A February Rental Portfolio Recap From 96 Milwaukee Units

$80,000 in gross rents can look like a flex, but it doesn’t tell you whether a rental portfolio is actually healthy. I’m Cole, a Milwaukee real estate investor juggling airline flying and military instruction, and I’m pulling back the curtain on my February recap with real spreadsheets, real expenses, and the kind of cash flow timing problems nobody posts on Instagram.

We start with the vacancy shock that put me in a “robbing Peter to pay Paul” season and what it cost to stabilize big single-family and small multifamily rentals. I break down why gross rent is basically a headline number, then walk through what matters: turnover costs, trash-outs, snow removal, management fees, utilities, pest control, and the surprise repairs that eat a month alive. You’ll also hear how rent credits at closing can help your down payment while still leaving you temporarily behind when mortgage payments hit before property management distributions arrive.

From there, I zoom out to strategy: when I choose to sell older Milwaukee buildings, how I think about raising rents without triggering a move-out wave, and why “passive income” is a myth even with a great property manager. I also map out my financing plan, including cash-out refinance opportunities and a hard money exit strategy, packaging duplexes and a single family for a credit union refi to escape 14% interest and lock in long-term debt.

If you like transparent real estate investing content, subscribe, share this with a friend who thinks rentals are easy, and leave a review with the biggest expense you didn’t expect when you started.

Transcript

Vacancy Shock And February Recap

SPEAKER_00 0:11

What is up, everybody? My name is Cole. I'm a part-time real estate investor, full-time legacy airline pilot, and a part-time military instructor pilot documenting my journey from A to Z as far as growing a real estate portfolio in the great city of Milwaukee. Uh, this month is a recap of what happened in the month of February. At the beginning of the year, I said I was going to do one of these videos every single month to show you what exactly comes in and out of this uh whole organization while we're trying to grow it. Uh, the good, the bad, the ugly. By the end of last year, in November and December, if anybody recalls, I had a bunch of unexpected vacancies. I closed on a deal. I thought it was a really good deal, and I still do, but uh I was expecting to have maybe two or three vacancies out of 14 units. And when I actually got, I we closed on it next day. I get an email that says, Oh, by the way, we forgot. Uh actually all these units are vacant too. And it was like another six. So, like basically three quarters of the units were vacant. And not only does that mean I'm not getting rental income, obviously, but that also means that I need to get them in the condition to actually rent them out. And a lot of these were single families, and they were big single families that I really liked, uh, but they're really expensive to fix. Some of them were almost$10,000 to renovate them and stabilize them and get somebody in there. And so you can do the math. Even if somebody's paying$1,500 a month in rent, minus all your expenses, how long is it going to take you to get that money back? It's going to be a while. So I was literally paying out of pocket for a while. I was going to work at the airline or with the military, and those checks were getting siphoned out of my own bank account to try to fund the properties and keep them limping along because we kind of ended up in a situation where we're robbing Peter to pay Paul. And that can work sometimes, uh, but it's certainly not a place that you want to be forever. It's temporary fix. And uh thankfully now things are stabilized. So that's really, really good. This month was our biggest month as far as gross rents go. But I've said this before: gross rents really mean nothing. Gross rents is just a number that you put on Instagram to tell people how big and how successful you are. It literally means nothing because you could have the same amount uh in expenses, and that would mean you have zero, right? So in this month, we brought in over$80,000 in gross rents and we netted uh minus everything except for principal and interest payments. So my payments to the bank, which is a huge portion, uh, my property taxes, which last year I paid about$70 some thousand dollars in property taxes, and before my insurance payments, which totals out to be about probably$30,000 or$40,000 a year, at least as it sits right now, uh, minus before you account for all that stuff, we came in with$48,038. That's what we netted out to. And then we'll take out all the rest of the expenses and whatever's left over is what we have as far as profits go. Now it's kind of hard to track this stuff because we're buying stuff, we're selling stuff, we're refinancing things. Like there's a lot always happening. So it's really hard to know for sure what's like truly a profit because like this month we had a lot of expenses for places that I bought recently that needed to be fixed up and rented out. Now, is that like truly like is that law? Is that a loss? Like it was something I bought into knowing it needed it, and I bought it at a price that made it work. So it's it's kind of like you can see, it's kind of hard to really say for sure. But one thing I can say for sure is this is about 76 units right now. Technically, I own 96 units, um, but 20 of them I closed on in February. And the way that works out basically is I get a credit for the rents for the month of February. We we closed at the beginning of February, which means I get a credit for the entire rest of the month, which is awesome for closing because it helps bring down your down payment, right? If you need to bring 20% down, you're gonna get credits for a bunch of things that keeps lowering the amount that you actually have to bring to closing. What that also means is that I didn't get paid any rent for those units in the month of February, which doesn't seem like a problem, right? Makes sense. I I closed