About That Rental Property

Completist readers of Ridinkulous will remember when I dashed off an entry about a rental property we were suddenly going to see the next day. So I’d thought I should give you an update on that and where we are now.

That rental property wasn’t a complete bust, but we decided it wasn’t for us. After seeing it in person, Marge and I each secretly wrote down a number from 1 to 10 to indicate our level of interest in it without discussing it beforehand.  I wrote down 5, and Marge wrote 3.5.

The house purports to be built in 1890, 30 years after our house was built, but there were so many similarities to our own house, I doubt 1890 is correct. Doorways were in different places and rooms were different shapes, but you could tell, this house was the same design. I knew our house had a doorway into the living room from the foyer at one point because you can kind of see the shape in the plaster. This rental property still had that doorway! We nerd out about old house stuff, so it was interesting to see some original layout details.

We have basically decided we have more money than time. There are lots of things I can do to improve a given house, and some things I can pay to upgrade, but once those things start numbering more and more, I just don’t know how we’d find the time. This house wasn’t in terrible shape, but it was enough that it would take a long time to take care of the needs (replacing a big janky covered staircase in the back, skim-coating or replacing plaster walls, getting the rear exit up to code, cleaning up the basement and replacing boilers) let alone the wants (replacing wood paneled walls and tearing out the drop ceilings everywhere).

Seriously, I KNOW one room’s ceiling is two feet taller than it appears because, in our house, it’s our bedroom. The drop ceiling is completely covering a circular window on the side of the house. What were 70s people thinking? Damn you, Peggy!

Oh, also, it used to be a funeral home up until 1962. Weird, right? We decided this wasn’t creepy on its own. If a murder happened in the house, that’d be creepy. But dead bodies just coming through? Not creepy. Still, the only way to enter the basement of the house was from the outside, and instead of stairs, there’s a very steep concrete ramp. Guess that’s how they got the bodies down there!

We decided that, even if the price came way down, it would just be too much work to make it something we’d be proud of. Meanwhile, we got the house hunting bug and started looking all over that night for other rental properties.  Later, we got realtor-ed up, went to look at a bunch more rentals, and are just now putting in an offer on one!

We are pretty much doing the opposite of what you’re supposed to do, which is buy the worst house on the best block, by buying probably the most fixed up house on the block. We visited probably over a dozen rental properties and kept running into problems like outdated fixtures, old furnaces and water heaters that would have to be replaced, weird moist basements. Nothing that would make a house uninhabitable, but lots of things I knew we would have to fix now or soon.  And since time seems to be in incredibly short supply these days, I was seeing fixes that would either take us months to DIY, or that would cost us much by hiring out.

So we are putting in an offer on a place we can rent out immediately and get that cash flow going. Marge especially fell in love with this place. It has two apartments with the possibility to add a third in the gigantic attic. The apartments are 1,300 square feet each I think, and it’s very near the elementary school, so we would probably be looking for families. It would be no problem at all to get renters for this place. And since everything is new and nothing seems to be in disrepair, we wouldn’t have to think about that stuff. But getting all those upgrades come with a price. The asking price is $150,000. The monthly rent is, supposedly, $2,000 total. $1,200 for one apartment, $800 for the other, but we would have to see how that shakes out in reality. We are putting in an offer of $125,000 since that is more in line with the neighborhood. We’ll see.

In blog-related news

I received my first bizarre, targeted marketing request. In that entry about the first rental property we looked at, I had mentioned that we were searching for rental properties by using a popular home search website. I got an email from the company asking for me to insert a link in the post to their homepage, since I had only referenced them by name, without putting in a hyperlink! How dare I!

I’m not sure how much of a real person was involved in sending the email, and how much it was purely bot-driven. I’m sure this happens all the time to more popular bloggers.  Well, needless to say, I went back to the offending entry and… deleted any reference to the company whatsoever. I’m pretty insulted that some corporate jack-off thinks I’m going to go back and give them a hyperlink. This isn’t some small company. If they want advertising, they can go buy it somewhere else. They should’ve been happy that I even mentioned them by name in the first place.  It was gross.  So I had to waste my time reading and deleting the stupid email, and they lost a name-check on the internet’s #1 coolest personal finance blog.  I’ll still use the website, but I won’t be mentioning them by name again.

Any company that gets a mention on this blog should feel blessed that I deign them worthy of even mentioning. Don’t push it and ask for more.

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