I Bought 4 Beach Condos, Rented Them Out for Years, Then Sold Everything... Here's Why

In Episode 10 of The Fitze Is Right, Maryland realtor Jen Fitze tells a story she's never shared on the podcast — her own. Not a client's deal. Not a horror story from a transaction. This is Jen and her husband's personal journey buying, renting, and selling four beach condos in Ocean City, Maryland.

It started with a dream. Growing up, Jen and Chris each had one week at the beach per year. That was all their families could afford. When they got married, they started renting the same condo in Ocean City for two weeks every summer — spending over $3,000 a year on someone else's property. After four or five years of this, Jen asked the question that changed everything: what if we just bought one?

They got approved — she still doesn't know how — and found their dream unit at the Capri. Right on the beach. Beautiful view. $10,000 over budget, because of course it was. They hired a property manager, rented it out when they weren't there, and the first year the numbers came in: $30,000 in rental income against $27,000-$28,000 in expenses. Barely breaking even — but they had a beach house.

The plan was simple: buy a new condo every two years, using the rental history to qualify for the next mortgage. By the end, they owned four units. One bedroom on the ocean. Two-bedroom oceanfronts. A bayside unit where they could watch fireworks from the balcony — Jen's absolute favorite.

Then COVID hit. No rentals allowed. Four mortgages plus their primary home. No income. "We went broke a little."

Jen pulls back the curtain on the tenant nightmares — renters who opened the sliders and ran the AC at 58 degrees all weekend, destroying the entire unit. Curling iron burns on white dressers. Bottle caps down the garbage disposal. Margarita stains on white pillows, flipped over like Jen wouldn't notice.

Eventually, they made the decision to sell. The first condo — purchased for $270,000 — sold for $475,000. Six years of equity growth. They used a 1031 exchange to defer taxes, rolled everything into a new home, and now have a tiny mortgage.

Jen's verdict on being a landlord? Social media glamorizes it. The internet makes you think it's passive income. It's not. It's a second job with no days off. It's a financial gamble. And a pandemic can wipe you out overnight. If you're going to do it, have your strategy, your team, and your expectations in order — or you're going to fail.

In this episode you'll learn:
→ How Jen and her husband went from renting to owning 4 beach condos
→ The real math of vacation rental income vs. expenses
→ What COVID did to landlords who depended on seasonal rentals
→ The worst thing tenants ever did to one of their condos
→ What a 1031 exchange is and how it defers your taxes
→ Why "passive income" from rentals is mostly a myth
→ The one lease rule every landlord should have

New episodes weekly. Follow Jen Fitze on social media for daily real estate tips.

Thanks for listening to The Fitze Is Right with Jen Fitze... the real estate podcast that tells you what your agent won't.

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Got a real estate horror story of your own? We want to hear it. Send your story to @jenniferfitzecompassrealestate and Jen might read and react to it live on a future episode.

CONNECT WITH JEN: All socials @jenniferfitzecompassrealestate

WORK WITH JEN: Buying or selling a home in Maryland? Jen has over 20 years of experience helping families in Harford County, Baltimore County, and beyond. Reach out at jensellsmd@gmail.com

Transcript

She Owned 4 Beach Condos. Here's Why She Sold Them All.

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Social media and the internet as a whole like completely glamorizes being a landlord or having beach houses, thinking that we're all like rolling in the dough and this is just such an easy game to get into and it is not. It is hard. It is a lot of pressure, it is a lot of financial responsibility, and you don't really make out with anything

Intro: The Truth About Being a Landlord

SPEAKER_01 0:20

in the end. It's a gamble every single day. Welcome to The Fight to the Right, where I tell you real stories about real estate deals and all the things buyers, sellers, and even agents should know about before it's too late. So today I'm not talking about client or stories from past clients. I'm gonna talk about myself and my life as a landlord. So I'm gonna give you

Young and Broke: One Week at the Beach Per Year

SPEAKER_01 0:50

the reality of being a landlord, Airbnb, burboing, you know, rental properties and the positives of what can happen and how you can make money, but then also the drawbacks. So this is gonna be a very honest, upfront, and blunt conversation about being a landlord and how to get into it, if that's something you want to do.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

So take us back to when you even just started thinking about and then buying these condos. What is the story there?