on it in February. Why would I get February rents? The problem is next month, the bank wants their money for this for this loan. And this is my biggest loan. So it's my biggest, it's my biggest loan payment of over$7,000 for this loan payment. But I haven't gotten any rents. And I will get the rents in the month of March, but I don't get that money from my property manager until the end of March, after the payments already come out. And you can kind of see like you end up kind of like one month behind. So you end up kind of trying to catch up a little bit. That's just the way it goes. I mean, that's just that's just how it is. Uh, and it's not the end of the world. We're prepared for that, thankfully. But you can see how you get yourself into a little bit of a situation. If you commit all of your excess money to buy a deal and you get that deal, and then they ask for the payment next month when you haven't received any rents that you can actually use, it can be a sticky situation. And the only reason that really is sticky is because I use a property manager. I don't get money from them until the end of the month after they've gotten rid of all the expenses and they paid for everybody. If you were managing it yourself, you're gonna get the rents as the month progresses. So you can actually do that. It just so happens that with the way that my stuff is set up, I can't do that, which is better because if if I was getting the money right away, I'd be allocating it to all this different stuff. And then when they called me and said, Oh, we need to pay the furnace guy, uh, he replaced your$3,000 furnace, or hey, the water heater guy's asking for his payment, and I've already allocated that money somewhere else, then it could become a problem. And I'm like, oh boy, I guess I'm gonna be going flying for the military or the airline this weekend to try to make up that difference. So it's it's better that way. It can just make for a little bit of a sticky situation if you're not really thinking things through as you're going. And the only reason I know that is because I've made that mistake probably a couple of times at this point. But the idea is I'm just gonna walk through all the spreadsheets, show you guys exactly what came in, what came out, talk through it off my computer because I can't really do both at this moment. Hopefully, one day I can just do one over the shoulder or something like that. Um, but I'm just gonna talk through what it all looks like and kind of give you guys an idea. And then um the rest of the videos planned uh for the near future are gonna be discussing some of the refinances that I've talked about, cash out refinances to buy other deals. Uh, we're looking at about another 25 units that we could move into with cash out refinance money. Um, and I've talked about that a little bit. And then also I've got a hard money deal. I've gotten, uh let's see, three duplexes and a single family, all with hard money at really attractive prices. And they're all, with one exception, almost stable. And so now I'm gonna package them up. I'm gonna take them to a big bank, a credit union, actually, to be more specific. But I'm gonna package them up, I'm gonna take them to that credit union and say, hey, I've got a deal for you. I bought them for a really cheap price. I don't want any money back. All I want is to not be paying 14% interest uh to the hard money company. So the idea is I'm gonna package them up, give them all the information, the financials, which would basically just be the rent roll and my expected expenses on a pro forma, and then see what they say. And I talked to them on the phone on Friday, and they sounded like they were they were good to play a game with that. So uh that's the plan. And then I can get off of that really high interest, 14% interest-only payments. I can get onto something that's like you know, five and three quarters probably, and I'll set it for five years and we'll revisit that down the road. But I did one of those recently. You guys may remember in about January time frame, I did the same exact playbook um with uh I think maybe 12 units or so. Um, I'm doing the same exact thing with this. So uh that's the idea. That's what I'm looking at doing, and uh, I'll talk to you on my computer. All right, welcome to my computer. This is February 2026, doing the recap of all my units. Again, I've talked about this before, but I redacted a lot of the information about tenants and units, not because I'm worried about people knowing addresses, it's more so because the tenants did not ask to be in any of these videos, uh, and they don't want their information out there, and nor do I want to give it out. Uh, so this is the first LLC. You can see right off the top, we brought in 8390. We had a bunch of expenses, and the net that we actually got was$2,000. This number doesn't exactly always equate, and there's some accounting reasons for that, but we'll go through and we're gonna talk about each building. Mill Road. This is a three-unit, uh, all townhouses, three beds, one and a half baths. Super nice units, but as you're about to see, these units are not cheap to clean out when people move out. Trash out for the unit that vacated. I mentioned this one earlier. 