How (not) to Fail in Real Estate
It is widely understood that one of the best paths towards creating, growing, and maintaining wealth is through real estate. Quite frankly, it’s easy to see why. Buildings are what keep people and their possessions safe from the whims of nature and they take time and energy to build and maintain. As a child, I became fascinated with the idea of owning buildings in part because of how unstable my life was. Growing up, we lived below the poverty line. Not only was housing unstable, but so was my safety at home and the ability to participate in the activities that my peers enjoyed. My childhood fascination with these stable and enduring structures became intertwined with an understanding that our society rewards the owners of these structures with wealth and security, which in turn, created a clear and compelling hook for me. Owning real estate meant a path to escaping poverty.
In this series, I’m going to explore how I built a $1.2M+ real estate development and management company from the ground up from 2015 to 2019, only to spend the majority of 2020 after COVID-19 hit, guiding its dissolution. These articles are meant to serve as a transfer of my knowledge as I’ve come to realize that my experiences may offer a valuable perspective for others. At the same time, these articles serve as an exercise in catharsis. In effect, I am mourning the loss of “my baby” and processing the feelings of failure, anger, resentment, and despondency that have come with having something I worked so hard to build come apart due to a black swan event. Admittedly, this has not been an easy undertaking. Writing this series has been a deep labor of self exploration into the “why” of what happens in life. Through this process, I have been striving for closure and acceptance so that I can move forward into the next chapter of my life with gratitude and grace.
I plan to tell this story through a series of articles reflecting on the key lessons I learned from some of the situations I found myself in as a property owner and landlord. Each article also features deeper meditations on my own life’s story. Below you’ll find links to each article in this series:
1) Why I became a landlord: people, safety, and the feeling of home
2) Moving fast and breaking things (mostly) doesn’t work in real estate
3) Scaling is really, really hard
4) How COVID blew everything up and attempting to wind down with grace
