Dirt Fever: The Road from Dirt Poor to Landowner Follows No Set Path
…but the view is always a welcome one
by Turk Pipkin
Like most Americans, I’m no good at saving money. Fortunately for me, I’ve found real estate a much better way to go. Thirty years ago, back when I was a ponytailed hippie, I literally carried bags of coins to my first closing. I kid you not. Almost a thousand bucks in loose change I’d earned entertaining people on street corners. I may have walked in dirt poor, but thanks to that big bag of change, I walked out a landowner. And I haven’t paid a dime in rent since.
The bigger piece of my down payment on that funky old house came from selling some stock that had been left to me by my grandfather. “Don’t ever sell those shares,” my mother told me. Lucky for me, I didn’t listen to her. In fact, the main thing I remember my mom saying to me in those years was, “You never listen to a word I say!” I don’t remember what she said after that.
The sagging A-frame house I’d purchased was in such a decrepit neighborhood that my friends named it “Squalid Oaks Manor.” It took a few years of sweat equity to fix the place up, but I had the last laugh when I sold Squalid Oaks for twice what I’d paid. It wasn’t a big score, but how much cash had I saved or invested in the same period? Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
When my wife and I moved to Los Angeles, we ended up buying a big apartment in the oldest co-op west of the Mississippi. We got a great deal most likely because the building was just a stone’s throw from people who really throw stones. At night, we could hear the gangbangers shooting at each other as they raced by in their cars. One night as we watched a high-speed chase from the roof, a police helicopter snared us in its spotlight.
“Go back to your home!” a loud voice boomed from up above. So we moved back to Texas, but not before selling our apartment for twice what we’d paid. And that’s before we really got lucky.
I was driving down a country road when I noticed a real estate agent setting up a “For Sale” sign. I pulled over and found myself staring at the home of our dreams-an old stone ranch house hidden in the woods with not a gangbanger in sight. Though the house was in foreclosure, the bank was asking twice what we could afford. Some sage advice was called for, so I rang up this country lawyer I know who also happens to be my brother.
“Offer them a third of the asking price. If they counter, you’ve got ‘em by the short hairs,” was what he counseled. They countered all right, and the deal got better every time we squeezed them. It took a decade to pay off the note on that house, which is when my wife and I bought some raw land and did even better.
Not too long ago, I looked up that stock my grandfather left me, the one I’d cashed in, and discovered that it hadn’t gone up much more than the inflation rate. Sure, I could have invested in Dell or Whole Foods and beat the market. Or I could have done what a friend of mine did: lost everything day trading.
Reprinted with permission from The Land Report.
