AVOID these Idiotic Mistakes of My First Rental House

be careful around power lines Oh what's up everybody in today's video I'm going to show you the idiotic and stupid mistakes that I made on my first a rental property and I'm going to show you what to do in Stannis so you can avoid making these same mistakes because the bottom line is when your own rental real estate you want tenants to stay longer and cause less damage so let's hop to it and show you the mistakes oh and stay tuned because I'll tell you exactly how I was able to get the money to buy this house at the end of the video by the way you have two days left to take advantage of some amazing tax deductions for 2019 check out the program's link below and use that New Year's Eve coupon number one noob mistake for some reason I had a loyalty to slog or Schlage locks and this isn't sponsored but I much prefer the quick-set smart re-keyed locks so everything's keyed the same and it's really easy to rekey number two the old palm tree carpet that was in here we replaced with new carpet which meant the dining room the family room and I guess the living room which is all kind of the same space over here because it's not a big house the hallway and the bedrooms all had carpet to me that's a new mistake because carpet doesn't earn the cleanest signal and it also doesn't send the vibe of ooh nice higher-end property we've since fixed that introducing my new favorite kind of flooring this is a luxury a vinyl plank it's scratch resistant and it's waterproof which means I could take the same exact flooring that I like I pick one design and I carry it all the way through from the kitchen to the bedrooms to the bathrooms to everything and that brings up newbie mistake number three yeah I think I'm gonna be a lot of newbie mistakes here I'm a bit frustrated with my original choice to go with what was popular then a beige larger tile today I could have gone with a much more timeless subway tile look that's looked good in the past that it still looks good today unfortunately is this now looks dated the good news is it kind of works with the flooring that we put in but I would have much rather had this being a white tile part of me wants to come in here and glaze this all-white but I ain't got it now I will say though a pro move was reglazing and polishing this cast-iron tub when we remodeled this a bathroom that is we didn't have to buy a new tub because it was already here and we were able to save the original tub which meant we didn't have to fix all the walls and all the damage around it now at the time these were original okie looking cabinets and so we painted and primed these hoist coffee semi-gloss through some brushed nickel hardware on which we matched the towel bars to which was like promove back then but today and I get that I didn't have money there was like nobody that Lauren and I my wife and I had to spend on the rental property so we had to be really careful and count every dime we were on this floor scrubbing it with little like abrasive sponges to try to clean the original linoleum crap that was here and we left that for the last six years but anyway this top to me is a little bit of a newbie mistake I would have gladly put this kind of faux granite in but I would have loved to wrap this with one of those vinyls and that you see people put on on YouTube that make these things look like quartz or marble super cheap and you can do it yourself now I now look and see that light fixture was actually a pro move it's almost that kind of rustic industrial style but I can tell that's like a $29 a light fixture but most tenants won't know the difference however something big that I would have done differently is I don't really like this mirror it's a little bit of a personal taste style mirror I would have much rather done what I prefer to do now you know those big mirrors that you get in big rectangles that look really lame and boring well all you have to do is take a look a bit a baseboard like this probably a little bit of a smaller version and take that baseboard make your own frame around your custom mirror boom you're good to go now when people first do a renovation I will say a lot of people get tempted to change out the doors with like a 2 panel or a 6 panel door I'm glad we left the original doors because realistically it doesn't make a difference now another new mistake is you see door stop right here this is one of those lame boring really at ones but it's not even a good doorstop it's like a crappy one I mean look at that the bottom of it has bent that's when you know you have crap throw that crap away instead you should get the solid doorstops that you can now put in some nice four-and-a-half-inch craftsman-style baseboards that we got here justice craftsman in the new mistake is this house doesn't have air conditioning which is okay for the region we're in in Southern California but to me the newbie mistake not having put in ceiling fans that's a big mistake each room should have ceiling fans so not only is there more light in the room after all this video is super dark and I can blame the ceiling fans because why not blame something now another newbie mistake because it screams cheap is I think we have these $30 little mini blinds that we actually left from the cellar they're surprisingly really good shape but they don't scream quality at all Oh another noob mistake I checked this out over here yeah so when we bought this place it had a furnace from like 1995 which should have lasted quite a while except it got fried in a