It's amazing sometimes how one single deadbeat can want ot put a small business over the edge! And add up more than one and suddenly you want to konw why you even do this business.

One thing, my husband has been in construction forever. He grew up in the industry. His father was one of those home builder/remodelers for the last years of his career, and one of the problems they ALWAYS knew about was that you get to a point where it feels like it's not so hard, if you make a hundred thousand profit off re-habbing ONE house, you get this idea in your head that if you could jsut get 5 or 10 in the works, that you could make half a million or a MILLION dollars pure profit. What a great deal. So you leverage your life to get that going... and then you hit a spot in the market where it's not quite so easy to turn over the properties... maybe not just NOT profitable, but not POSSIBLE... and suddenly you've got an inventory of 8 houses ready to sell and $25,000 per month carrying costs and no buyers...

This same principle goes for every business... if you grow too fast for the infrastructure of your business to keep up, it's a danger that you'll have more on your plate than you can handle, and in an EASY time it'd be huge profitability... but in a TOUGH time (think... half the partnership out of commission to have a baby)... it's potential disaster.

Stick to your guns on this one. It's the right opportunity at the wrong time, which could end up being the thing that puts the number of rentals just over the edge with overhead. Not worth it.

JBar's comments are bizarre and kind of show his midnset... if you can weasel your way into something, cheat someone or convince someone to do it for you, then it's fair game. If you can find a way to leverage someone into giving you too much, they'll throw good money after bad just to try to avoid losing thier initial investment in you. It gives you the chance to borrow more than you can afford while making it harder for people with good records and no debt to make a start in a similar kind of borrowing.

Using bankruptcies and foreclosures as opportunities to create too much debt for yourself in the hopes that you'll make a big profit while knowing that if it doesn't work you can always just go bankrupt & wipe the slate clean.

Thank goodness most people in the world don't choose to work that way and I'm glad to know that you don't!