Yo Gotti often shares that he is building his wealth through an expansive real estate portfolio. But the rapper and record label owner revealed in a recent interview that he could have lost it all as a result of a mistake.
During a recent interview on the “Urban Wealth Management” podcast, Yo Gotti shared that he almost foreclosed on 15 of his homes as a result of not paying property taxes.
“I didn’t even know you had to pay property taxes on a house that you’d paid cash for,” he said during the recent interview. “I got some paper in the mail.”
Soon Yo Gotti learned that in Tennessee, foreclosure is a possible outcome for a property owner failing to pay property taxes. Following a foreclosure, the property is sold as a tax sale. To avoid a foreclosure and tax sale, a land owner has to pay property taxes annually.
Fortunately for Yo Gotti, he caught his mistake in time, paid his taxes and saved his properties.
Relying On Real Estate Investments
Yo Gotti, a native of Memphis, Tennessee, reportedly has a net worth of $16 million. Early in his career, he began purchasing real estate.
“Real estate was one of the first things I was doing,” Yo Gotti told Yahoo! Finance. “I kinda like mistakenly fell into that. I bought a house early in my career, and in my head it was like, ‘If everything goes wrong, I own this one house, you know?’ And luckily, I never needed to move into that house, so it was always getting rented out.
Yo Gotti began by purchasing properties that he could renovate and then resell. Within time, he was purchasing one home per month. Along the way, he was presented many challenges, such as the unpaid property taxes.
“I didn’t have education or information about real estate at the time. I learned after I already assumed a few houses, and then I kind of fell in love with the rehabbing of the houses and fixing them up and just the whole process, and turned it into a business,” he told Yahoo! Finance.
However, Yo Gotti learned the lessons and continued to purchase properties throughout Memphis. And in 2021, he accepted a huge challenge: He purchased a $7.6 million mansion in Los Angeles.
“I don’t buy a house that I don’t think I should buy. Nobody really consult me on that. I know the area, I can buy a house from over the phone ’cause I know every area in the city,” he told HipHopDX. “Now, if it’s in a different city, maybe we get someone who can consult with us because we may not know the area. In real estate, you have to know what area you buying in ’cause you gotta know the prices going up and down.”