SPEAKER_01 1:19

So my husband and I love the beach. We absolutely love going to Ocean City, and I know everybody thinks it's like you know trashy down there, and it can be, but I love Ocean City. I've always loved Ocean City when we were young and broke and poor as crap when we were children. We had one week at the beach, and I looked forward to it all year long. This this one year, and my husband was the same way, like one year at the beach. So then when we got married and we got together and we were like, let's go to the beach. Well, so we started spending like two weeks at a time in Ocean City. So we would rent the same condo for two weeks, and it was costing us like all this money every year to rent these crappy condos. But we loved it, we didn't care. We loved it, we loved being there. So then I'm like, what happens if we just go and like buy? Like, how does that even go? Like, how does it even work? Like, how would you even go about like way could we even afford it? Because you know, we're young at the time, and how much are condos, and then like could we even rent them out? Like, what what could we rent them out, you know, when we weren't down there and make money to cover all the expenses? So there were so many questions. We had no idea what we were doing. Um, even me as a realtor, like I knew some things, but I didn't know like the whole part of like investing and becoming a landlord, and especially when it's a in a second home community, it's not like I'm buying a place that to rent year long or having long-term tenants in. Like, that's that's to me is kind of like a cakewalk to compare to figuring out what you'd actually have to make renting weekly to cover all the bills. So we decided to start just kind of like calling the lenders, figuring out like, hey, can we even do this? Because I mean, we probably did it for like four or five years in a row. We're spending over three grand just for the condo.

SPEAKER_00 3:21

What do you mean?

SPEAKER_01 3:22

To rent it for two weeks.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Wait before you decided to buy.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

So it's like before we decided to buy.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

So we're spending all this money

Buying the First Condo in Ocean City

SPEAKER_01 3:30

all the time. Um, and then but we would also be going down Memorial Weekend and Labor Day weekend, and so we're like, we were constantly down there. So we got approved. I don't even know how that happened.

SPEAKER_00 3:41

So wait, why did you not want to just buy a house for you to live in down there? Like, what was the difference between that and buying like a rental type of thing to rent out?

SPEAKER_01 3:48

Because we're not down there, so we didn't I didn't want to have all that maintenance to worry about, like especially when the hurricanes come and like having to board everything up. I didn't want to have to be concerned about that. I wanted, you know, to be like in a building where nothing was going to happen, and I didn't have to worry about, especially with the house was like mowing the lawn, or you know, like just people like walking by and stealing stuff. And because my friend actually had a house at the time on Coastal Highway, and there was so much crime right at her house, and she was on 100th Street, 110th Street, she was literally like right there, and just cops running by there all the time, and people throwing trash and stuff in her yard. And I didn't want to deal with any of that because I saw what she would deal with, and I know, uh-uh. So, condo is what it was, we weren't there, utility bills were low. But this was just for you guys to live in. No, we were gonna rent it out, like we couldn't afford it. Yeah, we couldn't afford the condo without renting it out. But when you wanted to go down, you would have it, correct? So, like we had to um we started looking and just kind of getting ideas of places I knew that we wanted to be up like North Ocean City. I didn't want to be down on the boardwalk end, I wanted to be at least like you know, 80th Street and up, and I wanted to be on the beach. Like that was my thing. And I actually put a post out on social media and I was like, because a couple of the units didn't have washer and dryer. I'm like, well, that's kind of like to me, that's important. I don't ever do laundry on vacation, I will literally take it all home in a trash bag. Um, but the other people might, especially if they have little kids, you know, they might. So I was like, is this important? So it's like then we could, and then if you were staying on the beach side versus the bay side, would you rather rent a place that has a pool or doesn't have a pool? Like if you're on a beach, do you need to have a pool? You're doing like a survey to see what you needed to have at yours, right? So if you buy on the bay side, do you have to have a pool because you don't really have easy access to the beach? So it was all these different things that we were thinking about trying to determine like what places to even look at, what buildings to even look at. I was friends with a realtor down there. He knew all of the different like the buildings and the the HOAs and the assessments and uh all the ins and outs of all the buildings down there. Like I didn't know all of that at the time. So it was good to have somebody that lived down there that knew all the details of what all these buildings because some buildings had these huge like 30 grand assessments, and some buildings were just like falling apart. Like if there was like a little match, it was just gonna go phew. Yep. Um, so it was good to have somebody with that knowledge down there. So we looked, and first day we got down there on our two-week stint, we looked, and we looked, I don't know, we looked at like five or six or something, and some of them were just complete crap, like the buildings falling apart, or yeah, I'm like, oh, this is like senior week community, like we are not gonna be staying here, just just trash. Like, and everybody has this freaking hodgepodge of furniture. It's like, oh, nothing matches, nothing looks good. It's like, oh, grandma died, take her chair.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

