More More More (a Scriptio Continua)

WINK 2023

We wanted more we bought our three-decker home we’ve been renting and upped the rent for our tenants (as well as friends) then we bought the house on the corner that was going into foreclosure and then the two houses in-between which were also triple decker’s and the money was flowing in and we wanted more so we bought two building lots and used them as collateral to build two dupex houses and since they were modern we got more rent and then we looked for more land and Mickey at the fish and chips store (open only on Fridays and Saturdays) wanted to retire and offered us the fish and chips store if we took the strip center which consisted of six more stores and he volunteered to hold the paper so we did the deal if he showed my brother-in-law how to make the fish and chips, which he agreed to and word got out that we were buying and Realtors and regular home and land owners called us since we wanted more we bought more but only the best of the more and then our bank called and asked us to come in and my wife and I did and the bank president and his lending officer laid out a plan of two customers, both in arrears and in pre-foreclosure and offered us their properties and since we had such great credit and cash flow he’d forgo six months of payments on all of these two portfolios and since we wanted more we walked out with these two new portfolios; one with eight houses that needed work in a poor neighborhood and the other with a dozen primo properties and twenty acres of land which we subdivided and sold off the lots even though my wife wanted us to build the houses and keep them as rentals we wanted more so we opened a rental office and put my mother-in-law in charge that freed us up to check on our properties and also to look at new properties since we still wanted more so almost every day we bought another house or commercial building and since we’d become the go-to buyers we learned how to negotiate better terms and prices and pretty soon our house was too small to work out of so we bought a big house on a tip from our banker who asked if we wanted more and we said we did we wanted more more more and he drove us over to his cousin who owned a Chevy Dealership and the adjacent car wash on one side and the four-story elevatored office building on the other he’d just recovered from a stroke and couldn’t handle the business pressures any longer, so we struck a deal and drove away in our new Chevy. More More More my wife was saying, and I told her we had to be super selective and not just buy good property but steal it, so we decided to take a four-day weekend in a Puerto Rico spa with no cell, television, or newspaper service and enjoy the sun, but I kept catching my wife going out looking at properties and I told her no no no if we couldn’t get to a property in thirty-minutes we wouldn’t buy it our driver picked us up at the airport and turned the radio on as we drove home we heard the news that the stock market was down forty percent as was expected to drop even more, there’s no way we can ride this out I said and called my banker who asked me to come in ASAP and we did and he said he cut us off from our line of credit and we could expect foreclosures on our properties not rented or being fixed up he also told me that Chevy had closed their cash spigot to us but there was some hope for us to salvage a couple of properties he had a potential buyer waiting in the conference room so we went in and struck a deal with the Moore’s from Texas who made several fortunes buying distressed portfolios and ours would fill the bill hangdog, we left the bank owning our original house, our new house and free new Chevy loaners each for five years we watched the Moores leaving in their limo with plates reading; GET MOORE en route home my wife told me to pull over and I did. There was a nice triple-decker with a for sale sign and an offer to hold the mortgage.