Yuill.ca

Most people who tell me investing in real estate and being a landlord is a bad idea often site the possibility of a tenant calling you at 2 a.m. in the morning about a leaky toilet and you have to rush over there to fix it. Apparently if this happens even once in say … the 15 years you might be actively managing your property, it makes all the upside of real estate not worth it. Of course these people don’t think it will happen just once, they must think it’s happening every other weekend. Well if that was the case I would suggest you stop fixing that toilet on your own and cough up some dough for a plumber to do it right.

So here’s a dose of reality for you. We actually had a call this weekend about a malfunctioning toilet. But it wasn’t actually a call, it was an e-mail and it came at 2 p.m. on a Friday, not 2 a.m. on a Saturday. And instead of rushing over there and doing a poor repair job we made arrangements to have it repaired by Sunday afternoon.

The end result, happy tenants and my personal time did not go to waste.

Landlording is not easy and it’s no more a natural skill than quantum mechanics is. I’m not suggesting landlording is as hard to learn as quantum mechanics but you have to work at it just the same. Being a bad landlord is easy. It won’t make you successful and the time you spend trying to fill your units and at Tribunal defending tenant claims against you will soon add up but people do it.

Recently we worked with an investor who wanted to put some of his portfolio in real estate but didn’t even want to get that e-mail about the toilet, let alone make arrangements to have it repaired. We ended up being a good fit to partner with them on a real estate investment. He saw the value in the work we put into being good landlords and our knowledge of real estate.

Who knows – maybe one day you’ll want to be a landlord too, just without the e-mails about faulty toilets. If that day comes, give us a shout and we might be a good fit.