Griffin Speaks
OUR WAR AGAINST THE SLUMLORDS
My wife and I are in the business of providing decent, safe and affordable
housing at a profit, because we are appalled at the number of slumlords
in Montgomery, Alabama. What is a slumlord? In our opinion a slumlord
is a person that is delighted to take over any junk property they can
acquire at a cheap price, with little or nothing down. They have no intentions
of paying the note on the property off.
The slumlord's chief goal is to put into the property the smallest amount of cash and take the most they can out of it for as long as possible. Tax benefits are not a big concern for the slumlord, because he usually deals in unreported cash. Appreciation is not a concern, because the slumlord intends to ditch the property after he has milked it dry. This results in run down neighborhoods!
We buy homes and repair them and bring them up to the Griffin Standard. Our reputation for affordable and decent housing has resulted in 100% occupancy. My standard is: "I don't rent anything that I would not personally live in." That is the Griffin Standard.
When we have a tenant move out and leave a mess, we cry, clean the place up, make repairs and repaint. We then pledge to do a better job of screening our next tenant. We still haven't gone to credit checks, background checks and last month and first month rent deposits. We may get to that point if we have enough bad tenants. A slumlord just lowers the rent on a trashed property until some poor person will agree to accept it as is. This process is repeated over and over again until you have the slum neighborhood.
People are always asking me "How many houses do you own?" I use to tell them until my mother asked me: "Do you think Joe Reed goes around telling everyone how many houses he owns? It made sense so I now simply tell them: " It takes me a weekend to collect my rent!" Our goal is 500+ affordable rental homes. Thanks be to God we are well on our way. I knew that was the case when recently while my wife was reading the paper in the den, she folded the paper, looked at me and asked: "How many houses do we own?"
In our war against slumlords our best weapon will probably be to purchase their structurally and aesthetically challenged properties then fix them up to our high standards. It doesn't take very many run down buildings to create a slum neighborhood. We have been purchasing houses in our own Haardt Estates neighborhood for years in an effort to keep the neighborhood up. I wish my other neighbors would join in. You will know exactly how many we own when they change the name of the neighborhood to Griffin Estates.
We can win the war against the short sighted slumlords who rape our neighborhoods and steal money from properties by chasing after cash flow with no regard to the long term effects. We can stop them from destroying buildings, neighborhoods and poor families. I encourage my readers to begin building long-term financial security by wisely investing in rental housing. Let us fight the slumlord and win this war.
Greg Griffin is a free lance writer. You can read his previous articles by logging on to www.greggriffin.com
Greg Griffin is a freelance writer. He can be contacted at www.greggriffin.com
