9. A Day in the Life

Today … was super busy.

Not a complaint, just a fact! I’m so tired right now that the following is probably going to lack some flair, but this is just what today was — exhausting.

I’m going to give you a run through of what our day today looked like with the following highlights:

9-10am I (Anne) had a webinar meeting this morning for the NOAA water quality project that I am coordinating. I may have mentioned this before, but I was in charge of this project while working at the Navarre Beach Marine Science Station last school year when I was still teaching. Due to COVID-19 and the school closures that followed, we were awarded a year extension to finish the remaining tasks we had on the project. I am still the coordinator on the project and, while it doesn’t take up much of my time, it does periodically interfere with my typical routine for our RE investing business. For example, it’s usually at this time in the morning that I am posting on all of our social media platforms. That didn’t happen today. It is a goal of mine to post at least once a day on all of the platforms, so I really slacked today by not getting this done and don’t feel good about it.

10:30am Mike and I left the house to go meet with our property manager in Pensacola. We live outside of Pensacola and it takes about 30-35 minutes to get downtown from our house. Our property manager will be managing a quadplex that we recently bought (more on that soon!) and while we have worked with him via email to get the initial paperwork started and spoke on the phone, we had not yet met face-to-face. So, we were able to do that today. We went over the items that we want to accomplish on this new property as far as some cleaning and cosmetic work that we want done as soon as possible. (Again, I’ll get into that in another post.) We also discussed the fact that all of the units are rented, however two of the four tenants haven’t been paying. One of them hasn’t paid rent for a YEAR! WHAT?! So, that situation will need to be addressed right away.

12:00pm Picked up some lunch and went home.

1:15pm Meeting with our SEO guru, Jerryll Noorden. This was a one-on-one meeting to go over some questions we had about our website and SEO strategy. It was a really great and productive meeting. Went in feeling overwhelmed and concerned, left feeling much better and with a clear path forward. Those are good meetings. The meeting was SO good, in fact, that it caused us to be late to our next appointment …

2pm (well, ok, 2:20pm) Met with the plumber at Property #1, the Milton house. This is the house I talked about in earlier blogs. We felt terrible for being late, but he was really friendly and understanding. At least he seemed to be. We walked through the property and explained everything that needed to be done. We provided a scope of work and he said he would get us a quote in a day or two. Great! We have been having to wait a week or more for some contractors to get back to us with bids, so I like this guy already. We’ll see if he follows through …

3pm We stayed at the Milton house for a while longer and made a couple of videos for our YouTube channel. We have yet to get this going. It has been a lot of hard work for me to keep up with multiple social media accounts on a daily basis, along with returning calls to sellers, following up with leads, cold-calling or texting new leads, answering emails, bookkeeping, and tracking our marketing. We not only wear a lot of hats in this business, we wear ALL the hats. It can be a bit overwhelming at times. So, yes, the YouTube channel we created a few months ago has been neglected. The videos we did today were of a walk through of the property and what our plans are for it. Then, we added a second one that was shorter (~2 min) and more specific to the work we are having done on the bathroom. I will come back and post links to these videos once they have been finalized and uploaded. We may wind up doing the walk-through video over again in the next few days. You always notice areas you can improve on once you actually watch it!

3:37pm I returned a call from a seller that submitted a form on our website yesterday. I had called him yesterday about 10 minutes after he submitted the form (a step 2 form!), but was sent to voicemail. I left him a message asking him to return my call and to leave a message if he gets my voicemail. He called back a while later, but I couldn’t take his call. No voicemail was left. I typically never call people back unless they leave a voicemail because I feel stalkery calling back and saying “I saw you called,” (it’s a huge pet peeve when people do this) but, I did exactly that yesterday evening. Same thing happened: my call was sent to voicemail … I left a message … he called back … didn’t leave a message. So, I tried him again this afternoon. Same. Thing. Happened. Omg. Well, except he didn’t call back. Does he want to sell or not? WORK WITH ME, PEOPLE!

4:09pm Mike called and spoke to another potential seller that had called us this morning while we were meeting with the property manager. He has a vacant lot that he wants to sell. Figuring out the value of the property will take some research, so we will be returning his call tomorrow.

5:40pm Reviewed and approved some work we had outsourced.

And, now, here I am at 6:35pm writing this blog post. I am going to end now because … I’m beat! But, not before I make some quick edits to our website …