550 bucks just to clean it out. Now, I don't usually reach out to the management company and say, Why was it 550? What did you do there? Because A, I don't want to bother them, and B, you should see what some of these units look like when people leave them. They leave everything. Sometimes they leave all their furniture, everything is left behind. And somebody's got to move all that, and it costs money to do that. And you have to dispose of all the trash, which also costs money. So it's none of this is free. I don't bother them about this stuff, that's just part of the playing the game. But you'll see this stuff gets expensive. The units are really nice, they bring in good rents, but they also cost a ton of money. And uh, so$550 right off the bat, snow$65 for snow removal, and we pay that throughout the month. And the number changes based on the snowfall amount, right? You can kind of see they even document what was the snowfall amount. So we brought in some rent, we had some snowfall, more rent came in, and this is uh my my favorite one of the month remove remove all junk, poo, tire, etc. from base from basement, clean and sanitize basement floors as needed to get rid of the urine slash feces smell. Now, in these units, the basements are separated, so everybody's got like their own individual basements, which is really nice for the tenants. But if this person's got all this going on in there, the other tenants are going to be paying the price for that. So we've got to get rid of that stuff, we've got to clean it up and take care of the tenants because they're paying a lot of money to stay here, and nobody wants to live around that, right? Uh, property inspection, they're changing the locks again. So when you add all this stuff up, 550 plus 220 plus 136 plus$3,300 to clean and repaint and do all the stuff in the unit. It's no joke. I mean, these units are expensive to swap out, so we really don't want to have turnover uh because it really, really is expensive.$281 for the management fees,$25. And the rest of the money that was left over goes to Silver Spring, which is its neighboring property, same layout, three bedroom units, and here it is. Brought in a bunch of rents, had some snow removal, management fees, and transferred. So this property really had nothing going on. It didn't really bring in its full rental amount. Um, I don't think it might well, I guess it says 36 to 43, which I think is correct. But sometimes people pay in different increments, so sometimes the numbers don't necessarily look like it, like I just did right there. I didn't think it was all the money, but it turns out my but I really don't pay too much attention to how much money is coming from each individual building because it will it comes out in the wash. Some people aren't gonna pay, some people are gonna pay. We've had tenants that we work with that are three, four, five months behind on rent and end up paying. So just because a unit doesn't generate money this month doesn't mean it's gonna be bad next month. And you don't want to necessarily always think that way because you could have a bad property, you could have a bad unit that needs to be fixed up or changed out or something needs to adjust to get it back on track. But you don't want to always assume that just because it didn't bring in money this month, that it's just a bad property. People have problems. Sometimes people can't pay, and that's just what happens.$13.95 for these two units on Mill Road, and the new rent for this one is$14.95. So$14.95 a month for the new unit, which means that these will eventually make their way to$14.95, which will bring up the gross rents for the whole building and therefore increase the value of the building. Same thing with Silver Spring. These ones, this is actually a much nicer building, I think. And these rents are definitely a little bit low. I think specifically this one and this one could go up. I mean, when you're talking about$14.95 is the gross rent potential, this is$400 off the mark. And$400 is like, okay, it's not the end of the world necessarily. And I'm not gonna necessarily make a big deal out of this, but$400 over the course of a year is almost five grand, and five grand is the property tax bill for this. So you you know, and the city's never gonna ask for less property taxes. The city is never gonna less ask for less water bills and all these other things, fines, and all the things that happen when you're doing this business. So you don't want to screw your tenants, obviously. But at the same time, you're also getting squeezed on the back end. Interest rates are changing, property taxes are going up, water bills, insurance is a huge one that's changed. So you have to also look out for yourself because at the end of the day, they can walk and leave from the property, but you can't leave from the property unless you sell it or go get foreclosed on. So just keep that in mind. New LLC, new day, new LLC brought in 13, had 4,000 in cash out, and we netted nine. I think we actually saw um it's like 80, some hundred, didn't exactly line up. This is the last of our Southside properties. So I know I mentioned in the past we sold off a bunch of the Southside. This is the last one. Bought it at an auction, we fixed it up, cost way too much money, probably, but we're hanging on to it. We like the building and it's too it's treated us well. It gets solid rents, water bill. That's what's gonna happen. That's every quarter, some lower repairs, management fees, a late fee, and transfer to a different building to help cover that building for the month and then the distribution. South 12th, this one's actually sold. So this one's off our books. This was the last month with it. Brought in rent, had management fees, and we got a distribution, and that was it. So this building's off our books. A new owner's got it, and uh hopefully they take good care of the place. It was a solid building in its time and service with us. It ended up getting sold for kind of lower than market because it had like a little bit of a basement issue because it's an old building. The reason we sold this one and a lot of our south side stuff is it's all early 1900s or late 1800s construction, and that stuff really is not gonna last forever. And I, you know, it's 2026. Some of these buildings were over 120 years old. I saw the writing on the wall and I said, I want out. There was a huge price change on the south side of Milwaukee, so I saw an opportunity to say, Hey, I'm gonna get out of this old stuff, I'm gonna move into these new buildings, which we've talked about a little bit, and I'll show you the proformas for that and whatnot. But we moved out of old south side stuff into newer north side stuff. We'll see how the move plays out in the long run. But for now, it's all good. Carmen. This is one of the new buildings we got. Not a lot of income. Like I said, we got these at the beginning of February, so there's not really anything that happened, just some expenses getting things cleaned