Welcome to Chez Cliff!

As he was climbing up onto the roof, I told the contractor that I didn’t want to hear that the entire roof was installed incorrectly and that the whole thing would have to be redone.

“The good news,” he shouted down, “Is that your entire roof doesn’t have to be replaced.  The bad news is half of it does.”

Price tag:  $3700

I told him to only fix the hole then come down.

This is one of the hardest aspects of being a landlord.  Problems must be fixed immediately; that I understand.  What I didn’t count on was every contractor telling me that the entire “whatever” needs to be replaced because the last moron did it incorrectly.

How do you know?

While I’m waiting to get 2 or 3 different opinions, days have gone by and the tenant still has the same problem.  How do you explain that to them?  ”Oh the roofer wanted to charge me $3700 but I think he’s full of it so I’m going to wait for a few other guys to come out.”

No.

Tenants only want to hear that you’re fixing their problem.

If I had blindly listened to every single time a contractor told me the entire “whatever” was messed up, I would have paid out an additional $15,000 which I don’t have.  And who is to guarantee that the next contractor who shows up doesn’t report back, saying the previous guy did it all wrong.

At the end of the day, the only phrase I utter is “Fix the problem.”  If the roof is only leaking in one spot, there’s no sense repairing the entire roof.  If the roof does require a complete overhaul, then the temporary fix gives me time to find the $3700.

But for the moment, the leak has stopped.

While the rest of the country is getting pelted with snow, we’re getting rain.

I love it when it rains.

We’re off to Las Vegas for the weekend for some rest and relaxation.  Monday, I’ll be back.

It was bound to happen sooner or later.  The phone call any property manager dreads getting.

“Cliff, there’s a leak in your roof.”

Ugh.

Usually these problems occur about as frequently as my car breaking down: far and few between.  But when you have multiple properties, the far and few between becomes periodic.

Rain is now pouring in Southern California.  I love the rain.  It just started early early yesterday and if the weatherman holds any credibility it’s not suppose to rain in my little city.  But go to another website and they’re calling for torrential down-pours.

Of course: no one works in the rain.  Even the postmen calls in sick these days.

I never thought scrambling around on roof tops would be part of my job description.  The leak has to be stopped, albeit it temporarily.  My thinking: two pieces of plastic, laid down from the roof-line to the spot where the leak occurred.  I could overlay them, just to ensure that any water that does land on the plastic rolls down hill, not under the plastic.  Defeats the purpose.

Lowes had some nice size plastic sheets that I used to cover the area up to the roof-line.

As I was leaving, the other tenant said the heater wasn’t working.  I turned it on and it worked.

I wish all my problems were that easy to solve.

Our first official board meeting went really well.  Compared to my “9 to 5″, I can’t remember the last time I attended a meeting and got fired up from it.

The issue of advertising came up.

It has been many moons since Kiyosaki’s name has appeared on my blog.  Truth of the matter is that Robert doesn’t give a lot of advice on rehabs.

I invoke his name now for the simple reason that one phrase he wrote in his third book struck me.  For his business, he didn’t want to incur an expense unless he found a way to raise revenues to pay for it.  This simple philosophy has always made sense to me.  

The object is to preserve cash flow.  If after all my expenses, my business has cashflow of $1,000 a month I want to keep that $1,000 per month.  If my advertising is going to cost $100 per month, I’d rather find a way to increase my cashflow to $1,100 per month then spend the $100 on advertising.

We agreed that the cashflow we currently have should be put directly back into software development.  We’ve received some great feedback and we have some slick ideas we want to push out.  This costs money.

With that in mind, there are a few things we can change in our current software suite that will increase sales.  That will take a few weeks to implement.  In the mean time, the advertising plan should start shaping up and be pretty comprehensive.

Unfortunately I can’t discuss our plan at this time.  Once it goes public, then I can report back on the results.