Or I should call it lock breaking, since the lock was effectively useless after my attempt to open up the mailbox which has been locked up by my previous tenant. It so happened that my previous tenant had one of the biggest locks around…Gulp!

Apart from such thievery acts, there are various other “house-keeping” chores that is involved when renting out this 900 square feet apartment.

Yes, I believe there’s lots of money you can make from real estate, but the learning curve of making it big is equally huge, and small timers like myself would probably not see any significant gain from such a puny investment.

The various tasks generated from my property such as timely rental collections (even with online payments), utilities fee payments, quit rents is another major turn off for me. One could have easily make better returns with an REIT fund.

That’s something I learnt from one of my first investment decision. A good investment package should be as passive as possible and should not take up too much time to monitor. After all, what we really want to be doing is to control the risk and return we are taking, and not spending 30 minutes breaking locks.

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