Diary of A Slumlord: One Landlord’s Lighter Look at the Darker Side of Real Estate: Introduction

Introduction

Another day, another drug deal, another death, and another deferred payment plan on rent. Ah, the glory of slum landlord real estate investment. It’s a joy that cannot really be expressed in words… or can it? I’ll do my best.

But before we get into all of that, let’s start from the beginning. My name is Gregory Brian, and I own a lucky number thirteen rental properties in some of the worst neighborhoods in Baltimore (read: worst neighborhoods in the U.S.ofA.). I’m a scrawny white guy who went to University of Delaware (Honors Program, thank you very much), I ran cross country in high school, and I’ve only been in one fight in my entire life (maybe two, but it didn’t count because I got my ass kicked). And no, I don’t own a gun, or a bullet-proof vest.

So what the hell am I doing owning property in the war-torn underbelly of America?

I could tell you about my first job out of college working for a sub-prime mortgage lender (yep, the very same who put us in our current credit crisis), and how I managed slum properties for the owner, but it’s not a very good story. What IS a good story is how I had to visit a 400-pound (most of it muscle) bounty hunter at his… “residence,” or the time that I almost stepped on a homeless guy in one of the houses. The word “troubled” doesn’t even begin to cover this underworld.

But most of all I’ll be telling you what few people from the sunny side have ever truly experienced, from the unique viewpoint of someone who grew up relatively privileged, and still is, who travels between Heaven and Hell every day. It will be part rant, part social commentary, part comic vignette, and part How-to-Invest-in-Low-End-Real-Estate-and-Survive.

And, in the immortal words of a mortal writer, “brevity is the soul of wit.”

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