In class recently, someone asked me how I started my own company in Real Estate as if my ideas would be helpful. I can tell you what I did but with no guarantees. I was Director of Property Management for the Forest E. Olson Co. in Van Nuys, when I decided to change to selling […]
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, I was a court appointed receiver handling apartment houses during the foreclosure period. I would get my official court order, go take over the building, and run it as a professional property manager. Great job and then the foreclosures quit coming. One time late on a […]
Settle or Not Settle? When you complete an eviction, you get a judgement and then a writ of execution. The judgements are normally worthless. You could paper your garage with them and get more value. However, there were times when other actions might be feasible. The evictee might be a person who would have a […]
Maintenance There was a 132 unit building in Torrance that we had syndicated. Cliff Dietrich and I were the General Partners. I was the Property Manager. One Saturday evening we received an emergency call that our garbage pumps were not working. The sewage from the 132 family units was sent to a big underground tank. […]
Volatile Tenant Another property was one of my very first purchases in Milwaukee when I saved money from working in Europe, officiating basketball games and teaching at the Air Base for the University of Maryland. This was a three-unit in an older area of this older city. A tenant was rather strange. She would yell […]
Rude Tenants In a building in Studio City we had a very bad tenant. Noisy, rude, narcissistic, racist, and other points North. However, he did pay his rent (one time using a racist slur and throwing Pesos at my manager). The tenants wanted him out and the manager wanted him out and I wanted him […]
