Property

At age fifteen I often hitch-hiked from Anaheim to beautiful Corona del Mar beach. One day a Realtor gave me a ride and talked to me about buying orange groves. He said it was smart to buy a grove cheap and then sell it for a big profit. Two years before that a man gave me a ride going over the grape vine from Los Angeles to Fresno. He said, "Someday this road will be lined with houses, factories and city stores from San Diego to Bakersfield."

As a student nurse at age twenty seven I talked to a patient who said his wife had committed him to the insane asylum in order to get his money. He told me it would be smart to buy cheap desert land in Nevada. When I was twenty nine working at Pass Memorial Hospital in Banning, California, a rich patient advised me to drop a dime from a plane anywhere in California, buy the property, and sell it for a profit. He said he retired in Palm Springs. To prevent boredom, he bought a fixer upper house on the desert. He piled up and burned the old furniture, hired a young man to help him, and they painted the house and plowed up the yard to make everything look clean. A Realtor sold the house within three months for a big profit. He bought other houses, fixed them up and sold them. His profits were a hundred thousand dollars a year. I decided to copy him.

As a student with a wife and baby, I wanted to buy a house but didn't know how. Barbara found a little house in the country for sale, and the lady was willing to sell it cheep. We needed a thousand dollars for the down payment. We asked Barbara's parents to loan us the money but they said it was too risky to buy property. I went to see my wealthy Aunt, and she said buying property was very risky because we might have a depression. I didn't ask her for the loan. Barbara knew her mother was holding a thousand dollars worth of stock in Barbara's name. We cashed it in and used the money for a down payment. We paid fifty dollars a month on the first trust deed and twenty five a month on the second. When I graduated from physical therapy school we had been in the little house for two years, and I had it cleaned up, landscaped, and looking good. We sold it for two hundred fifty dollars down payment and took a three thousand dollar second trust deed. To me this meant the original thousand had multiplied into three thousand dollars.

We bought a nice four bedroom home in Garden Grove by borrowing from the bank for the down payment, and the seller took a second trust deed note. After two years the next door neighbor wanted to sell us his house. For down payment he accepted the three thousand dollar second we still held from selling our first home in Loma Linda. This was the first rental house we owned. Soon we bought 160 acres of mountain timber with a trout stream one mile from Lake Shasta. My four brothers were fifty percent partners, and I was the other 50% partner paying $100 per month. At the same time I bought fifteen acres of gentle slope near Redding. My payment on the fifteen acres was also $100 per month and it took many years to pay off both Shasta properties.

We sold the house next door and used the several thousand dollars profit to put down payments on several more houses and rented them out to make the payments. In Anaheim we bought a small lot with two little houses on it for $800 down payment. The houses rented for $40 a month each, not enough to cover our payments. As years passed the rent went up. Eventually the property was paid off by the rent money. At times renters moved leaving the place a mess and each time, we cleaned it up and rented it out again. Finally we sold the property for ten times what we paid.

One Sunday we took our four children for a ride in the station wagon going down the coast toward San Diego. We turned left at Oceanside just to see what the countryside looked like. We saw signs advertising Bob's Burro Farm also called Hee Haw Valley. One sign read, "Our donkeys don't wear pants". The place was ten miles inland close to Vista. We went to the farm, and the kids fed and petted the many farm animals and rode the donkeys as Burro Bob chased them around a little fenced trail. Bob was friendly, and we learned that he was a real estate salesman. He said he knew of bargain houses and agreed to show some to Barbara after the week end.

Barbara took her mother and they drove to Vista and investigated several houses Bob had chosen for them to see. The following week end, I was free to look at them and decided the best one to buy was a large home with five acres a mile north of Vista on a gentle sloping hill with a three quarter circle view of distant hills. I said, "Barbara, there is only one thing wrong here. We are already buying several properties, and it is hard to make payments since I only make twelve to fifteen thousand a year. We have never paid more than twenty thousand for a house and this one costs almost twice that much. How can we do it?" Barbara said, "Don't worry about how to pay for it. Let's just get control by making a down payment somehow. Then we will use it for a home for unwed mothers, and let them make the payments."

We bought the Vista place and used it as a home for unwed mothers. Later we fell in love with the home and decided to make it our home to live in. All six of us moved into a work room built on the back side of the garage. We had to walk outside and down some steps to enter the main house where six girls and a housemother lived. For the first few months, I felt like a guest in my own house because we didn't sleep or watch television there. The unwed girls lived like part of the family because we all sat around the table for meals, we did household activities together and had outings on weekends to the beaches or other places of interest.

After a while the housemother left for a higher paying job in Texas. My oldest child Julie moved into the main house, and a year or so later we all moved in. The unwed girls moved out. Finally we had the house to ourselves. Sometimes I walked out on the porch and looked at our land with pride and gratitude. Burro Bob sold my brother-in-law and I two acres of land with a rental house in Bonsall near the new multi million dollar race track for quarter horses. We sold the place two years later for double the price we had paid. I took our profit, and we bought some more houses and fifteen acres with a running creek. Then Barbara decided to invest in a nursing home. We found several rest homes for sale and bought the oldest rest home in Poway. It had twenty three beds and a separate rental house on the two and a half acre parcel. Our friends Joe and Shirley moved from the Garden Grove home they were renting from us, and they moved into the small house in Poway and became the managers of Twin Peaks Retirement Home. Later we bought two lovely homes in Poway, licensed them as rest homes, and friends managed them as fifty percent partners for any profits we might make.

We bought an old house on a business street in Vista and rented it out for a few years. Then we split the property in two, sold the front lot with the house for a small profit and kept the quarter acre bare lot. The bare lot is now worth triple what we paid for the house.

Barbara and I went on a vacation and drove the coastline of Oregon to Portland. We passed by Newport and decided it might be a good place to buy a beach home. While showing us property, a saleslady told us we might find a bargain twenty miles south where the Alsea river enters the bay at the coastal city of Waldport. We found a cute six sided house on a strand of beach with the house facing the waves. We took one look and bought. We keep it furnished, and the realtor takes care of the place and rents it out for us. Recently we spent a few days there. We dropped a baited net to the bottom of the bay pier and every few minutes hauled up the crabs several at a time. We saw fishermen catch twenty to forty pound salmon out of the river. One caught a sixty pounder. Trout run up the river to spawn every year. A young boy who lives close to the river showed me a place where steelhead are caught with lures. The area is a fun place to visit for storm watchers in the winter.

I have met married couples who have not shared interests like Barbara and I have shared managing our own properties. At times we have gambled and lost, but almost always we won. It gives us something to do together to make our lives more interesting. With the money we earned, we were able to pay for the children’s education, bought them cars, and picked up the tabs for their parties. The properties provide jobs for other people too.