Believe it or not, the life of a landlord isn’t always filled with sunshine and happiness. Sure, it sounds easy enough – you buy a few properties, rent them out to nice people who always pay rent on time and next thing you know, your biggest problem is choosing which resort to vacation at next. Yeah. Right. It’s true that real estate is a proven path to long-term wealth and it should be a part of every investment portfolio, but the reality is that some days you need to deal withSTUFF.

More often than not, when that stuff happens, that stuff ain’t pretty. Now, I’ve not yet had the the experience of finding a dead body like my friend Chris describes, so I’m grateful for that. Sometimes the stuff can be completely outside your control. Last year, there was a fire at one of our properties. It was outside the garage in the back alley and fortunately, the house itself wasn’t damaged, although the garage ended up being a total loss. The fire started inside one of the cars parked out back and as you can see from the photo, the damage was extensive.

It took almost an entire year for the demolition, reconstruction and final inspections to be completed. Along the way were a number of roadbumps concerning permits and poor workmanship that took quite a bit of effort to get resolved. The good news is it’s all done now, and our insurance coverage picked up the total cost. Still, there was a tremendous amount of stuffto deal with just to get back to where we were.

Almost one year to the day, more stuff happened to that same house when we experienced a flooded basement due to a well-known defect (It’s well known to me now, it was unknown previously or I would have replaced it…) in a Crane toilet tank that self-destructed. That repair is still ongoing. Fire and flood at the same property. Looking forward to the plague of locusts next year . . .

Other days, the stuff is related to bad tenants. We recently had to evict some folks for numerous lease violations and unpaid rent. The RTDRS in Edmonton makes the process fairly straightforward in a case where the violations are clear. However, even after accomplishing the eviction there was more stuff to deal with. These fine folks had left the home in a somewhat less than re-rentable condition. Have a look for yourself:

We’ve been working hard to get this place back in shape and we’re almost there. The job was mostly junk removal and cleaning, but we’re also taking the opportunity of the vacancy to make some improvements to the property. This will allow for better rents and attract less troublesome tenants. (I should note that these particular tenants were inherited when we bought the property – they’d never have made it through our own screening process).

Every incident is an opportunity to learn and some of the lessons you should pick up here are that you need to always have good insurance and screen your tenants carefully, but even then sometimes stuff happens that you can’t prevent. Providing impeccably managed properties is hard work and potential real estate investors need to be prepared to deal with that. Before you buy your first investment property, examine your capacity and willingness to deal with the stuff of landlording.

One way to get the advantages of real estate investing without dealing with the stuff yourself is to partner with someone who has the ability and experience to do so. That’s the kind of investment that Advanced Home Strategies’  joint venture investment partners enjoy. We have the team and the experience to handle the STUFF, so our partners don’t need to.