Oh, the it's like wait, but like when you're buying it, you're buying it with the furniture in it. Furnished. Why?

SPEAKER_01 7:06

Everything is fully furnished because it's a condo. All the condos are sold, they're full. I mean, every single utensil, everything. Yeah, you can go in there and you know buy new or whatever, but when you're spending this much money on a condo, you're kind of broke. So it's good to have you know furniture in there that way you can like quickly, you know, rent it. And it's also when you're looking at places you want to get the past rental history too, because you need to know whether this unit is producing or not. Because if they can't get anybody to rent it, then that's not something that you want to invest in.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:40

So, and people also question like they don't want a building with assessments. I think that it's a good thing when there's an assessment because that means that the condo association is taking care of the building. So they're doing things to maintain it, putting on a new roof, redoing the elevators, you know, everything costs a lot of money to maintain down there because of the salt air and everything has to be replaced as like half a shelf light than it would like up here in Mill Air. Um, so when they're assessing you this extra money to make these repairs, I think it's a good thing. But it sucks that you have to pay it, but they're also maintaining the building and it therefore maintaining the value of your unit.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

Yeah, that's smart.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

But yeah, we went and looked at a bunch, and then he took us to see one that was like 10,000 over our price. And of course, that's the one that we loved.

Scaling to 4 Units... Then COVID Hit

SPEAKER_01 8:30

Um why wouldn't it be? But it had this most beautiful view. You could see all the way down coastal highway south, you could see all north, you were right on the beach. Like it was just fantastic. We just stood out there and we're like, yeah, this is it. Like this. So then we waited for like two weeks, like the whole two-week stint. We sat there and like pondered and pondered, and should we do it? Should we not do it? So we finally did it.

SPEAKER_00 8:56

So you had one condo in OJ? That was one condo. So was it the Cabri? So you said you said at this point that you only could afford it if people were renting it out, but you guys also went down often. So, what did that lifestyle look like for you?

SPEAKER_01 9:10

So we would go down, um, so it wouldn't really rent in like from like November to April-ish. Um, as much as we tried to get it rented in the like December for like winter fests and stuff, it just wouldn't.

SPEAKER_00 9:22

Um where'd you put it to rent? Like was a rep website or get a property manager. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

A friend of ours lives down there, him and his wife, they're our property manager. They took care of everything. That's like booking all the rentals and you know, getting all the funds and paying off paying us and doing the repairs and doing it. Very nice. It was the best. You recommend it. You can't, yeah. Like, you definitely have to have somebody down there that's that can be there in a jiffy to get in a jiffy. God, how old am I? That can be there quickly to handle issues. Um in a jiffy. In a jiffy, yeah. So yeah, we bought a condo.

SPEAKER_00 9:59

And on the busy season, when would you go down and when would you rent it out?

SPEAKER_01 10:02

And what we would go down Memorial Weekend, and we would go down for a week in the summer, and then we would go down Labor Day weekend.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

And then just try to rent it out, and then everything else was rent. And did you make way more than your mortgage? Like, what was the success of this?

SPEAKER_01 10:20

Um, like the first year, like our bills totaled the first year career, which was like 27, 28,000 for the like the mortgage, the condo fees, uh utilities, all that. And so if our bills were like 27, we made 30. So it wasn't like the money, but yeah, no, because then we had to put that back in there to like you know, paint or replace the air conditioning unit. Yeah. But you were going down for something. Everybody broke. But the bonus is you have a beach house. Yeah. Right? So, like, that's kind of the goal. Like, you're not making bank like you would if you had a long-term rental in there. Yeah. But you go down and get to stay for free. Yeah, exactly. So, like when I have conveni they have a convention down there every year, I can go down there and stay, or you know, it was just it was just much more convenient.