up as we are taken over as the new owner. Same thing with the other Carmen property, these are two right next to each other. This one literally had nothing, nothing happened. No money came in, no money came out. It's a new property. As far as March goes, that's when we'll start to see all that impact next month's income. Roosevelt Drive, one of my favorite properties. Lovely four unit. I'd love to keep this thing forever. And this is the one that's actually on the books to be refinanced. It comes due at the end of December, and so I want to refinance this place. I want to either take money out against it, we could sell it. I just don't want to. It's a nice building, there's nothing wrong with it, and it the rents on it have just gone up and up and up. We have some expenses, as you can see. We're trying to take care of the place, we're cleaning it up. I mean, we got a mattress outside that we had to throw away, common area cleaning, the all the snow removal. It has expenses, but the building is really nice. I just don't want to get rid of it. I don't I don't know, maybe I'm being emotional, but this building's just been super solid month after month for the most part. We never really had too many problems with it, and so I want to cash out on it. I think it's worth about 400 grand. We owe 170 on it. We'll take 75% of that$400,000 number. And the net difference should be about$130,000, and we can go shopping and buy something, hopefully. So that's the plan for this building. We'll see if it actually happens. This is all pie in the sky, it might not actually happen, but that's what my plan is. 37th, this is a duplex uh next to a a strip club called Gold Diggers. Uh, I've never been in there, I've not been a patron, but uh the building has been super solid. This is the place that I bought um from a wholesaler, and I ended up having to put 40 grand into the basement. Uh, it was painful, it sucked, especially at the time we didn't really have the money to do that. We still don't really have the money to do that, but we had just done a cash out refinance on the south side property I just mentioned, and so we had that exact amount basically sitting in the account, and we're like, hey, we can go buy a duplex or something cool. And then we got slammed with this$40,000 basement repair. And guess what? Basements don't generate any money. And I'm not it's not all about money, but when you put 40 grand into a basement, it's literally just to keep the building from falling over. And now it's it's great, it's a perfect basement now, but it cost us a ton of money and it was a huge opportunity cost to have this building, and it was hard money and it created a bunch of issues. So this building, this month is I mean, since we've done all that, it's been very simple. There's not been a lot going on, but uh it was expensive. So this building we're gonna keep for a long time just because of the fact that we have so much money sunk into it to get our money back out of it. We need this to be worth like 200 grand, probably. Tutonia. This is one of the new ones. Again, not a lot to see here. We had a new renter move in. We re-keyed some of the doors because they were on a different key system than us, mailbox replacement. Nothing really happened though, because nobody paid rent because they already got credited for the month of February. So next month, starting tomorrow, is when this will all take effect. Same thing with this one. This is another four-family, literally nothing came in, and another four-family, basically nothing happened. I mean, balance transfers and whatnot, but literally basically nothing happened because they all paid for February. And here's the rent roll. So, this is that this is that duplex that we bought at auction. Brings in 2090 a month gross, solid place, three bedroom units. I like that. This one we sold$18.90. We sold this for$100 and I think it was like$135,000 or something. Didn't really get a great price for it, especially for the rents that it's getting$18.90 a month at$135. That's a good price. Uh, needs a little bit of basement work for five, ten grand. You can get that cleaned up and you're still in the green as far as your rent roll goes. Carmen, this is one of the new ones. We got a new unit getting filled here. I think that filled at$7.95. So you can imagine$200 each year potentially on the rent roll, and that adds up to you know over four grand a year. So you got to keep that stuff in mind. It's small, it seems like small numbers, but this stuff matters because you're gonna be paying more money every single year to operate these properties. So every now and then you have to do that. This one needs a price increase, but all three of these probably are are ripe for a price increase, but you have to balance it out because people will move too. People say, Yeah, this is too much money, I'm getting out of here. So you don't want to raise the rents on everybody right away because it's gonna be painful for them and they could leave, which makes it painful for you. So keep all that in mind. This is that property I said I think it's worth about$400. Sure enough, it brings in$39.94 a month in gross rents. Got those big three-bed, one and a half bath units. Just I love that place. Not gonna sell it. 37th, this is the one with the basement problems. This is the rent roll for that$14.94. Low rents on this one, but even if you raise that, okay, you're bringing this up to$15.94. It's not even worth$150, probably right now, if we really wanted to. So we'll be hanging on to that. This is one of the new ones, Titonia, Titonia. These are all right next to each other, all in a row. Another Teutonia. Sorry, I kind of scrolled past those, but you can get an idea. That one brings in$3,200 a month,$31, and this one had a vacancy, so$24.98. Like I said, the gross rent, market rent is$8.99. I think you could probably squeeze$9.99 if you really tried, but so there's a little bit of growth on the on the rent roll for these for sure, but we'll take it easy. We don't want a mass exodus either. So all right, new LLC. This is the big one for the month. Brought in almost 40 