Not a heck of a lot of news to report, as we’re still waiting to close on the refinance of House #1, which ideally needs to happen before everything is signed off on for the potential line of credit, which needs to be in place before I can get serious about pursuing any new house flip projects.
But the lender seems to think we should close in a week or two, so hopefully all those assorted balls will soon be rolling. The REO property I was eyeballing immediately went under contract, so no luck there. There’s not a lot on the MLS at the moment that looks very appealing, so I may try the route of contacting out-of-town owners of abandoned properties. Spent a few hours yesterday trolling through decent neighborhoods in town and came up with three prospects, grabbing the contact info for the owners via the county appraisal district records.
From what I can glean on assorted REI forums, there’s typically a very, very low response rate to shooting off letters to out-of-town owners in cases like that, but all it costs is a stamp and a bit of time to give it a shot, so why not.
Talked to the tenant in House #1 last week to let him know the appraisal was happening, and he wants to go month to month when the lease ends in late October, as he and his wife finally sold their house in Dallas and will soon be looking for a house to buy locally. We’ll be sorry to see him go, as you couldn’t ask for a more perfect tenant. I went inside with the appraiser and it honestly looks unoccupied and spotlessly clean as it is now. He just needed a temporary, short-term place to live, so there’s like one chair, a table, bed, couch and TV in the house, and absolutely nothing else.
Sucks to lose him as a tenant, but we’ll probably bump the rent up when he leaves, as the house rented almost immediately when we put a sign in the yard and no one balked at all at the price. If we bump it up to $900/month, with the refinance it’ll be cash-flowing about $325/month after PITI, which isn’t too bad. Can’t say this was my plan for House #1, but its far from the worst spot in the world to be in.
We’re also charging ahead with renovations and improvements at our principal residence, with the new garage 95% done, and a good chunk of the interior painting and re-arranging out of the way. We’d been using the den as an office but I finally bit the bullet and shifted all the office stuff to one of the spare bedrooms (after painting and adding crown molding/trim to the bedroom-soon-to-be-office), so that we can add French doors to the den, leading out to a new deck in the backyard.
It’s actually a little harder for me to motivate to get stuff done on our house as opposed to when working on flip projects, as there’s not the same pressing need or potential payoff, but it does feel good to get our house into shape, completely crossing off entire rooms, etc. We’ve got a pretty nice chunk of equity in the house and aren’t opposed to the idea of selling it to move to the next potential fixer-upper, so the closer we can get to it being in condition to immediately list, the better.
