How Valuable is Your Time? Rebuilding New Orleans
Time is money. We’ve all heard that and in real estate investing it couldn’t be truer. Rehabbers depend on time or the lack there of to make their money. The more time they sit on a property, the less they make. Long-term real estate investors hold property for one or more years to cash in on appreciation and they make their money when their tenants pay the rent on time. How valuable is time though?
It’s been said that money can buy a watch, but it can’t buy more time.
On a recent trip to New Orleans I learned that time itself appears to be more valuable than money in the Big Easy these days.
In partnership with volunteers from Dubuque Iowa and Catholic Charities of New Orleans Operation Helping Hands (www.catholiccharities-no.org ), Belstar Properties spent time, not money in New Orleans. It has been almost one year since hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, but it looks as though it could have been yesterday.
Waist high in debris and battling humid temperatures in the hundreds we were volunteering where money could not be found.
Hundreds of thousands of New Orleans residents simply cannot afford to pay to clean out their houses and rebuild. Money from donations help of course, but it is the time of thousands of volunteers and workers that are truly the most valuable asset in New Orleans right now.
In nine days our group of nine volunteers completely cleaned out the debris and gutted two properties. One off them was a duplex in central New Orleans. Two properties may not seem like much when there are still 140 thousand still uninhabitable, but for the residents of those homes our time was as good as gold. William Smith, the owner of one of the homes we worked on was thankful for the donations given to him by Operation Helping Hands, but he didn’t thank us for those. Surrounded by his family and teary eyed, he thanked us for our time. “I can’t believe you all took time out your lives to come down and help us,” he said over and over. “Thank you.”
It was those two words that made my time down there worth it. I could have used those nine days to make more offers or rehab another house, but for me so far this time has given me the biggest return of any investment I have ever made.
There are still thousands of residents waiting for their time to get their lives back on track. Their time will come when more volunteers can donate more time to help and continue helping to rebuild New Orleans. As real estate investors we know there is a lot of money to be made in real estate and we always seem to make the time for the next deal. The question to ask yourself though is how valuable is your time and can it be used, even for a little while, for a greater good?
If you can’t take the time to go down to New Orleans yourself, I urge you to continue your donations to programs like Operation Helping Hands, www.catholiccharities-no.org so that others can.
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