First a little story about buying investment property.
My wife and I stayed at a motel in Tucson for a week one winter. Our bill was for twice what it should have been, but since I already paid the correct amount in cash, I thought nothing of it. During our stay, we noticed that the lobby and swimming pool were unheated, and passed it off as frugality. A year later, however, when I read a news story about a new owner struggling to make the motel work, I realized what was really going on.
To prepare the motel for sale, the owner had been using the two most basic ways to inflate the appraised value: decrease expenses and increase reported income. Stopping repairs, turning down the heat, and quietly adding $100 in income to the books ev...
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