Dave Barry's Money Secrets (12 page)

15

HOW TO GET RICH IN REAL ESTATE

Simple, Foolproof Techniques Unconditionally Guaranteed to Work 100% of the Time for Anybody!

Except You

I
T’S EASY TO GET RICH IN REAL ESTATE. You don’t have to take any risk, or work hard, or even have a central nervous system. That’s how profitable real estate is!

How do we know this? The same way we know everything: television. Turn on your TV pretty much any weekend and click through the channels, and soon you’ll see an infomercial featuring a real estate genius sitting poolside at a swank vacation resort and explaining his simple system for getting rich, which he has decided, out of generosity, to share with everybody in the world:

REAL ESTATE GUY:
Hi! I’m Bob Pronghandle, and I’m sitting poolside at this swank resort connoting success because I want to tell you about my incredible program, Get Rich by Becoming Wealthy Making Big Money in Real Estate. You know, as I was driving here today in one of my several Rolls-Royces that I own because I have so much money from real estate, I was thinking about some amazing facts I’d like to share with you:

•                  Did you know that more millionaires got rich through real estate than any other way?

•                  Did you know that you can buy real estate without having any money?

•                  Did you know that over the long run, real estate always goes up in value?

•                  Did you know that every night, giant flying lobsters from Mars play Scrabble on top of the Chrysler Building?

Well, my incredible program, Get Rich by Becoming Wealthy Making Big Money in Real Estate, can show you how to
harness the power
of this information to break out of your loser infomercial-watching existence and achieve the lifestyle and Rolls-Royce quotient you have always dreamed of. But don’t take my word for it! Joining me here poolside are two regular people like you, Norm and Gladys Hingler. Norm and Gladys, welcome!

NORM:
Thanks, Bob. Good to be poolside.

REAL ESTATE GUY:
Tell us about your experience with my incredible program, Get Rich by Becoming Wealthy Making Big Money in Real Estate.

NORM:
Bob, in my own unrehearsed words, it is a dream come true. Our lives have totally changed. Like, last night, Gladys ate the whole jar of cashews from the minibar, and I took a look at the price and it was $12.50, and for a minute there I was like, “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FRICKING
MI
N
D,
GLADYS? TWELVE-FIFTY FOR LIKE SEVENTEEN FRICKING NUTS??” Then I remembered, “Hey! We’re rich now, from real estate!” Although if you ask me, swank resort or not, $12.50 is a ripoff.

GLADYS:
They weren’t even that fresh.

NORM:
It’s OK to say “fricking,” right? They told me don’t say “fu . . .”

REAL ESTATE GUY
(
interrupting
): OK, getting back to my program, Get Rich by Becoming Wealthy Making Big Money in Real Estate: Can you tell us how you found out about it?

NORM:
Well, Bob, things were bad. I’d been working most of my life in the field of roadside fireworks sales, but it wasn’t steady work.

GLADYS:
It was two weeks a year.

NORM:
So anyway, a year ago, two days before the Fourth of July, which is the height of our busy season, I had an on-the-job injury, which I won’t go into the details of here.

GLADYS:
He shot himself in the scrotum with a bottle rocket.

REAL ESTATE GUY:
Huh. Well getting back to . . .

GLADYS:
Is it OK to say “scrotum”?

NORM:
It was a freak thing, Bob. It’s a little demonstration I used to do where I launched the rocket from my pants. I called it the “Fart of Doom.” It’s a great sales booster—kids love it—and I did it a thousand times with no trouble, but this one time, I don’t know what the hell happened—bad fuse, probably—but next thing I know I’m an unemployed man with a third-degree burn on the old nutsack that would
not
heal. Gladys was changing those bandages ten times a day. Is it OK that I said “fart?”

GLADYS:
Do you have any idea how much pus a burned scrotum can produce?

REAL ESTATE GUY:
No.

GLADYS:
Most people don’t.

NORM:
So we were hurting for cash, I tell you. We have five children under the age of three, and it got to the point where we had to choose between buying food for them, or cigarettes.
No
parent should have to make that choice, Bob.

REAL ESTATE GUY:
No.

NORM:
So there we were: Our kids were starving, and our rent was past due. They even repossessed my Bowflex machine.

GLADYS:
Like you ever used it.

NORM:
It was the
humiliation,
goddammit, pardon my French.

REAL ESTATE GUY:
So things were bad.

NORM:
They were terrible. We didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Gladys was thinking about turning tricks.

REAL ESTATE GUY:
That’s awful!

GLADYS:
Not really, I saw something about it once on
The Maury Show,
“Hooker Housewives.” You can make good money, set your own hours. And it’s not like I was getting a lot of loving from Mister Scrotum Wound, here. He still can’t get his . . .

REAL ESTATE GUY
(
interrupting
): So you were desperate for money . . .

NORM:
Right, we were desperate, and just when I thought we had hit bottom, we discovered a money-making concept that changed our lives.

REAL ESTATE GUY:
My incredible program, Get Rich by Becoming Wealthy Making Big Money in Real Estate?

NORM:
No, robbing convenience stores. Not with a gun, of course; we’re both religious people. We had this fake bomb we made with duct tape.

GLADYS:
Inside it was Tampax.

NORM:
I’d say, “Give her the money, or I set off this bomb!” It worked the first two times, but the third time, the guy says, “OK, OK! Here’s your money!” But instead of cash, he pulls out a fricking
shotgun.
You can’t trust anybody, Bob.

GLADYS:
When Norm saw the shotgun, he jumped behind me and yelled, “Don’t shoot me! It’s
her
Tampax!”

