Adventures in Indio

Yes, real estate investing does have its ups and downs, even when you know what you're doing. Here's our property in Indio where the gardener totally flaked out on us. He talked a good talk, and then didn't do anything for a month. And can you believe this this, he lives right next door!



And this is even more unbelievable, but I'm not making this up, we had bids of $500 and $700 to clean out the weeds. We figure that works out to about $50 a hour. To pull weeds! If any of you are looking for a career, don't bother with college, just go to Indio and be a gardener.

So what else is new, Crystal and I spent a couple of days weeding, fixing sprinklers, and generally cleaning up the place. We took 18 big contractor trash bags of weeds, dirt, and trimmings out of the place, and brought 40 bags of pea gravel in. 2 trips in our Prius, which was riding very low!

When we were finished, it looked a whole lot better, and now we hired a different gardener to overseed the lawn with ryegrass.

Unlike investing in mutual funds, sometimes investing in real estate means you have to get your hands dirty. The good news is that we got an offer on property and we are now in escrow. When it closes, we will be paid very well for our efforts.