May
4
Plans, Plans, and More Plans
May 4, 2007 |
Trying to take it a bit slower this morning and somewhat enjoy my last day of “vacation” from the day job, so I thought I’d catch up on assorted blogs and plans and schemings and what-not.
1) The property I was interested in listed in the tax deed sale for May turned out to be a no-go, although it was a bit of an odd situation. It was scheduled to go to auction and the property taxes are delinquent, but the owners have a payment plan in place. According to the appraisal district, it technically goes to auction, but they don’t proceed on their end of the suit, because of the payment plan, so if I bid and won the auction I would very likely end up with my money simply being refunded, when the county didn’t pursue the suit.
I wasn’t too crushed at the news, as I’m busy enoough without taking on an abandoned property, interior condition site unseen, and I did line up a title company here in town that will run pencil searches on future properties for me for $50/search, so I did some make some progress on that front, if I find future tax deed sale properties I’m interested in.
2) Updated the expense page for the Main St. house, as well as the total to the right. The new roof went on earlier this week, which explains much of the bump in costs. I’m probably going to go a bit over my initial budget of $10,000 for repairs, but that’s largely due to the slight change in plans of hiring out the installation of flooring in the kitchen/hallway/bath, instead of tiling it myself as planned.
I still need to get the gas turned on over there and get more estimate for furnace repair/replacement, as that and the flooring are the two major jobs left.
3) Keeping my fingers crossed as to what we’ll get for the Austin house, but things are looking good as far as a complete lack of inventory in our part of town, and how quickly properties are moving, with most listed less than a week on the MLS before showing up as pending. Honestly, it’s likely a mistake to sell it now, as our part of town is slowly being gentrified into a cooler, hipper area, but I think I can recoup any lost future profits by selling now and getting the profits to work sooner, as opposed to renting it out for another year or two at slightly negative cash flow.
4) We’re eyeing a commercial building here in town, smack dab on the historic, old-fashioned town square. One of our long-term goals is to eventually open our own art supplies/art studio/gallery, as my wife is a sculptor and I’ve got a MFA and like to dabble in metalcasting and welding and other artsy-fartsy hobbies. The planned business would never make tons of money but it’s something we enjoy, and there’s really nothing similar within a 30 mile radius (until you get into Austin proper), so it’s not the dumbest idea in the world.
We’re a year or two away, though, from really being ready to give something like that a whirl. Thus the condundrum, as we’ve found a really nice space downtown that’s perfect, in many ways. It needs much work and is essentially torn down to the studs, as far as the interior goes. For us, though, that’s pretty perfect as far as what we’d want the space for, and we’d just end up re-configuring pretty much any other building anyway.
The biggest potential issue is the electrical and plumbing, as it doesn’t appear to have been updated in many moons (although it does have a new roof). The furnace is also fairly old, although it reportedly was working fine when last in use. It’s listed at $107,000, but our realtor expects we coould probably get it for something like $85,000-$90,000, as it’s been listed for forever and no one is biting. Similar buildings on the square in ready-to-rent shape have sold for around $200K, so the price is definitely right, even if we ended up sinking $40,000-$50,000 into it in repairs.
Just not sure if the timing is right. We’re rolling around ideas as far as configuring it so that it’s a split space, with all of our stuff on one side and 2-3 offices on another, with a shared entrance from the street. That way we could do short-term leases for the offices (which would be pretty simple little offices for accountants/someone who wants affordable office space downtown and doesn’t need anything elaborate) and offset some of the mortgage costs, while we got things sorted out for our planned store/gallery/studio. It’s not perfect but it might work. Seems like we’re biting off too much at this stage, but I keep telling myself it’s not the worst investment in the world, and could even be a potential flip, as far as doing all of the rehab work and simply selling the place, if we realized that we simply weren’t ready to open a store ourselves.
5) My wife bought a red oak tree for our backyard here at home, and found a great deal from a nursery a bit south of town. It’s a fairly small place, owned by a husband/wife team, and very much in the “Sure, we’ll come and plant it” mindset, showing up the next day and doing just that and charging about half what other places would. I was working at the Austin house but while here the husband noticed my growing pile of trash in the backyard (I’d been stockpiling all the assorted junk generated from rehab efforts, to be hauled off by someone later) and offered to haul it off for $50.
My wife asked him how much to also tear down the rotting shed in the backyard, which I haven’t had time to deal with, they discussed other assorted jobs, and, long story short, my wife offered my Web development skills, as far as building and maintaining a website for their business in exchange for assorted trash hauling and landscaping work. He had to talk it over with his wife but seemed pretty jazzed on the idea, as was I, since I already have a dedicated server set up for my other sites, so it’s pretty simple for me to handle everything on the Web end.
That’s something I need to be more aggressive about in the future, as far as working with local contractors who don’t have websites at all or have very basic ones not optimized at all for getting results. That’s basically what I do, build websites and get them ranked well in search engines, so it’s kind of silly not to pursue that on the rehab side of things, too. I’m not going to be able to barter a new roof for a website, but I imagine I could get assorted people to knock a couple hundred bucks off the final price tag for assorted jobs, for some basic Web development and/or search engine optimization work.