NORM:
I was thinking of the kids. They need a father.

REAL ESTATE GUY:
So getting back to . . .

NORM:
We ended up in prison, five to ten, and that’s where I saw your infomercial, Bob.

REAL ESTATE GUY:
You mean for my incredible program, Get Rich by Becoming Wealthy Making Big Money in Real Estate?

NORM:
No, this was back when you were selling that kidney dialysis–by-mail program. Boy,
that
was a stinker, huh? I heard there were a
lot
of lawsu . . .

REAL ESTATE GUY:
I don’t think we need to . . .

NORM:
But the thing was, I liked your style, Bob. First time I saw you, I said to Skag—Skag was my best friend in prison . . .

GLADYS:
“Best friend,” he calls it.

NORM
(
ignoring her
): . . . I said, “Skag, this guy has something. When I watch his infomercial, I say to myself, now
that
is an infomercial.”

REAL ESTATE GUY:
Thank you.

NORM:
So I started following your work, and when I made parole, first thing I did was get your tape, Get Rich by Getting Rich in whaddycallit.

REAL ESTATE GUY:
Real estate.

NORM:
Right. And Bob, in my own words, it is a dream come fricking true.

REAL ESTATE GUY:
So you’ve made money?

NORM:
Out the wazoo, Bob. If I can say “wazoo.”

REAL ESTATE GUY:
By applying the principles described in my program?

NORM:
The what?

REAL ESTATE GUY:
The principles of successful real estate investing.

NORM:
Sure, whatever.

GLADYS:
How come he made you get that tattoo, if he’s your “best friend”?

NORM:
Don’t you make air quotes at me, bitch.

GLADYS:
Oh, right,
I’m
the bitch.

REAL ESTATE GUY
(
to camera
): There you have it: One couple’s true story of how they achieved financial independence through my program, Get Rich . . .

NORM:
At least I’m not a whore.

REAL ESTATE GUY:
. . . by Becoming Wealthy . . .

GLADYS:
Tell that to your “best friend,” Skag.

REAL ESTATE GUY:
. . . Making Big Money . . .

NORM
(
lunging toward Gladys, knocking over the camera
): I SAID DON’T MAKE AIR QUOTES AT ME, BITCH!

VOICE OF REAL ESTATE GUY
(
over sounds of struggle
): . . . in Real Estate!

VOICE OF GLADYS
(
being choke
d
): WHORE!!

(
T
HE SCREEN GOES DARK AS THE CAMERA FALLS INTO THE POOL.)

I admit that the preceding is not a totally realistic depiction of a real estate infomercial. The real ones are even stupider. But the message is the same:
Anyone can make money in real estate!

The only problem with this message is that it is, with all due respect, a tub of whale shit.*
 
³²
I say this because I personally have, on numerous occasions, failed to make money in real estate. I’ve owned a string of houses, in good real estate markets and bad, and no matter what, I have almost always managed to not make money.

What’s my secret? Simple: I make certain fundamental mistakes, and I make them consistently. These are proven, time-tested mistakes, and I believe that anybody—even somebody who has no previous experience losing money in real estate—can apply them.

Mistake Number One: Buy an Older House

The reason people usually give for buying an older house is that older houses have “character.” What do we mean by “character”? We mean “dry rot.”

The problem is that many, if not most, older houses were built in the past. Back then, people were stupider than they are today, and one result was that they built their houses largely out of wood. This was a mistake, because wood—and you can look this up if you don’t believe me—comes from trees.

What’s wrong with trees as a building material? Plenty. Go outside and examine a tree. From a distance, it appears to be a sturdy, permanent object, but when you examine it closely, you discover that it is a living organism, like a big hamster, except that virtually every part of the tree is constantly being eaten, bored into, nested on, or otherwise occupied by a vast teeming horde of ants, beetles, worms, termites, vines, toadstools, spiders, mosses, hornets, woodchucks, birds, chipmunks, squirrels, snakes, bats, and so on. A tree is nothing more than a giant hotel/buffet for critters. This is why the tree must keep committing acts of photosynthesis and growing new branches: If it didn’t, in a matter of days it would be termite poop.

Cutting a tree down and calling it “lumber” does not change what it is: It’s still a tree. Building a house out of “lumber” is really no different from building a house out of pepperoni or Cool Whip.
It’s still edible.
Sooner or later, critters are going to resume eating it. The most deadly critter is the dry-rot fungus, an organism made up of tiny but voracious spores that, when magnified 127,000 times, look like this:

There are millions of these things munching away at the typical house. The older the house is, the more they’ve munched, until in time, what’s holding the house up, structurally, is paint.

And that’s not the only problem with the older house. It probably also has an antiquated electrical system, installed back in the days when electricity traveled at only 57 miles per hour and wires were fashioned from goat hair and beeswax. The plumbing system—consisting of pipes made from some material no longer considered safe, such as arsenic-coated lead—passes water about as smoothly as a ninety-one-year-old man with a prostate the size of a bowling ball. The windows, which cannot be opened, are as effective against drafts as a volleyball net. The heating system, although it has been modernized on several occasions (most recently 1928) was originally designed to burn some fuel that is no longer available, such as heretics. The air-conditioning system, if there is one, was apparently tacked onto the house in a single frenzied day by unskilled workers using only chainsaws. The current roof was put on during the administration of Warren G. Harding; the attic insulation consists primarily of spider corpses; and the basement is prone to flooding, as evidenced by the presence of a thriving coral reef.