grand. We had about 9,000 expenses and we netted. This is the one that was causing me all the problems. This is the one that was causing me to have to pay in tens of thousands of dollars of my own money to keep things afloat because we bought all those properties at the end of last year that needed a lot of rehab and stabilization. But we're rented, we're stable, we're good. Chambers, this one we just sold. We sold it to a guy that used a hard money lender, the one that I love, Mach 1. Shout out to Mach 1. They bought it for me for 110. I think I bought it for 90. And you'd be like, Oh, you made 20 grand. But at this place, I actually got screwed really hard by like two different people. One of them uh was supposed to do some painting for me, and he basically totally did not do that. I should have known he showed up in Looney Tunes flip-flops, and somehow I still gave him a chance and it did not work out. And uh, the second person, uh, I gave them five thousand dollars as a deposit on a ten thousand dollar job, which was basically to make both these units rentable. He took the five grand, took the keys for the property, and disappeared. So I couldn't check on his progress. He'd tell me, Oh, yeah, I'm working on it, it's going good, this and that, but I could never check because he had the keys. And then eventually I realized what was going on, and he had the keys, so I could never actually get to the bottom of anything, and he uh blocked me or whatever, who knows what happened. Uh, but he never responded to me. He took the money. I was gonna try to sue him and this and that. But I said, you know what? Uh, the way I believe is that all this is gonna, you know, what goes around comes around. And I think in this guy's case, he's got something coming for him. So I'm not gonna lose sleep over it. But I did lose, like I said, I've probably in the hole a little bit uh with that, all that work. Granted, I've I kept it for a couple of years, so we got some rent income out of it, but you can see it's just you know, we had eviction filing and well, foul order, foul odor investigation. And it just kind of was always a little bit problematic, and it needed a lot of love outside. It needed new siding, which I got quoted for like 30 or 40 grand. Uh, it needed a lot of just cleaning up, and eventually I just was like, I don't think this is worth hanging on. I think I'd rather just cash out, take whatever we can net out of it, and move on. We didn't get quite as much as we were hoping to. I think we were hoping to get 130. I think I settled with 110 and called it a day. Sometimes you gotta cut your losses, you gotta know when to cut them. Holton, this is one of the new ones. It's a single family, brought in money, had a little kind of tiny repairs for some patch concrete in. And it helped out Mount Vernon, which is a three-family, and that's what we took in. And I really love showing this stuff because I really want you guys to get a good idea of what this actually what it actually looks like every month. Some months are great, some months are bad. Sometimes you're the hammer, sometimes you're the nail. But I really think it's important to see this stuff because people think it's just always sunshine and rainbows, and it's not. You can see some LLCs I have did good, like this one did okay this month. Some of the other ones, there's always stuff going on. This is you know, people talk about this being passive income. Uh, it's not even passive when I have a management company, let alone if you're managing them yourself. Bobalink is a duplex. As you can see, only one rent came in, so somebody's behind on rent, but there was no other fees, so you know, we still cleared 823 on this one, but that's about half of what it's about. Supposed to bring in. St. Paul's a three family. Bunch of rent came in. Smoke alarms for Section 8. We don't have a ton of Section 8 units. We have a couple. And it's not terrible. Some people swear by it and say Section 8 is going to solve all your problems and make all your dreams come true. I'm not really a believer of that, but you know, when you can get it going, it works. And they're not too bad to deal with, uh, in my experience. So uh water bill, that's always gonna happen. The only ones that don't pay for the only people that do pay for water, I should say, are the single families. This is a three-family, so the water bill's three units worth. Most duplexes I count for about$450 a quarter, and this falls in line with that-ish, uh, just under the$700 I would expect to see out of it. So nothing too crazy here. Pretty straightforward. Mount Vernon, another three family. I bought both of those as a package. I recently refinanced them and used that money to buy all those other properties. Water 382. That's a little under what I would have expected, actually. And we paid for the lower electricity because they moved out and it really did barely brought in any money. And that's the thing. This LLC did really well still this month, even though we had, as you can see, we've had multiple units that didn't pay anything. Out of this building, we only had one person out of three units pay, and we had all these expenses, so it really didn't net anything. Uh, but we also had that duplex that didn't pay, so it just having more units helps because some units are gonna pay, some units aren't, and it'll kind of come out in the wash, like I said. People will get evicted if they don't pay for long enough. We try to work with people, and you'll see that later, but it doesn't always work out that way, so you just have to be ready to the pro forma. When you put the numbers on a spreadsheet, that only tells a certain portion of the truth. Velar Phillips, this is a duplex. We got in the money, management fees came out, and that was that. Third street, bunch of money came in. Pest control. This is one thing people have asked me and said, Why are you paying for the mouse treatment? Like, isn't it the tenants' fault? And like it can be, right? The way that people live in their units certainly influences what they have coming in and out as far as rodents and pests, but it's