SPEAKER_00 11:07

So, what happened from this? Did you rent out more condos or were you stuck with one?

SPEAKER_01 11:11

So, the plan was to buy a new condo every two years because we needed two years of rental to show we had two years consistent rentals and how much we were making in those rentals to cover a new mortgage. Because we obviously couldn't keep affording all these mortgages. Yeah. So every two years we bought another unit. So by the end, we had four.

SPEAKER_00 11:34

Is that something you put on yourself, or is that like from a lender? They're like, this is what we need to see to allow you to buy. It's from the lender in the beginning. Yeah, we need to see that you're good at you can get it.

SPEAKER_01 11:43

Yeah. And of course, COVID hit, and um, they weren't allowing rentals, and we still had to pay all the more, we then had to pay all the mortgages without any rentals, and that was a big cluster. Like that was like you're like, let me get rid of these. That was bad, but then we kind of we kept them all, we we had to recoup, like we had like really like we ran broke a little, not broke, but it was just it was hard. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:12

Um, which that type of stuff can happen, right? So it's like when you're doing the in this business, you have to kind of prepare for that.

SPEAKER_01 12:18

We do, you do. I just didn't feel like we would have to pay all four at once, yeah. Plus our house here, yeah. Like it was yeah, a lot. Yeah, but yeah, like we absolutely loved it because like sometimes like we'd have to go down there and we're like, okay, which unit's open? Like, which one can we go and pop into for the weekend, or which one, you know, and they were we had a one-bedroom and we had two other two bedrooms on the ocean front, and then we had a bayside unit, which was right northside park, which was my absolute favorite of all of them because we could see the fireworks from our balcony. Like we did, like I would run there like every day. I just loved being there. Um, I would probably buy another condo there in a heartbeat.

SPEAKER_00 13:01

So, what were the downsides? Like, what were the upsides and downsides of this? So, upside, obviously, you can go anytime you want.

SPEAKER_01 13:06

What did it end up being profitable when you had four units going, or was it still kind of um it was, but it wasn't like by the time by the end, the very first condo where initially we were making like 30 year, we we were getting in 30 year by the end we were getting in 50 a year or 55 a year. Um, so that turned out really well. And the one on the one on the base side was really just kind of like a break-even. We were there all the time, so we didn't rent it out as much, but it did rent, but it was really just a break-even point. Um, and then we had two others that were in the same building and they rented, but it wasn't like it was nothing was ever like the Capri, like the original one.

SPEAKER_00 13:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

Um, that had an indoor pool. So if you're ever looking for a place, yeah, recommend, get a place to indoor pool because people will rent it all year long.

SPEAKER_00 13:53

So when people get into like Airbnb businesses or vacation rental businesses and they it make it their whole job, like what are they doing to make it so profitable? Or is it just that they have so many? I don't think that it is profitable.

SPEAKER_01 14:04

Yeah. Like when my friend got into it, like he they lived up here and he worked for Wells Fargo, and she has a full-time job, and he was like, Oh, let me just start. Like we were his first clients, and so now he has like over a hundred, but he wants to keep it small and tight. He doesn't want to be like cobanker, but associated, whatever, um, because he likes to have that like hands-on approach with everything.

SPEAKER_00 14:28

So he's making profit, I guess, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:30

But it's not I mean, it's like when we started, we were paying him 11% like a month based on what we what was rented, and now I think he's at like 16%. But I mean, if they're not rented, he's not making anything, and he's constantly up and down coastal highway, like him, his wife's here, he's there, like checking all these issues. He's had to go out in the middle of the night and deal with you know, like the H2O

The Tenant Nightmares: AC Sabotage and Margarita Pillows

SPEAKER_01 14:55

weekends and people like or like senior weekers, he has to go and like do spot checks, and it's like it's not an easy job. It's like he's constantly on call. He can never like go out and have a drink because he might get a call and be like, Oh, the dishwasher's leaking everywhere. I need you to come over here now. And he can't go there, obviously, with like flicker on his breath, that kind of stuff, you know. So it's like he never has any downtime. It's a hard business, it's a very hard business, very it's not a rewarding.

