment buildings, and just about everything in between. Several years ago, before the first edition of Buy It, Rent It, Profit! was published, I decided to put all the advice, systems, and “best practices” I’ve developed over the years into a book and seminar series called The Landlord Academy (www.landlordacademy.com). After working in real estate for so long, I had grown really dissatisfied by what I’d seen in the marketplace and by all of these speakers blowing into town to host seminars on how to get rich in real estate. Typically, they had a line out the door of people looking for advice, but I knew that those so-called experts were just opportunists who were taking advantage of people who legitimately wanted to create wealth through real estate. Almost everything they were teaching people about successfully investing in real estate was wrong, and I made it my mission to show people the right way.

I was going around to real estate associations and sharing my information with their members. At one of them, I met a guy who was a manager at Kinko’s. He let me use his store’s broom closet to host my own small meetings, and that was the beginning of my company, which came to be called The Landlord Academy. Meanwhile, I had also written a manual that would guide real estate professionals through every step of the investment process, including how to run their properties on a day-to-day basis and treat every investment like a business. It was called the Landlord’s Operations Manual, and I was selling it directly from that Kinko’s broom closet and out of the trunk of my car.

That manual ultimately became the basis for the book you now hold in your hands. When Touchstone (part of Simon & Schuster) first agreed to publish Buy It, Rent It, Profit!, they started with just a tiny printing. It was 2009, the world was in the throes of an economic crisis, and of course the real estate sector had been hit especially hard. The good people at Simon & Schuster were probably more than a little apprehensive about how well a book on real estate investing would sell during the Great Recession (in fact, my editor later confessed as much!). But I knew the answer: The principles, strategies, and systems I teach in this book are time tested, and they work in any economy. And sure enough, that small first printing turned into a dozen more reprints, and Buy It, Rent It, Profit! became a category bestseller on Amazon. Since then, through the book, my website, and many, many speaking engagements (in rooms much larger than a broom closet, thankfully), I’ve trained hundreds of thousands of would-be rental property owners, some of whom have gone on to be property moguls in their own right. Our academy has become one of the industry’s leading consulting and coaching programs.

And the good news is that, in order to be successful, you don’t have to have a hundred units—a single-family home or a duplex is just as viable for your first move as a rental investor. And, as I’ll show you, it’s a heck of a lot safer to hang on to property for the long term than to try to work the market with risky “fix-it-and-flip-it” schemes. That’s part of the reason so many investors got in trouble in 2008. The beauty of rental investing is that you can choose the steps you want to take and decide when you are ready to take them. The key, of course, is performing your SEOTA (my own method for evaluating the right rental properties, which you’ll learn in this book) and allowing this process to help you choose wisely. I’ll give you all the tools, checklists, and operating systems you will need to make that first choice with confidence. That is my commitment to you. And I also promise that these principles will work every time, no matter what the current economic state is. Read on to learn how Mitchell and Thelma, two of my Landlord Academy success-story clients, put these systems into practice and used them to succeed even in the midst of the market crash.

MITCHELL AND THELMA’S STORY

Mitchell and his wife, Thelma, attended several of my Landlord Academy training courses around 2004. They were recently married with two young children, and were looking for a way to build wealth. Their financial state was OK (but not perfect) when they came to me. They both had steady jobs (though neither was pulling in the big bucks) and they had decent credit (with some outstanding credit card debt). But they also had a dream for the future: They wanted their kids to go to college (something neither of them had done), they wanted to be able to offer some security to their parents, and they had decided the 401(k)s they contributed to at work weren’t going to get them where they wanted to go fast enough. They wanted to take their financial destiny into their own hands.

Mitchell and Thelma were living in an apartment and needed more space for their growing family. As a two-income family, they decided they were ready to buy a home. However, after attending some of my classes, they were excited to start their rental investment portfolio and were unsure if they should use their limited funds to buy a new home for their family, or continue to live in their apartment and buy a home to rent out.

I get questions like this all the time. I usually suggest this: Why not do both? Why don’t you buy a rental property in which...