Fortunes Creator

I can’t dispute it…real estate is absolutely the best investment in the world. My husband and I have been real estate investors for many years now (9 for me, 15 for him), and nothing is as simple, predictable, profitable…or stressful. Now, I know many people would argue all of these points with me, but we have been through nearly every nightmarish situation imaginable…crazy, violent and non-paying tenants, broken sewer system that took months and months to diagnose and fix, closings that took eons to nail down.

So where’s the love, you may ask. The love is in the money. There, I said it. As John Wayne said, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is better.” And there is no area of investment that will make the average person with limited education and little (or even no) money the kind of return that a well-planned real estate purchase and/or sale can. Did we always plan well? Absolutely not. But we profited anyway, even having made somewhat stupid, costly and naive moves. And we grew emotionally, mentally and spiritually in the process. We became each other’s bastions in difficult times. We fought. I cried. We hugged and kissed and made up and decided what to do next.

As my idol, Robert Kiyosaki teaches, one of the absolute keys to real estate success is to KEEP YOUR EMOTIONS OUT OF IT! This is business. Don’t “fall in love” with a house. Don’t give prospective tenants the benefit of the doubt. Don’t sign a contract without reading the fine print. Don’t try to do anybody any favors. Real Estate is Business…note the capital B.

Example: At a time when we had an empty apartment and were getting desperate as the mortgage payment due date was approaching, our real estate agent called with a tenant for us. She was in the “witness protection program” having witnessed a crime in a different borough. The “program” offered a higher rent than what we were asking and a bonus as incentive for taking this lady in. We thought it was the answer to our prayers. Sure, I had a little trepidation (as I have for most everything…I’m cynical that way). But we needed the money, and this lady obviously was in need of a safe place to live.

She brought in bags and bags of stuff, mostly clothes. I remember, it was a Friday evening when she started hauling in all of these garbage bags. A few hours went by. Around 11:00 p.m., the music started. Rap music blaring louder than a concert hall. My 73-year-old father-in-law lived in the apartment right in front of this lady, we lived right upstairs (big mistake, by the way…never live in the same house, even the same neighborhood as your tenants if you can help it).

We tolerated the noise until about 12:30 a.m., at which time my husband got fed up and went downstairs. He knocked, she answered the door in bra and panties. He looked at the ceiling and asked her nicely to turn the music down. She asked him in, he abruptly declined, and she flew into a tirade, screaming obscenities about me and how she worked hard all week and if she wanted to listen to her music she had the right. Needless to say, she had just imbibed a liter of Absolut Vodka all by her lonesome.

We called the police. They came over and told us they were sorry but there wasn’t much they could do because she did live there, even though there was as yet no lease. They did offer us one solution…if we could somehow get her out of the house, we could lock the door behind her and if she did anything bad outside, they could arrest her.

Boy, do the NYPD know their stuff. Somehow, she did end up outside. And yes, we did lock the door behind her. And yes…she did something bad. She threw a brick through the glass of our beautiful brand new front door we had just installed. I was hysterical. Having grown up in an alcoholic household with lots of late-night trashings of the house, I would have thought that I’d have taken it more in stride. But it just stirred up all those long-buried emotions from my traumatic childhood. We had struggled with no money to restore this house that had been abandoned for 16 years, putting in all the blood, sweat, tears and dollars we could come up with and here this ungrateful witch was desecrating our baby!

Well, our dear friends at the NYPD returned, cuffed her and took her away. Days later, the DA’s assistant brought her back to get her clothes and we never saw or heard from her again. So again, you may be asking…where is the love? Here is the moral of this story…the City let us keep the deposit and the bonus and paid to repair all of the damage she did.

We were able to pay our mortgage on time, and we had time to find a decent tenant…using due diligence and a proper rental application complete with 5 personal and professional references. We found a very nice lady and her daughter who we so quiet we never knew when they were home or not, and she ALWAYS paid the rent on time.

Do you have to go through the all of the drama to make money in real estate? Absolutely not…but you probably will at one point or another. My best advice is to study, get all the good advice you can, toughen up, get your emotions out of your business and forge ahead. Building a real estate empire is the quickest, easiest way to getting rich, spending more time with your family and having a real estate to leave to your children when your time in this dimension is done.

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The author, JoAnn Roselli, is a successful living consultant, screenwriter, webmaster, entrepreneur, real estate investor and author of “How to Get High-Quality Plastic Surgery…CHEAP!” She resides in the Dominican Republic with her husband and their 12-year-old son.

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