SPEAKER_00 15:24

Would you recommend people to try to like buy a rental property and and do what you did? Or do you think it's situational? Or like what were the downsides of this?

SPEAKER_01 15:34

The downsides were people don't take care of your place the way that you would take care of it. A. People are not clean, like they should be. People will ruin your stuff. People will get there on a Friday and open the sliders and then turn the air conditioning down to 58 and let it run all weekend long, and then and Sunday morning leave and close the sliders and turn it up to 80 and leave and then freeze your unit out, and then we have to buy a new unit.

SPEAKER_00 16:08

Nice.

SPEAKER_01 16:10

Yeah, so they just don't care.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

That's what you get when you're doing vacation, right?

SPEAKER_01 16:16

I had a curling iron burn marks on my white dresser, and people just throwing like all the bottle caps and stuff down our kitchen sink and to the garbage disposals, all you know, they just they don't care.

SPEAKER_00 16:30

So if someone does want to get into this, and it doesn't have to be a bishop's hoodie, but like what can they do to make this profitable for them? Like if they're it's not like you who wants to go stay there. They're like, I want to buy properties and rent this out. What should they be doing?

SPEAKER_01 16:43

Well, if you want to be profitable, I would do more of like the yearly, like the long-term renters. Yeah. That's where your profit's gonna be. Um, seasonal rentals, you're if you break even, it's a good year. Yeah. You know, and the the perk is somebody's paying your mortgage because you're not getting it, and you have a place at the beach or wherever it is that you're renting it.

SPEAKER_00 17:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:05

So that's that's the pro. Um, but if you want to do more long-term rentals, like you can make money. Your mortgage could be $1,500 a month and you'd be renting it for $2,500 a month, and so you're making $12,000 a year. Yeah, as long as those people don't destroy your place.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

Yeah. Which they probably won't as much because they care a little more because they're living there, you would think.

SPEAKER_01 17:25

You would think. But no. But not all the time, no. And that's why, and then like when we were renting it, we would raise the rent a little bit more, like higher than what the others, because we wanted to kind of get the

Selling Everything: $270K → $475K and the 1031 Exchange

SPEAKER_01 17:38

higher quality people. Yeah. Not just those that are, you know.

SPEAKER_00 17:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:43

You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 17:44

So you had these units, you're breaking making a little bit of money and let's say every year, and you said you enjoyed it, but there were these downsides. So what what was so 2020 happened? 2020 happened, and we make it through, and I'm just gonna do it. So you're just paying for all of it yourself throughout.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

Paying all of it ourselves because the pools weren't open, like nothing, nobody was going down. Um, we get it, I feel like it was 2022 or 20, I think it was 2022. We already sold the first one.

SPEAKER_00 18:15

What how did you come to that decision?

SPEAKER_01 18:16

Um, it needed a new kitchen. It needed a new kitchen, and it needed two new bathrooms, and like the kitchen, the drawer, this was the first, you know, we bought the drawer, like the tablets were painted, and the drawer with the utensils was like crooked and it wasn't on the track anymore, and it's like don't touch it, you know, kind of thing. And so it's like, do we want to put like all this money in to fix the kitchen when do the bathrooms, or do we just sell it? Because at that point, the equity like skyrocketed, like we it was worth double than what we had paid for it.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

So you would make more money selling it than getting these rental renters, right?

SPEAKER_01 18:53

So it's like, do we want to put like 50 grand in and fix it and keep it and keep renting it, or do we want to take advantage of the equity? Yeah, um so that's what we did. We sold that one.

SPEAKER_00 19:07

And it sold for how much more than you bought it?

SPEAKER_01 19:10

We paid 270 for it and we sold it for 470, 475.

SPEAKER_00 19:16

So you made out, and then how many years was that? Six?

SPEAKER_01 19:21

We bought it in 16 and we sold it in 22.

SPEAKER_00 19:25

That's pretty good.

SPEAKER_01 19:26

Six years.