power surge because these 1950s neighborhoods with these old power lines in the back they don't have the highest quality infrastructure and little power surges when the power company turns on and off power mostly on again can destroy appliances in your house so I've since installed this Levitan surge protector which by the way if you want to know how to do that you just call the electrical company have them removed their lock you pull this off you throw a little neutral line in there you shove it on you shove the other thing on and you go good to lock it up again but I also did one more thing because remember we had to replace the furnace now so guess what else I did well I replaced the furnace but check this out don't know if you've ever even seen one of these I ordered from Amazon a surge protector outlet that's built into the wall I guess I could have just put like a little socket one on here but anyway I thought I'd put on a built-in one so the tenant doesn't remove it and use it for their computers or something like that and instead I put a surge protected outlet here to try to protect this furnace and make it last longer because I didn't want to replace it again for a stupid power surge now this is another new Bemis I cannot stand when people put a bunch of cable like this around what who needs a TV cable in a hallway anyway this is getting snippy snipped no I made a few mistakes in the kitchen as well over here this was the original Formica countertop again I should have just vinyl wrap this you could see the discoloration over here it's just not like super great this we actually get super lucky and we threw this cabinet in which was just a really inexpensive maybe $150 prefab cabinet and we painted the Front's of it white to match the rest of the kitchen but we actually found the same countertop on the shelf at Lowe's that was really convenient but here's the other newbie mistake I made look at this stupid gap on the left and the right now the stove centered a little bit which makes it a little better and maybe you could put like a stepstool in there or towel you could do something with it instead the better way to have done this would have probably been to install a new cabinet on this side new cabinet on this side up to the side of the range and then filler panels on the ends so the countertop could have been thrown on top of that today we would have used a white sparkly quartz countertop instead of this but this is what we got now well this appliance is stainless another new mistake that we made when we first bought this property and again we did not have a lot of money is we installed originally white appliances knew that it was a new white dishwasher a new white range which we've since had to replace and a new white vent hood as much as I don't like the stains that stainless gets stainless is still what's in know the good news about this property is I did buy it at a steel I actually got this as a wedge deal because at the time I was a relatively new real estate agent and my mission was educating people on hey it's 2011 12 13 we should go out there buy little fixer uppers and make money with a real estate so the beginning of my career was founded around helping people make money by investing in real estate and that's the same thing I teach today in my real estate courses like bellowing including my do-it-yourself property management course and the most popular a real estate investing course by the way here's a testimonial on-screen and if you follow me on instagram you could see a lot more testimonials right here in the little circle here's another newbie mistake see this a water softener yeah this is a rental unit this means we pay about $78 per month to have this rental unit exchanged I think weekly or every other week it doesn't really matter well the problem with that is it cost me about eight hundred to one nine hundred forty dollars per year to have this thing replaced all the time and service I can probably spend like eight hundred dollars buy my own water softener and have it installed and then the system pays for itself the first year now the original reason we didn't do it was because we didn't think there were any drain opportunities over here but I've since realized that we can actually drain the water softener up and into the Attic and down one of the stink pipes I wish I knew that then now something else that I'm seeing right now is this place needs a little bit of pressure washing it's not looking that great with this brick and it's almost like mildew we looking concrete on the floor in fact the entire driveway looks pretty dang dirty well the nice thing about pressure washing is it's pretty cheap now the other newbie mistake I made was not installing sprinklers and fortunately when tenants have to hand water it usually means that tenants are less happy and you get these sort of mud patches that come up because somebody has to constantly move around a hose or one of those little heads that you kind of walk around and wander around the yard it's inconvenient it probably leads tenants to move unfortunately every time a tenant moves it costs money because you generally have at least a few days of vacancy to factor in and you oftentimes have to do things like touch-up pain and other miscellaneous repairs that you can't look at a security deposit for or it's not even worth the deducting you may as well just get it done and forget about it now what I really liked about the deal was that the entire property already had dual paned windows and what I thought was a