We finally sold our investment property. We lost a ton on this property, although the exact amount is difficult to calculate for various reasons. This is in spite of the fact that the rent was much higher than the mortgage payment, which seems to be the first criteria that rookie investors look at when evaluating rental properties. In this post, I'm going to detail our mistakes in hopes that someone else will learn from them. But first, some general calculations to show how bad the carnage was.

  • Purchase price: $138,000
  • Sale price: $114,500

Okay, that's a 17% loss. That's bad enough, right? But wait, there's more. The IRS lets you add to the basis for various improvements and other costs. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but as I recall I got the basis up to about $145,000. Now we're at a 22% loss. Also, in this price range, to get anyone to buy it you've got to throw in 3% of closing costs. 3% of $114,500 is $3400, We're now up to a 25% loss. We had to spruce it up significantly to get it sold also, between repairs we did to get an offer, and the ones demanded by the inspection, you can add in another $6K or so. We're at 29%. Also, you have to pay a realtor. 6% of 114,500 is another $7K. 34% loss.

Okay, now let's talk about the cash flow over the years as a rental. I think we were cash flow negative, sometimes severely cash flow negative every year. In fact, for the first 18 months after we moved out, we didn't have a renter in there at all because we were desperately trying to sell it for 14, then tried to get a renter in for 4 more. So all in, we lived in it for 4 years, it sat empty for 1.5 years, and we had a renter paying rent for 3.5 years, at which point we sold it for a huge loss. We walked away with $18K in cash, but had thrown lots extra at the mortgage over the years. We also had pulled cash out previously to purchase our current home. (Thankfully, we more than made up for our losses with appreciation of our big fancy doctor home bought in the depths of the housing crash.) But you can see how it is hard to give a definite figure on just how bad our losses were. I mean, when you consider the leverage, it's at least a 100% loss, maybe 200%. It's bad. It's an investment disaster by any measurement except for the fact that we could afford to lose the money.

# 1 Bought At The Peak

We bought the property in 2006. Most people who bought any kind of property in 2006 have not enjoyed very good returns since. In fact, if I had been in Las Vegas, it would have been much worse. In 2006 the average property in Las Vegas was $299K. It bottomed out in 2012 at $109K and has gradually climbed back up to $191K. Despite 9 years of holding, the average home buyer in Las Vegas is still looking at a 36% loss. I did a little better than that in Virginia, getting out with a 17% loss, if you only look at the purchase prices. But despite the general rule that you only have to hold a property for 3-5 years in order for your appreciation to make up for the transaction costs, its easy to see there are times where that time period can be much, much longer in many locations. In this situation, we clearly should have rented.

 

# 2 Paid Too Much For It

Looking back, I think we could have bought the property for about $130K if I had been a better negotiator. I applied the lessons learned on the big doctor house, but in real estate, you make your money when you buy.

 

# 3 Did Not Pay Enough Attention to Resale Issues

This home was in a diverse neighborhood just off a military base. The schools get poor ratings. We didn't really care about all that. We don't mind living around people who are different from us, and only one of our kids was going to be in school, and that was just kindergarten, while we lived in that house. However, it turns out that racists enjoy better property appreciation.  Our neighborhood was probably 75% black. Perhaps we would have enjoyed better property appreciation (or less of a loss, or more of a rebound) if we had chosen to live in a neighborhood 10 miles away that was 90% white with top-notch schools. Hard to say as all real estate is individual. We thought it would be easy to resell the property given its proximity to a military base. We were wrong, and it cost us a lot of money.

 

# 4 Did Not Buy As An Investment Property

Like many others who bought homes anywhere near the peak of the bubble and then wanted to get out of them within 3-5 years, we became accidental landlords. We never bought this property intending for it to be an investment. Don't get me wrong, we did all the right things. We put 20% down, got a decent rate on a mortgage (6% something was pretty good at the time,) negotiated, and made sure it was a place that was very affordable for us (which obviously helped us become millionaires.) In fact, we used this property to save up for our dream home, such that it was nearly paid off by the time we moved out of it four years later.

At that time, we were having a little trouble selling it, so when we bought a place in Utah 6 months later, we got a 20 year home equity loan as a bridge loan. The rate wasn't great (although still lower than the 6% we had) but the fees were very low, which was the most important thing, since we were only going to have it for a few months. Well, months turned into years, and we still had that 5.35% loan. To make matters worse, we tried and tried to sell it, reducing the price about 20% from its peak value. At the value at which I was then trying to sell it for, it made for a reasonably attractive rental (cap rate 6.7%), although it still took a few months to get a renter in there. But between trying to sell, and waiting to get a renter in, we paid that mortgage without any assistance from a renter for a full 18 months after moving out. It was a good thing it was VERY affordable for us. Most importantly, while it certainly met our needs for a home to live in at the price we paid, it was not a good price to pay for a rental property. It only had a cap rate of 4.7% at that price.

Bottom line, we learned a lot about real estate investing over the 9+ years we owned the property, and knowing what we know now, would never buy it as an investment, would never use the loan we used, and of course, would never wait that long to get a renter into it.

Being an absentee landlord was less fun than crossing that mudhole

Being an absentee landlord was less fun than crossing that mudhole behind me

 

# 5 Absentee Landlord

This “investment property” is located precisely 2,218 miles away from my home. I only returned to the area one time in those 5 years, for a WCI speaking engagement. It's one thing to do syndicated real estate deals in another state. It's entirely different to do it when you're the only owner and have to trust a property manager to do a good job. Well, our property manager did a reasonably good job finding a good tenant, but they did a terrible job of keeping her happy. After a while, we fired the manager. That boosted our return a bit, but it also made us the primary property manager. Luckily, I had a good friend I trusted who is a general contractor. He did a great job doing maintenance and upgrades for us, but a lot of it was stuff we could have done far cheaper and easier if we had lived nearby. And forget trying to find another tenant. That's why we put it on the market when this tenant decided to move out.

We also discovered that not only do we dislike being landlords, but we're not that good at it. We even argued about who was supposed to cash the rent checks and that's the easiest part of the whole thing!

 

# 6 Ignorance of the Importance of the Little Extras

This property is in a flood zone, so we had to buy flood insurance. It also had an HOA fee. While low, it added up. Those two extras, especially combined with taxes, insurance, management fees, and maintenance costs, made sure that we were cash flow negative every year we owned it (although we had a slightly positive overall return several of the years.) The general “55% rule” says that your net income is 55% of your gross rent. For us, it was more like 50%, and that doesn't include that 18 month vacancy.

Despite these six mistakes, this whole episode didn't have a huge financial impact on our life. We had very affordable housing for four years, saved up enough for a down payment on our dream house, and did not have to bring money to the table to close. But from the time we moved out until the time the house was sold, we probably had a cumulative loss of close to $60K on a $138K property. That's the total of the transaction costs, loss in value of the property, and the total of the negative cash flows. Many people who purchased in 2006 and wanted to sell in 2010 did far worse (I had one colleague with a similar military doc salary who bought a $750K house at the same time), so we'll count our blessings. And we more than made up for our losses by being able to buy our big fancy house in 2010. We also will get a pretty significant tax loss out of it. But we certainly learned a lot that goes in to every investment we now consider, especially real estate investments. Like with entrepreneurship, in real estate you want to fail early and with as little money involved as possible. If you are interested in learning more about real estate and minimizing mistakes like mine, check out our No Hype Real Estate Investing course.

What do you think? Were you an accidental landlord from the housing crash? How did you make out? What's your worst real estate investment? Comment below!