SPEAKER_00 19:26

That's pretty good.

SPEAKER_01 19:27

Yeah, so and then the second one on the base side, we sold we decided to sell that one. That was a third-floor walk-up, so it was really hard to sell that one because nobody wants to do that. But you said you loved that one though, right? That was our favorite, yeah. Like, we hated taking all the luggage up and down, and like we would just like throach it off the balcony to like get it down to like towards cars, but like lugging all that stuff up and down. And people that are older, like they're buying places, they're not gonna do all that. Yeah, so it was really hard to get that one sold. It probably took a good six months to get that one at least sold.

SPEAKER_00 20:04

Did you make money there? We did. How much?

SPEAKER_01 20:08

We did, we bought that one for 260 something, and I feel like we sold it for four or something.

SPEAKER_00 20:16

So, I mean yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

It was like a successful endeavor, I feel like and then the other ones we literally bought and sold within a year. So, and we sold both of them from more than we paid for it the year before. So that was good. So we did a 1031 exchange.

SPEAKER_00 20:33

So this is something that helped you what you're doing.

SPEAKER_01 20:35

It helps us defer the taxes. So when you sell the property and you have all that income or all that profit accounts as income, then you have to pay taxes on it. So this would defer the tax payment. So we take all that money, we give it to an intermediary, very nice guy, I forget what his name is, but he was nice, and he just help holds the money, and then we when we go to buy a new place that we weren't going to rent, he gave us that money and they they put that right on the new place.

SPEAKER_00 21:05

So you never had to pay taxes on it?

SPEAKER_01 21:07

Not yet. So when we sell the new place, if we don't buy another second home, we will then have to pay the taxes on it.

SPEAKER_00 21:16

So that's something anyone could do with any of their houses, technically, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:20

Yeah, it has to be the same property. Like if you have a second home, it has to be a second home. Investment property has to be investment property. It's not for um primary residents.

SPEAKER_00 21:27

Primary residents get an investment property or something like you can't do that. Yeah, no. So what so you guys now have so you use that to buy just like a home for you guys took all the proceeds and just bought a home for us.

SPEAKER_01 21:39

In the end, when we realized that we had so much equity in all the properties, instead of putting money into fix them up, we decided to pull it all out. Because we didn't know what the market was going to do after the whole COVID pandemic. I mean, prices had really increased like big time, so we kind of wanted to take advantage of it. Yeah. Um, if we didn't know whether they were gonna go back down. Or continue going up. So I'm not a real high risk taker when it comes to that kind of stuff. So we pulled it all out and just like, let's just buy the house

Rapid Fire: Passive Income, Worst Damage, Would You Do It Again?

SPEAKER_01 22:10

now, then, and then we put all that money towards this house, and we really don't we have a very small mortgage.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

So now so it got you where you wanted to be.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

That's where we wanted to be. It was a little bit earlier than what we wanted, what we were thinking. But it worked out. But it worked out in the end.

SPEAKER_00 22:25

And you're still gaining equity on that so that you can sell it one day.

SPEAKER_01 22:28

Probably not.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

That's why you ever paid for it. Yeah. Don't tell my husband. But nobody's gonna watch this. So now you just go there freely and happily and live. Yeah, Chris just left. He just went. So I feel like anytime someone wants to get into the business like this, I feel like it's like have your strategy. Because if you don't, I feel like you could get lost. Like you knew what you were trying to do.

SPEAKER_01 22:50

You have to have a strategy. You have to have, you know, a financial planner. You have to have, you know, an accountant, you have to have your lender, you have to have like property manager, like you have to have all this like set up, like all your ducks in a row before you even like decide, yes, this is what we're gonna do. Because if you just go in there all willy-nilly, you're going to fail, you're going to lose money. Like you just you've got to be smart about it. And it's a lot of money.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:15

It's a lot of money. And you just you don't want to leave it up to chance.

SPEAKER_00 23:19

You don't. The real costs of being a landlord that nobody talks about, like maintenance when it's vacant, certain parts of the season, etc. etc. How do you deal with that?

SPEAKER_01 23:28

Yeah, like we had to go down once a month.