relatively new furnace but the main reason I bought the place was because it was selling for a relatively cheap amount compared to everything else see a lot of people get offended by tract homes but the nice thing is I was holding an open house as an agent on that house right there and an lady walked in and said hey you know I know this place is selling for you know four hundred ninety nine thousand dollars at the time my place it needs a new roof it's gotten some problems it's got some dated elements to it it's got the original shiny carpet the kitchen looks old or the bathroom looks older you know I needed a remodel and she says hey I'm just trying to offload this for four hundred thousand dollars and I'm thinking myself oh my gosh four hundred thousand dollars we ended up paying three hundred eighty seven thousand dollars for it the place after I put thirty grand into it was worth at least five to five and a quarter because it would have been in better shape and was in better shape than that one now I bought this place with twenty five percent down but let's be real as a second or third year real estate agent I didn't have a 25% down so what I did was because the first place I bought was such a really good screaming a wedge deal like I teaching the real estate investing course I was able to get a home equity line of credit or basically a credit card against my first house and take a hundred thousand dollars out of my first house to help me finance the purchase and renovation of this one that meant I only had to come out of pocket about an extra fifteen to twenty thousand dollars to buy the place and I got paid a commission as a real estate agent which in case you're a real estate agent I also have a really good course for real estate agents and I teach you how to provide more value and become a no-pressure agent now it's probably a bad signal to leave this rot as well so I should probably have that stuff fixed oh oh that's not good wait let me do the key test look bondo a lot of good that bondo did I'm not entirely sure if there's a termite problem here let me do with the termite inspectors do that's that's not good oh dear oh yeah hmm Lauren I think we need to fix that be careful around power lines oh all the way all the way through I think we got some Rock see this is why I always say it's important to use quarter-inch thick paint you see the wrinkles here it holds all of this together see what would happen without the paint it would just crumble Haven at least I can water the grass now you know how I talked about pressure washing it's really good to pressure wash houses that have electrical junction boxes then don't have their holes covered or sealed it should be quite shocking now another thing it's always a good idea to repaint your fences because it'll actually make the would last longer sort of seals them a little bit now if you're ever going to donate it's a really good idea to load your car up with all of the toys and then just happen to forget to go donate them every single day you get in your car and just shovel things around including your mater port camera and the broken hatchback of while the tests lock and remember folks safety first these are my maxi flanks I get them on Amazon link down below not supposed to use them for electrical stuff but I'd touch power with them and I don't get shocked don't sue me bro if you do this folks is a stink pipe paint it this folks is a ridge camp on a pretty terrible roof that is see all this white fiber that means all the little sand granules are gone and you got nothing left but well a little bit of thin paper it's probably not good for preventing roof leaks oh and a lot of these chimneys don't have a useful life left so most of the time we just say don't use the fireplace it's decorative only but do put a chimney cap on so it prevents water from draining down and causing more damage you know it was about right here when this place was getting a roof inspection and they told me you shouldn't be able to springboard on your roof like it's a diving board you see that that's a sign that there's some rot underneath there not a good thing but hey until it leaks I ain't gonna fix it maybe it is but the bottom line is if it ain't leaking what's the point of doing anything I can fix that spot and it'll end up leaking over there and I'm just not ready to replace this whole roof yet because it's gonna cost me like I'll haven't granted to do it now I'm ready to get down because the neighbors are starting to look at me weird now the last dude mistake was we didn't paint the fireplace that's dumb always paint though brakes especially if you're going with a more modern scheme there are times used redbrick can look good so don't sue me bro if you like the used red brick just say him this looks better than what it was we even tried gray but gray doesn't work with beige walls I made that mistake too but most of the moves I've been making have been pro moves and if you want to learn to be a pro - links down below now the next thing I'm going to do is I'm gonna pop in the attic and well check if there are any leaks because there's a little bit of a stain in the roof and the days of well slumming this roof might be over [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Meet Kevin

Views: 558,572

Rating: 4.8869371 out of 5

Keywords: real estate real estate investing finance, money, wealth, how to invest, beginner investing, house, rental, investment, noob vs pro, investing

Id: mrPBbsSgpxg

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 29 2019