also partially our fault. Like, the property could have holes that need to be patched and things like that, but things pop up all the time, and we try to take care of that stuff and we do a pretty good job of it, but it's not perfect. These properties aren't brand new, they've been around for 50 years, let's say. So stuff happens. So we don't really charge back the tenants generally for that stuff unless it's blatant that it was their fault. So you can see I'm eating the cost of that, and whether it's their fault or mine, I'm not gonna argue with them about it. We're gonna take care of it because we don't want that in the property either. We want these properties to be nice, we want to continue to make them better as time goes on. So we're like as you can see right here, seal the large hole. Could I go to the management company and say, I don't want to pay$143 for you to seal some hole? And I don't want to pay for this mouse treatment either. But instead, I'm just, you know what, I'll pay the money, and now hopefully sealing this hole helps fix this problem too. So it's just for the way I look at it, I'm looking at big numbers. I'm looking at purchase prices, I'm looking at refinances, I'm looking at sales. The monthly management is the most important aspect of everything, but some of this stuff is just the cost of doing business. This is built into my pro forma pro formas. I might not have said, Oh, I'm gonna be doing this mouse treatment in February of 2026, but I can guarantee you that this number is accounted for in those proformas, so it all comes out in the wash for me. I build mine very conservatively, so I can weather the storm, hopefully. This property literally brought in a whole bunch of nothing because it got a transfer from another property to cover all of its bills. So Sixth Street has a placement fee for the tenant that we put in, so they're paying$1,500 a month, but then I had all these expenses, double electricity somehow, and we made nothing off that property. No month is ever gonna be perfect. This one was pretty simple, though. We did an appraisal, so I'm trying to refinance this property. This is a single family. They brought in the rent. I paid 40 bucks for them to coordinate the appraisal, which is easy money for me. Like I said, I'm still flying full-time, obviously. I'm still flying for the military. So for the 40 bucks I have to pay somebody to do that, honestly, it just works for me because I have to be at my other jobs and I can only take so many days off. And for me to take a whole day off of flying to do an appraisal when I could pay$40, you know, you can do the math, and sometimes it makes sense. 14th Street. This is a single family, another mouse treatment. Sixth Street. Brought in some rent, some snow removal, garage door problem for 92 bucks, re-keying it. And again, could I charge back the tenants to re-key it? Sure. But guess what? Getting into your place is uh, I think a right of yours, right? Easy access to the property that you're paying me so much money to live in. That's a non-starter. So I'm not gonna argue with the management company about who should be paying the re-keying fees. I never argue with them about that. I don't argue with them about almost anything. I I honestly don't think I've ever argued with them about anything. Sometimes people set their thermostats extra egregiously high. I've seen that a lot lately, especially last month. I think you guys have probably seen on the January report. People set their heat super high, it causes it to have a high limit trip, and then somebody has to go out there and reset them and talk to them about don't do that because it's gonna set it. And I pay for that. Should the tenant pay for that? You know, you can make an argument for that, but I'm not gonna lose sleep over$89. If$89 is gonna make or break the business, then I did my math horribly wrong. 25th Street brought in rent, had a big old water bill that was charged back to the tenant. That's the beautiful thing with single families. Some people hate single families, but single families literally are like a triple net lease almost. Not quite, but they're in the same ballpark where they're paying all the utilities. I'm paying for the loan, obviously, I'm paying for insurance, and I'm paying for taxes, which I know on a triple net you would not pay, but it's as close as you can get with residential, at least as far as I know. They pay for everything, so it's super low cost for me to run these, and I really like these properties compared to duplexes, compared to multifamily. I love it. Here's Roosevelt. Now, this is not the same Roosevelt, this is a duplex on Roosevelt, and here's what I was talking about when people aren't paying all this money that you see here, late fees, January, December. You can see there's December late fee, November rent. We could have gotten rid of this person, we could have evicted them, we could have said, see you later, we don't want to deal with you. But I'm telling you, it's so much worth it's it's worth it to work with people. Not only is it good for them and it's good for us to treat them well, but also this stuff happens sometimes. I had it last month too. Somebody paid me$8,000 in back rent. Some of it, I think, was section eight, doesn't really matter. The point is we were able to retain the tenants, so we didn't have to pay to repair the unit and start over, but we also got all the back rent. It doesn't always happen that way. Sometimes people will screw you, but we got all the money for this one, which was huge. Super nice to see that. And as you can see, all this is not really gained money because we were owed this for these months past, but in this month specifically, it offsets the units that didn't pay, and it all comes out in the wash, like I've always said. I love I've had this one for a little over a year now. Super solid place. I bought it as a package with this 46th Street. Both of them are solid. I bought them as a package deal, got them for a good price, and as you can see, it's not a whole lot going on. We got a little furnace problem. This one, I'm not too sure about the