If At First You Don't Succeed... Dust Yourself Off and Try Again

Welcome back, last post we spoke about protecting your investors and their investment. Our main objective is always making sure we are putting our investors' capital in the right assets with as low risk as possible. To this point in our journey, we have backed out of 2 contracts based on the risk we were not comfortable exposing our investors to. Now let me tell you, at the beginning of your journey in investing and starting a business, there is NOTHING more demoralizing than working as hard as you can to find the right property that you believe fits your criteria and your investors. You do your due diligence, negotiate a price that works for you and the seller, open escrow, and you have to back out. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but all we can do "dust ourselves off and try again..." 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTA0RuZoIxM

There’s a song from 2000 that comes to mind when I think about our journey in multifamily real estate thus far, Try Again by Aaliyah. The chorus of the song goes “If at first you don't succeed, then you can dust yourself off and try again.” As we’ve mentioned in the past, Matt and I are former athletes and we have played a combined 40 years of sports in our “heyday” and when I tell you there’s no quit in us, there’s no quit. In true athlete fashion, what we did immediately after having to back out of our 2nd contract was we hopped on the phone and both said “back to the drawing board.” We discussed our process of finding deals, zoned in on our buying criteria, and got back to work.

It’s very easy after the work that goes into finding projects and getting them into contract to just say, “we’re going to do everything it takes to get this deal closed, no matter what.” Especially early on in your career. However, when your mission statement for your company is, “...(We are) dedicated to providing an honest and profitable real estate investment. Our main objective is to provide everyone from young professionals to seasoned investors with great investment opportunities.” and our first 2 core values are Integrity and Leadership, you DO NOT waver.

The trust is... we could have closed on both of the deals we were in contract on, and probably made a bit of money for our investors in the process, but the risk that was involved was too large for the reward. 

A quote that comes to mind when thinking about canceling a contract is “Live to play another day.” There were some huge issues that weren’t disclosed to us prior to getting into contract on these projects. The first project had a roof that was collapsing and needed immediate replacement. Which is no sweat, assuming you pay the right price for the property, or the seller pays for the roof, but in our case he wasn’t willing to credit us or reduce the price. The second project that I’ll dive into soon, had intense drug activity next door as well as obvious plumbing issues that we weren’t able to detect immediately when we visited the property. This seller was also unwilling to reduce his price or give us credits for the issues. 

(Update as of writing this, the seller was in contract again on this property and the buyers backed out for the same reason we did)

With these 2 experiences, we learned several valuable lessons. Were we upset with the outcome? Sure. Discouraged? Not in the slightest. We learn and move on because we know, just like in baseball, we’re one opportunity closer to success. And in the famous words of Aaliyah “If at first you don’t succeed, dust yourself off and try again.” That’s exactly what we are going to do.