What the Hell was I thinking?

The adventure began simply enough with a phone call from a friend who wanted my opinion on a business opportunity. So I asked the natural next question, ”what kind of investment?

“Rental property” Steve said.

“Really, – where?”

“near my shop.” was his reply.

Near my shop was code for a part of town that was a little seedy, Lower Price Hill. Actually, it is one of the more dangerous parts of town, with lots of interesting characters and not a lot of legal money.

“okay, I’ll come along, BUT- I’m not interested”
Well, the next thing I know I am walking around some very run down properties, feeling like I needed a bath in hand sanitizer. Then we started talking about the economics of rental property. The tenants all have a voucher from HUD so that their rent is paid. There is a shortage of qualified housing. The building costs were low and would be cheap to run if manage correctly. It wasn’t long before my mental spreadsheet was busy calculating the operating income and payback on capital and it became a clear financial winner.
“I can’t take this on by myself”, Steve said thinking aloud
“hmmm, if I handled the books and never came back, this might be interesting”, I mumbled.
And with that, we started down the road to become our own version of Slum Dog Millionaires.
This is a business; I had no intention of treating it any other way, but somewhere along the lines, things changed. I don’t know if it was when I found out that my family live in the neighborhood in the 20’s & 30’s when it as a working class neighborhood. It might have been when I met some of the people. It could have been when I fell in love with some of the old buildings. It really doesn’t matter what changed, just that something did and I started to become involved in trying to make a small difference in one community.
I was (and probably still am) naive about what I have taken on. I guess if I had a good idea of what I was in for I probably wouldn’t be doing it.

Our plan is to rehab the buildings converting several of the 1 bedroom units to 3 bedrooms, clean up the trash- literally the back yard & basements are full of it – and start renting them out within a few months. As you would expect nothing is going to plan and it is the speed bumps in the process that are making it interesting. Hopefully, you find them interesting too.