“There are very few things I regret in life, and one is selling real estate,” my father would say.
I think I know what he’s talking about, for it still hurts, however long it’s been, whenever I pass by a piece of property I’ve bought and sold. To the injury is yet added the insult of the price for which I parted with it. Boba! I hear myself say in self-rebuke as I go to the masochistic extent of computing how rich I’d have been if I had held out longer.
Dad warned me to keep a balanced investment portfolio, to not be too liquid: “Real estate is always a good solid alternative. Liquid runs—they don’t call it that for nothing, kiddo. It leaks and evaporates with inflation, which erodes if unspent.”
I’ve, in fact, seen it happen, to my own distress, and it terrifies me.
My husband, though, has a different take, one quite fetching in itself. Coming as they do with certain obligations and responsibilities, not to mention the possibility of getting lost, misplaced or stolen, possessions to him can be a burden if not an aggravation. I guess he’ll never be able to appreciate my fear of liquidity, which happens to be his very comfort zone.
Since for me the burden and worry precisely come from having more cash on hand than necessary, I feel pressured to put some of it to profitable use before it becomes eroded as Dad warned: I’m looking to invest. Of course, when you’re invested you also can’t help feeling anxious, especially at this age.
Heeding Dad, I got us a piece of property, a single-bedroom condominium unit—“a little square of airspace,” as Vergel calls it with undisguised disfavor. It was to be our nest egg in lieu of a retirement plan.
Sweet talk
A property manager sweet-talked us into a deal. She would take care of renting it out and managing it for a fee, taken as a percentage from the rent.
Soon enough, the aggravation I had been warned about began to happen. A check she had issued remitting rent bounced, then a second check. Given grace, she managed within a week to fund each check. On a third bounce, my husband advised me to terminate the contract. But the nice, trusting fellow that I have proved myself to be, I got sweet-talked again.
To Dad, trusting was no virtue; to be trusting was negligent, sloppy, even stupid. The true and working virtue was due diligence. “Only a person you trust can fool you,” Dad, in fact, told me the first time I got swindled—out of a piece of jewelry.
The latest news is that our property manager has arbitrarily and stealthily packed her own family of a husband and four children, along with a maid, into our 48-square-meter, overloading it by five bodies. In effect, she’s both manager and tenant, a clear case of conflict of interest in which our benefit is certain to suffer against her family’s own.
She has, in fact, done it before, at least twice, but each time driven out in time, though not until after her family had trashed at least one of the units.
Some senior friends themselves weighed down by the burden of managing their own property have been asking for a suitable property manager for hire. I had told them about my property manager, but I failed to update them of the nightmare she had become. Finally apprised, they felt both let down and relieved.
“You mean,” asked one, “I still have to be hands-on? I’m tired na!”
There does seem a need for a property manager not just to relieve us of the chore, but to free us from worry and aggravation. Indeed, in a perfect world, that’s an ideal arrangement. But the reality is that the arrangement is fraught with temptation and therefore danger. It all goes back to the non-virtue of trusting.
My father’s father himself didn’t believe in any other kind of management than the hands-on kind. He didn’t believe in ever giving somebody else that power. He used to tell us, “El que tiene tienda que lo atienda”—if you have a store you’ll have to mind it yourself.
I guess I was never cut out for business, and I’m surely not about to learn now. I’m afraid at this stage of our lives, my husband’s preference for liquidity—or anything easily transformable into liquid—is beginning to look more and more attractive.
