Growing Up Quickly

I bought this home at a Trustee Sale, it had been foreclosed

I was very lucky to find a career that I have enjoyed from the first day on the job.  Most people search their entire life looking for a job that is rewarding and profitable.  I was very fortunate that my dad's profession happened to be a direction that I would follow for that last 35 years.  Every day I wake up excited wondering what will be thrown at me to solve and how I can help someone with their housing needs.

I have been a property manager in the Phoenix area for the past 35 years.  I manage real estate, single family homes.  Providing housing for families is very rewarding.  It is equally satisfying helping investors receive a strong return on their investment.  For me, the two issues meld into one equation.  Great research, great service, great outcomes.

After graduating from ASU I eventually started working in my dad's office.  I was no longer painting homes and mowing lawns.  My new assignment was answering phones, listening to problems and concerns, and walking through homes after the tenants had been evicted.  Wow, that was a huge wake-up call - tremendous clarity of my new career.  Managing rental homes requires a serious ability to multitask; there is a lot of moving parts between a home and its occupants.  Retrospectively I realize to do this job well you need an analytical mind with a twisted sense of humor.

It was tough finding a balance between the needs of tenants and financial responsibility of supervising 45 rental homes.  I look back and I laugh at the outcomes of my early attempts in problem solving.  The only thing I did well was to develop procedures that allowed everyone to understand the process and forced the program to treat everyone equally.  What was interesting was how many issues fell between the cracks, the number of times the process failed.  It became very obviously that no two families had the same issues and expectations.  In those early years, I scrambled a lot.  The biggest lesson I learned - "why real estate investors hire a property manager, because it is no fun kicking anybody out of their home".