Hasan Gabareen

Hey All! I hope you all are having a wonderful day. I wanted to ask seasoned Long Term Rental Investors what the main mistakes are that casual W-2 workers commonly do when they invest in their first one or two properties to hold on for a long time, with their ultimate goal of slow but stable wealth building, not trying to scale to as many doors as possible. As I'm based in the Bay Area, CA, I see and have talked with many people who do not have long term rental / appreciation properties.

In 2009 I was buying homes at courthouse auctions across Northern California. One walkthrough, no second look, renovation budget estimated on the spot. We did that 400 times and deployed over $100 million for institutional investors. The single biggest mistake I watched other buyers make during that run wasn't overpaying. It was trusting seller projections without stress testing them. Every pro forma shows you the ceiling. Full occupancy, optimistic rents, minimal expenses.

Hey all, I’ve been thinking a lot about how most people underwrite LTR deals, and one thing I keep noticing is that downside risk doesn’t always get as much attention as the base-case numbers. A lot of the focus tends to be on: purchase price rent comps basic cash flow Which makes sense—but it usually stops there. But what I don’t see as often is people really asking: What actually breaks this deal if a few assumptions are off?