INTRODUCTION

How I Owned and Operated 75 Rental Properties While Working My Full-Time Job as an Undercover Police Detective (BEFORE Hiring a 5-Hour-a-Week Office Person)

Hello fellow landlord investors; I'm honored to have the opportunity to share my investing lessons and techniques with you. Not all of my landording education has been pretty. I've also got honorary PhDs from both the “School of Hard Knocks” and my private high school diploma. If I help you get on the fast track to holding good solid rental properties, it'll be another notch on my belt of achievements. Before we get started here, I'd like to share with you a little bit about where I've been, what I've done, and where I am today.

Mom, Dad, and seven kids grew up in this two-bedroom home a few blocks from Churchill Downs, Kentucky

I grew up just a few blocks from the world-famous Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby. Our neighborhood consisted primarily of blue collar workers, where the definition of “successful” was to land a good job, at a good company, buy a home and get it paid off, and retire and buy a riding mower. In our neighborhood and church, I don't recall any doctors, attorneys, or CPAs. Those folks lived on the “other side of town.” I was the oldest of seven kids, and we were raised with a good strong work ethic. Pop worked at a slaughterhouse and proudly identified his occupation as a “meat cutter.” He'd let people know pretty quickly that anybody can be a “butcher.” Mom stayed at home and did a great job of keeping everybody fed, healthy, and in clean clothes. We had no clue we were poor. We knew Dad worked hard and I admired him and wanted to be just like him. I played football for nine years and got a paper route delivering daily morning and afternoon papers the summer after the eighth grade. This paper route was passed on to my brothers and sisters for almost a decade and delivering papers allowed us to attend a private high school.

I worked for 10 years at Winn-Dixie supermarkets starting out as a bag boy and working my way up to Store Manager. In November 1982, I had the wonderful opportunity to get robbed at gunpoint, with a revolver nervously shaking centimeters (not inches) from mynose.

This event, along with catching shoplifters (some violent), sparked my interest in law enforcement. I took a pretty good cut in pay to become a cop. My starting salary was $17,000. I worked all the overtime I could get and worked “off-duty” jobs for extra income.

I was very intent on finding something to supplement my police pension down the road. I feverishly read the classified ads daily, especially the “Business Opportunity” sections. I wanted the “magic pill” too. I thought it might be found in vending machine routes or coin-operated car washes and Laundromats. There had to be a simple, easy way to financial success.

My goal or objective was to spend my time and energy (because I had no money) into something that would grow in value and income. My attitude was I could simply outwork everyone else, resulting in success. I was searching for something to grow and make money as an “ABSENT OWNER,” a hands-off system. My gut instinct kept directing me to real estate and rental property, but I didn't have a clue how to get started, where to begin, PLUS I HAD NO MONEY.

In those days, HUD advertised properties for sale in our Sunday classified ads. I'd drive by these properties in my old Ford Ranger pickup and I thought I was learning my market by seeing how much HUD's asking price for the property was and trying to catch how much they sold for in just a few days or weeks. One Sunday in December 1989, a two-bedroom house on my old paper route showed up on the HUD list. I made an all cash offer “below their asking price” and had no cash. I just wanted the experience of going through the bidding process.

Low and Behold, My Bid Was Accepted!

Now what? We had about $1,000 in our police officers credit union savings account and I got pretty nervous. I went to the Louisville Police Officers Credit Union and got a loan on my Ford Ranger pickup, our old Monte Carlo, and an unsecured signature loan with auto-payments to be taken directly from my paycheck. This still wasn't enough to pull it off and do the rehab needed. I resorted to my last resource, cash advances on several credit cards.

We bought this house for $17,000, put $2,000 in rehab and completed it all in 13 days. I hauled trash and debris to my police sub-station dumpster at night. After renovating this little house, I went to Office Depot and purchased a generic rental application and lease agreement, and put a tenant in the property. (I was lucky. This tenant is still with me today in his third home withus.)

The short version of this story is that I refinanced this house by paying off all of those truck, car, signature loan and credit cards and ended up with $5,000 cash in my pocket PLUS we were making almost $200 per month positive cash flow!

Another pretty house, ready to go, went up for sale across the street. I repeated the same process without having to do any repairs except changing the locks. WOW! This was pretty awesome. Now, Tammy jerked my chain and said, “WHOA!” She was very wise and conservative and ordered me to ride it out for 12 months and see what happens because of the “too good to be true” jinxes.

After a year, we had over $6,000 in our “real estate savings account” and she let me off my chain. I continued buying rental houses. In the beginning, it was just simply a lot easier to buy stinky, broken, ugly houses in need of repair. I'd fixed them up and rent them out. People thought I was nuts. I was buying them at a good price; but I was NOT selling them. It seems like the rest of the world wanted the FAST CASH NOW. I was simply trying to build something that would double or triple my police pension in about 15 years.

Several interesting achievements were accomplished by accident.

1. I NEVER went to a bank to buy an investment property. I always bought the property first.
2. I NEVER used a hard-money lender or a private lender for financing.

We started off our first year with two properties, then two more the following year, and I set a goal of one house per month, resulting in 18 properties purchased. After this, I was going to set a goal of two houses per month (24 for the year). My good friend, local competition, and education partner, Jay Long, and I had the opportunity to see Brian Tracy in Florida during one of his annual real estate investor conferences. Brian Tracy did a presentation on setting goals and challenged folks to “Shoot for the Moon!” If you fall short and miss your goal, he'd ask: “Are You a Loser?” His answer: “NO, You're Not a Loser, You're Just a STAR!” Because of Brian Tracy, I adjusted my goal from 24 houses for the year to four times this … 96 houses, and rounded it up to 100.

Thanks to Brian Tracy, I did 85 deals that year, resulting in over 50 rental properties purchased and added to my portfolio. Absolutely incredible! That sure blows the doors off my original aggressive goal. Getting this Buying Machine cranked up was a huge challenge. There were so many train wrecks and potholes in the details of the Big Picture. I'll share many of those in later chapters in this book.

Warning

In today's real estate market, do NOT focus on “quantity”; focus on “Quality.” Each rental must support itself with a “Pay Me First Mindset.” Your rental must put money in your pocket every month. When I got started, I focused on quantity and I was buying rentals that were marginal deals. You cannot do that today.

The crucial learning for me was that I had to develop super-efficient systems, tools, and resources in order to realistically have a shot at achieving my goals. I hired my first part-time handyman on rental house #5 and pretty much never swung a hammer again from that point forward.

I used my noggin in creating my effective buying machine, managing rentals, and keeping it all together from a very small office in the corner of our basement. My communication tools were a pager and a cell phone. My real office was on wheels, my police truck. Today, absolutely everything is done remotely using my smartphone, tablet, or laptop.

As a cop and an undercover detective, I developed pretty darn good people skills or communication skills. I had a special ability of getting bad guys and gals to tell me their side of their story, either tape recording it or allowing them to tell their story in a written statement. An admission of the criminal offense, taken properly and legally from a bad guy, is one of the best pieces of evidence in a criminal case. What's kind of weird here is the bad guys usually thanked me as they were led away in handcuffs. I retired in March of 2000 and still get calls from bad guys in prison and on parole. Their girlfriends and family members have quite a bit different attitude about me. I know this is true, even today, because two of my little brothers are police officers,too.

Tammy and I lived off of our police officer and nurse wages. We chose to let our real estate grow itself. One beautiful Saturday morning, I checked the voice mail messages on my pager and found it full with 30 messages. I retrieved all of the messages and began returning phone calls at 8:30 A.M. while sitting...