Mistakes I Made as a Landlord
The first big real estate investment we ever bought was a mixed commercial-multifamily building in Queen Anne, Seattle.
We closed during COVID. We didn't know what questions to ask. We didn't dig into the rent roll. We didn't understand the tenant situation before we signed.
We learned all of it the hard way, after closing, after we took over management, when we found out several tenants weren't paying and had no intention of starting.
Then we learned the second hard lesson: getting them out was long, slow, and brutal. Our first eviction attorney. Then the paperwork. Then the waiting. And the waiting. We were stunned by how much time, money, and energy it took.
More than $30K from one tenant gone in lost rent and legal fees, plus all of our excitement and energy drained and a genuinely bad taste in our mouths about being a landlord in Seattle.
That experience changed how I operate today. We acquire differently now. We manage differently. We ask the questions we didn't know to ask back then. Those losses have made us better investors, which is a generous way of saying they were tuition.
PadSplit launched HostGuard this week, a host protection program that covers the exact things that nearly broke us early on: eviction costs, member-caused property damage, and member liability. I've written before that most of the hesitation I hear about this model is fear, not math. People can run a proforma. What stops them is the what-if.
I wrote an honest breakdown on my blog, what it actually covers and, just as importantly, what it doesn't. Because it's not a replacement for your own insurance and it's not magic. But it does put a floor under the three costs that scared me most when I was new.
For first time investors getting into rent-by-room and co-living, PadSplit just gave Seattle investors one more reason to leverage their platform.
#seattlehousing#seattlerealestate#coliving#rentbyroom
(Pictured: Our family in front of the church we bought and 1031 exchanged to purchase our first large commercial multifamily).
