<p>My parents own a couple of duplexes as well as a vacation condo on the coast of Texas. The MOST important thing is to get a good management firm!! Good ones will take care of late rental payments, maintenance, etc. and charge you fairly. They will also make sure the vacation condo is rented out regularly. Bad firms are a huge headache - rents don’t get paid, the condo is not rented, stuff disappears or gets damaged, etc. Right now, my folks have good management firms in place, so I think they would say it’s worth it. A year ago at this time, they might not have answered that way!</p>
<p>The market has definitely turned. Last year I got several steals. Now there are only deals and the opportunity for modest profits. In five years, I will be very happy with the property appreciation.</p>
<p>No properties in Calif. I manage them myself because I only have a few. I am still amazed at how much money the banks have lost on the properties.</p>
<p>My husband and I are landlords and HATE it. It is very hard to find qualified renters in our area…most people looking to rent have credit issues and that is the least of it.
It has been nightmare-ish for us and I wish we were not stuck owning this house</p>
<p>At this stage, I won’t acquire more residential properties. At the end of the day, despite having good management firms, you still have to do some management, if only to watch over the management firms. Otherwise, the expenses pile up.</p>
<p>If you could afford it, look for commercial properties, get a good management company, have triple net leases, less headaches. In addition, look at storage units, hardly any upkeep whatsoever, but require good management.</p>
<p>I’m not fond of being a landlord. I bought a house near the beach 10 years ago that I initially expected to retire to. I rent it out to students during the school year which basically pays for the mortgage and incidental expenses. I’ve never had a problem renting it but its still a hassle to write out leases every year, worry about the grass etc. I’ve got to pay for some of this stuff because its 120 miles away. We’re not too certain if we would retire into that house as it has a number of stairs that are already getting somewhat difficult to continually climb. Besides having to take care of my primary residence and this vacation house, its starting to look like I’ll need to take care of my father’s house which I own half of with my father. I’m not the type of person who likes to waste time doing house repairs or yard work.</p>
<p>No. We had an excellent management company and in the month it took them to get our renters out, the renters did 20K worth of damage. The renters had dropped their insurance a few months before hand. We wound up carrying the entire cost. </p>
<p>We will never, ever be landlords again.</p>
<p>Edited to add: our damages would have been twice that amount but my husband and some very, very good friends took their vacation time to redo the house themselves. If they didn’t have that time/skill sets, we would have had to pay for labor as well.</p>
<p>It’s a PITA. I find reading the threads about different areas of the country fascinating. Real estate in some parts of Cal. appears to be a different beast, for renting and selling, than for some (many?) of us in economically disadvantaged, rural areas.</p>
<p>Right now, my houses are full and tenants are paying, so I’m ambivalent. I’d done it long enough to know that could turn in very short period of time. It’s a constant headache.</p>
<p>Like lje62, finding decent renters in my area is extremely difficult. Housing is cheap and if someone is over ~age 35and renting, there’s a reason why. Most renters aren’t long-term and cleaning, showing, and re-renting is a big hassle.</p>
<p>Meth is huge problem in my state, and landlords are responsible for cleanup, which can run to $20,000.</p>
<p>I have not personally done this but my parents owned and rented out several homes over the years (2 houses and 1 condo in the Washington DC area). Even with a management company it was a huge pain in the neck. Renters tend to wreak havoc on homes and after repairing and replacing things enough to put the homes on the market -they lost money on every home. This was in an up market on homes they own over a decade. I wouldn’t do it.</p>
<p>The headaches and tax implications are just not worth it for us. </p>
<p>If considering it, you should consider how much stress owning your own home might have and then triple it. We actually had good renters, but maintence and the rotation cycles for the renters was a big pain.</p>
<p>We have a business on the first floor of a property and rent out the apartment above. So shall I tell you about the time our tenant just stopped paying rent for months, and, while we were going through the exceedingly long and tedious eviction process (in most states deadbeat tenants have ridiculous protections), had a satellite TV dish installed on OUR roof? Don’t do it.</p>
<p>Thanks for the reality check. In the Charlotte area there are many homes on the market for less than $100k, and even for under $50k, and it “seems” like a good idea to search for properties that can be rented out. I suspect that it would be a real pia though.</p>
<p>We’ve rented out homes in the past, but this time we bought a condo 6 months ago. It sold for 260K in 2006, and we bought it from a friend who got it at a foreclosure sale, for 75K. It hasn’t been too bad. We do all the work ourselves, didn’t borrow much money on it so it’s a nice positive cashflow, rents for $1200/month. I think these renters are going to be great, very neat and fairly handy. I hope they stay a long time. It’s a bit of a pain, but with the cash flow and appreciation, maybe it will work out well. We are looking for more, I’m actually working on that right now.</p>
<p>We had some renters who moved out after only 3 months (grrr!) and the first time we put it up on the rental market for only $1050 and got so many calls. Almost every single person’s credit just stunk. The next time, we raised the rent and specified, “GOOD CREDIT ONLY.” We also didn’t mention that it was available immediately. Didn’t get many calls, but fairly quickly got a good renter.</p>
<p>DH once mused about owning a rental. I pointed out that when the garbage disposal breaks on Thanksgiving day, or the A/C goes out on a sweltering July weekend – HE would get the call. That ended his musings once and for all.</p>
<p>Lol, have to laugh at these posts. H and BIL own 75 units together. With our own homes it totals 92 toilets at last count (my personal misery index). They have been doing it for 25 years. Trust me, they’ve earned every penny they’ve made in cashflow or equity.</p>
<p>I don’t own rental property, but my folks did. As immigrants, they thought rental properties were the way to gold and riches. They did OK, but only because they did all of the upkeep and repair themselves. As a kid, I have memories of spending time at these properties while my parents were getting them ready to rent. I also remember my Dad going out on weekends and holidays to do some emergency repair. Maybe their experience with renters was atypical, but it seemed to me that all they did (and they had other jobs as well) was spend their spare time taking care of the two properties (apartment buildings) they owned. I guess the bottom line is that if you don’t want to do the maintenance work that’s required–and there’s always something–you’ll have to factor the cost of a management company into your profit equation. Personally, I think there are investments that create much fewer headaches.</p>