basement flooding issue, but this property specifically had a bunch of work done to it before I got it, so I wasn't too concerned about it. But this is one that I would did want to check up on because we did have a major flood at the end of last year and maybe fall of last year, but I'm not sure that this is really related to that because they've had their furnace on all winter. So I was just kind of curious about that one. And I was gonna follow up on that because you when you see this, when you see that there's flooding and basements, I don't love that because this furnace, okay, it's working right now, but how long before I see a$3,000 charge here and new furnace installed? And if we didn't solve the flooding problem, then I'm just gonna keep paying for new furnaces for no reason. Anyways, solid place. So 36th Street, this is another uh decent place. Uh, I've got a bunch of these next to each other. Income, expenses, and super simple. 36th Street, that's the one next door, like I mentioned. Income, expenses, out the door we go. Carmen, bigger duplex, income, management fee, out we go. So you can see it's pretty simple. Chambers, like I said, is gone. And here's the rent rolls for all these properties. This is a single family brings in$12.95. This is a duplex,$18.95 on this Holton. Bobbleink brings my buddy. Told me I asked him about this property when I was gonna buy it because I know he knows the owner, he's related to the owner, and I asked him, would you buy this property? What do you think of it? It's not the prettiest property, whatever. We're trying to clean it up. And he's like, You have to own a property that's on Bobble Link. Like, what kind of name is that? You gotta own a duplex there. So I own this one now. Uh St. Paul three family 2405. This three family 2559. Or sorry, 2599. First Street. It's a duplex 1398. You can kind of get the feel. Most of my units are pretty similar. This one's a little undermarket, but that's okay. 1350 on Velar Phillips. Third Street, 1670. 6th Street, 1495. A single family 76, 12.99. Another single family that I bought as a package with one that burned down. The only fire I've had, I think I may have mentioned this before. 14th, 1495 for this bad boy. 6th Street, 1495. Single families, obviously. 1150. This one's a little undermarket. We could definitely bring this up, probably four or five hundred bucks a month, I guarantee. But again, we're taking this bites at a time because not only 45 days ago, I was paying out of pocket to run this place, so I wasn't even worried about rent increases. I was worried about getting stuff stable and getting units rented.$1,300 for this one. The duplex on Roosevelt. This is not accurate.$3,600 is not true. It's$1,200 aside, so$2,400 total. I gotta get this changed so that way it's accurately reflected. Although that would be really cool. Also, if you're looking at Milwaukee, anything on Roosevelt Drive, I call me crazy, but I really like the stuff that's on Roosevelt. I love Roosevelt for some reason. I only own two places on Roosevelt, but I wish I owned 100. I don't know. They've just always treated me well, and I'm bullish on Roosevelt. If I had to be bullish on any street, uh Villard, another duplex, 46, another duplex, as you can see. This one, I bought, like I said, I bought these as a package 2190 on this one, just as one duplex alone. I mean, that's you can't beat that. 36th Street, the 36th Street next door to that one. Carmen 2048, and that's that. So that's the end of that LLC. And now we're into another one. This is uh newer LLC, ton of expenses because we bought a bunch of new places. I've talked about them in visit videos recently using hard money, buying new places, packaging them up, getting them stable, and bringing them to a credit union or bank for a long-term loan. That's what we're doing right now. Some of these are on hard money, some of these are on already on a long-term loan. This is a single family that is already on a long-term loan. The income and expenses for this one is a little wonky this month because we had this big old water bill. But you can see the water bill was massive, and then a water heater got replaced. Usually, if you see both of these together, this is a telltale sign that this water heater was just leaking water all over the place, which led to a giant water bill. So that is a telltale sign. When they see this, when the management company sees that come through on a single family on a quarterly basis, there's a problem. That's a ton of water, and that means that this was probably leaking, I'm assuming. And uh that's what led to the replacement. So, and the tenant does get charged back for the stuff, they're probably gonna be paying it in increments because that's a big bill, especially when they're paying this much for rent. I think they pay$1,100 or$1050. So, you know, that's basically double rent for them. And that's water that they didn't even use, it just went right down the drain. So it's painful for the tenants, so they're gonna pay in increments, and we're not gonna bother them about it. 52nd Street, this does have tenants in it, but for whatever reason it's not reflected. It didn't bring in any money though, so I guess it doesn't really matter. 56th, I've had this one. This one's on a long-term, um, long-term loan. Super nice unit building that I'll probably keep forever. 