SPEAKER_00 23:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

Make sure it was clean, make sure it was okay, make sure that you know everything was working and functioning. And um, again, you have to pay for people when they screw your stuff up or break your things. And after a while, it it tends to be a lot. You know, you have to go in constantly repainting or replacing flooring or replacing furniture, and it just gets to be taxing after a while. Yeah. Because it you go in and you like you fully like love it, and it's like, this is our place, and like you know, we you hope that people love it like you do, but they don't. They split margaritas all over your white pillows, yeah. And then they flip it over because they think that you're not gonna know. Yeah, like you're not gonna flip the post. That I'm not gonna flip it over and see it. So it gets to be it's very disheartening sometimes. So although social media sometimes can make it seem like this is just passive income, like it really is a second job almost, or it is the second job almost, like you're constantly on it, like you're constantly in touch with the property manager, you're constantly figuring out like what needs to be done to what unit, like when and when it's rented and when it's not, and when we can get in there, and like if it needs to be painted, or if it needs something needs to be fixed, or you're constantly coordinating different things. It's not like you can just go down there and veg. And even when we went down there for weeks on a time, my husband was literally working on the units the entire time. Like there was no relaxation for him. Yeah, it was he was constantly doing things, which isn't this is not fun, it's not the goal. Social media and like the internet as a whole, like completely glamorizes being a landlord or having beach houses and make you know things thinking that we're all like rolling in the dough, and that this is just such a like an easy game to get into, and it is not, it is hard, it is a lot of pressure, it is a lot of financial responsibility, and you don't really make out with anything in the end. It's just it's a it's a gamble every single day because you just don't know what's gonna happen. And a pandemic could hit, and then you're really screwed. So just be prepared.

SPEAKER_00 25:36

And that's what your agent won't tell you.

SPEAKER_01 25:38

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 25:40

All right, we have four rapid fire comments that people left, as everyone knows. Right and ready. Right and ready. All right, the first one says, What's the most damage a tenant has ever done to one of your properties?

SPEAKER_01 25:52

That was the air conditioning unit where they turn the open the sliders on Friday and left it, left them open all weekend and turn the air down to 58. Yeah. Program your nest thermostats so they can't change it more than four degrees. What did it do to the apartment the content? It totally, there was a big huge ice ball in the thing, and we had to get a whole new unit. Nice. And we didn't know for like almost a week because the tenants after that reported that it wasn't really cooling, and we'd already given their security deposit back. So we were totally screwed.

SPEAKER_00 26:25

Yep, nice. Next one. True or false, rental property is passive income.

SPEAKER_01 26:29

True. Depends. I mean, it depends what kind of rental property it is.

unknown 26:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:34

Long-term rental, short-term rental.

SPEAKER_00 26:35

Seasonal.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:37

Strategy. Third one, what's the one thing every landlord should put in their lease that most people don't? Or rental agreement if it's short-term?

SPEAKER_01 26:44

That you need to rent to people 25 and older. And dang them out. If the rule is if you the parents like sign the rental agreement and then like drive the children down there and check in with them and then roll out. If we find out that there are kids in there, you lose your entire week of rental money. You don't get any of it back. So nice.

SPEAKER_00 27:11

Did you implement that? Huh? Did you end up implementing that?

SPEAKER_01 27:14

At our units, no. Well, it was implemented at all of his units, all my poverty marriages units, but yeah. But did he ever kick anybody out of ours? No, but other people's, yes.

SPEAKER_00 27:23

Nice. And last one, would you ever be a line board again?

SPEAKER_01 27:26

Probably.

SPEAKER_00 27:27

Could happen.

SPEAKER_01 27:28

It could happen. It could happen. I mean, I would love to buy over on the bay again by Northside Park. Yeah. That was like my absolute favorite. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:35

Um, we could vlog about it.

SPEAKER_01 27:37

But I think I would probably rent to people that I know versus strangers.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

Yep. So stay tuned because we could record your process in the future of Sunday, maybe.

SPEAKER_01 27:47

Who knows? When I live down there full time, you can have all sorts of places. So stay tuned for the next episode. I'm gonna talk about the pros and cons of a short sale and how they are not so short, and what disaster is gonna happen after waiting almost a year to find out if you get into a property or not.