Distancing From Sha

I’ve been re-evaluating my friendship with Sha for the last couple of weeks. In my mind, I do this to every once in a while make sure that I have the right people around me to venture on. If I feel that they’re a detriment to me, I keep them at a distance. I have to admit that, lately, Sha isn’t as much of a help as he was before.

I wanted to do real estate ever since my mom, Rita, took me to Louisiana in 2005. She wanted to do a real estate deal with a group of friends and they went looking around at properties with a broker. The deal ultimately went to shit (too many investors usually means too many ways of thinking), but the seed was planted. Driving around and seeing the different properties with all the potential monies to be made had my mind spinning with ideas. So the Louisiana trip planted the seed, but I came to Smalltown because of Sha. He helped me understand the nature of real estate and property management, as well as helping me get through the hurdles of financing for my first two properties. His wife, Sonya, was the loan officer that worked with me even though I had almost no idea what I was doing in acquiring properties Alpha and Beta. Now, it seems as if things are different now.

Sha still owes me the $1050 I lent him for his trip to the Bahamas a couple of weeks ago. I have no doubt that he’ll pay it in full next week, but he said he was going to do it last week. Back in June of this year, I gave Sha $2500 for his guy to do property Chi’s roof. It was supposed to be a simple 2 day job where the valleys would be redone and the holes in the roof patched. Well, it’s September 14, 2011, and the job still isn’t done. He called me last weekend to say that some of the material was stolen so he needs more time to get the job done. A couple of days ago, Sha and I were texting about a trip to Vegas he wanted me to go on with him and some old college friends of ours in October. I let it slip that I was planning to retire somewhere in 2013 so I can’t take off work for a while. This is an excerpt of the text conversation:

Sha: You are missing out on LIFE

Me: Life can wait until retirement…

Sha: You’ll be an old fuck

Me: Near the end of 2013 is my projected retirement date

Me: Would have been sooner if I hadn’t fucked up my credit so much

Sha: Impossible

Me: Impossible?

Sha: To retire that early… I can’t even do that!

Sha: Start enjoying life, man… You won’t get this time back

I started texting him about my dick at this point because I had to change the subject. I didn’t understand it. How can someone who taught me so much about real estate be blind to the idea that working a paycheck job for 20, 10, even 5 more years is unacceptable? And even if he doesn’t believe that, where’s the encouragement? Okay, maybe I don’t need encouragement anymore, but where’s the advice? Where’s the reliable Sha that always had a simple answer for every complicated question?

Maybe I was looking at him through the student’s eyes. Maybe now I’m starting to see all his business flaws and problems that were always there before, but I just couldn’t recognize it because I was so inexperienced. It was fun riding around with him when I first came to Smalltown. As we were “cruising for bitches”, he’d stop the car, look at a property from the outside, and then call his broker that he wants that property. He wouldn’t even go inside it to inspect before closing. It looked so cool and I wanted to learn how to have that “eye”. I look at those properties now and they’re a mess. Bad neighborhoods, shabby construction, awful tenants and, the worst part, having his garbage workers handle the repairs. He started with almost 30 properties and is now down to maybe 11. Out of those 11, maybe 8 of them are in foreclosure.

When talking about Sha, Paul Maddox told me that he didn’t like the way Sha did business with him. Paul said that Sha would take the rents and spend the money on other things besides the debts, then have an even larger debt to pay off. Sha is now indebted to Maddox for the 7 or 8 properties he bought from him, totaling almost $100K. I re-read a post I did in early May of this year, called Playing It Safe. Part of the reason I think Sha was talking so much crap about mortgages when he found out I was trying to get one, was that he can’t get one now if he wanted to. Maybe he now has no choice but to purchase properties with cash because no bank will lend him anything. You know, this may sound stupid but I’ll say it anyway. I always thought that, in 5 years, Sha and I would be at a good level of success. I always pictured that, every Sunday night, we’d sit on the roof of a big commercial property that we bought together and drink a glass of scotch like Denny Crane and Alan Shore from the show Boston Legal. We’d shoot the shit, laugh about strange tenant situations, and talk about some chick the other is trying to get (or already did).

Sounded nice back then and it still sounds nice now. Who knows? Maybe in 5 years we will be equally successful in our real estate ventures. Sha always seems to have a way out of every situation, so it’s possible. After all, everyone makes mistakes. But I’m now more careful than ever of what I tell him business-wise, making sure not to talk about my business plans out loud with him. I may have to curb lending him money if he’s going to take longer times to pay me back. I’ll never use his workers again. We should still be friends, no matter what. Business-wise, however, we couldn’t be further apart.