45th, another duplex I bought as a package, brought in money. Somebody had a hearing for their eviction, so they're probably not going to get evicted. They obviously paid uh the lower the lower is the one that owed the money. They paid up, paid up. So we said, okay, you're good. Juno's a duplex, and babom, got hit with a new furnace. I've had$2,700 furnaces recently. This one's a little bit more expensive. It didn't say what uh size BTU the furnace was. This is probably at least$500 more than what I would have to pay in the market. I've got a guy that'll do most furnaces for units like this for$2,100,$2,200. But am I gonna argue about this when they're running all these places for me? No. And again, I've said it before, but could I make more money doing it myself? Sure. But I need them because I am doing so much else outside of real estate for now. I have to have them. They're my lifeline, so I leave it alone. But I'm certain I could save a little bit of money there, but I'm not nickel and diming people. I'm looking at the big picture, and it's a slow, slow game. State St. Paul. Uh, this is a duplex also on St. Paul next to my three family. A little bit of toilet situation here, and then transfer money to cover everybody else. 36th Street. This is a solid place. Money came in, management fee came out. Nothing crazy there. Roberts, uh, this one. Well, it I it had a bunch of city orders. When I bought it, it had a bunch of city code violations, which is why I got it for as cheap as I did. I bought this place for 110,000 or 120,000. Actually, I bought the other one for 110. Bought this place for 120,000. It didn't have tenants, it had roaches, it had mice, it had all kinds of problems. And as you can see, we are working through these problems. Expensive to work through them, but absolutely necessary. And once this place is stabilized, you know, we'll get$8.95 a unit, super solid rents, and it'll be stable. We'll take it to the big bank and we'll call it a day. But this is what it takes to get that done. Plus, I paid for the hard money, yada yada. It's it's the way that this works is you hold on to it for a long time. Sherman, single family, money came in, a little bit of a leak, management fee, done. 45th, nobody paid anything. I had a trash out. Okay, so somebody, something, somebody left, or maybe I don't know, it says exterior. Well, no, it says interior too. I'll have to call follow up on this one. I'm not exactly quite sure what happened here, but we'll figure it out. Center Street. Uh, this is a commercial building. It makes no money basically, but I I wanted this place for the commercial space downstairs, which is like a four or five thousand square foot place with a 10-foot overhead garage door. So I was like, hell yeah, I want this. This is awesome. But I left the guy that's renting this because he's uh related to the family. He does work for the family, not my family, but the people that I buy a lot of stuff from. So I left it and he's paid me$500 a month. But as you can see, that like their rent barely even covered like just this stuff. I got$39. And the loan on this, the loan is like a thousand dollars a month because I'm on hard money right now. So not really economical, but you know that that happens sometimes. 29th Street, money came in, management fee came out for 84 bucks, and that was that. Here's the rent roll on these. 40th is a single family, like I said, 52nd, 56th, 45th, Juno Duplex, another St. Paul duplex. The market rents here should be like$12.99, but we're working our way up there slowly. 36th Street, Roberts, so that one's finally rented. Sherman is a single family, super solid, clean place. 45th. Now that I say that, I understand what 45th is. It's a single family I just bought. Three bed, one and a half bath. I'm super curious to see what it rents for. You guys saw my tour of the building. As you can see, they were already doing the trash out of the exterior and the interior. So I'm really curious to see what this rents for. I think I'm thinking, I don't know, 1600 1700 bucks a month. Some people could probably get a little bit more, but I don't know. I'll be interested. I'll definitely make a video about that to give you guys a kind of a comeback, circle back moment on that. Center Street, uh, nothing crazy there. Like I said, that's the commercial space, the only commercial space I own. And 29th Street's a single family. And the last one, this is owned in my own name. It's on First Street, it's a single family, and they paid me back for January, for February, December. They were way behind on rent. But again, we worked with them and we treated them for mice. So there's been a couple mou. There's some been some mice around this month, but we worked with them, we let them stay. It's easier to work with people sometimes than it is to just kick them out. And there I am right there. That's me. This is my owner distribution. Now, is this free and clear money? No, I've been paying for this loan for this property every single month, even though I have gotten no rent. Uh, but now I've got the money back so I can pay back myself for what I was paying into the loan on my own. So$3,300, not bad. But again, don't let anybody fool you. That's not what I made in a month. This property didn't pay me for three months, and I was still paying for the loan, so I was down whatever it cost me, plus the property taxes, etc. So don't just assume when people show you these spreadsheets, oh, this you know, I'm making so much money, I made three grand just off of one property. That's not true. There's a bunch of expenses that aren't covered here insurance, taxes, principal, and interest. Um, but also, as you can see, December, January, February, late fees, etc. But that's the month. A super solid month for the most part. We had some problems, and this spreadsheet's getting longer and longer. So I apologize. But if you stuck with me through this whole time, I really truly appreciate it. It does mean the world to me. And uh, I look forward to talking to you guys soon and giving you guys more insight, more information, and uh more of a look at what it actually looks like to run these properties. Next month will be even more exciting because it will be truly 96 units, including all the ones that I bought that didn't have any data for this month. So you're gonna get a full look at almost 100 units in Milwaukee, and hopefully soon we'll have even more than that. It's slow and steady, and I'm doing YouTube as just like a side side hustle, I guess if you want to call it that, or a hobby. Uh, so take it easy on me. But we're working on it, we're trying to make stuff happen, and I really truly appreciate all of you sitting down and what you know walking through this with me. If you have any questions, any comments, any thoughts, let me know, and I'm happy to answer. And I appreciate you guys. Talk to you soon. See ya.