Tag Archives: rental property

The Rental Plan

3 Replies


The House in Question

Well, we met with our real estate agent and the news wasn’t very good. She thought we could sell it for about $10,000 to 20,000 less than we paid for it. If we finished the basement she thought we could sell it for about what we bought it for. We estimate it needs about $5,000 to finish the basement. (The basement already has a finished bathroom and bedroom and is fully framed and wired.)

So…I think we are going to rent it out again for at least a year in which time we can slowly finish the basement and keep contributing equity to the outstanding mortgage. By this time next year we will have another $6,000 paid toward the house that doesn’t come from our pockets (hopefully that means equity). So even if we spend the $5000 to finish it we’ll come out ahead and we’d be able to either charge more in rent or sell it for more.

It’s not ideal, but for the timing of this (being right before we buy the place in Puerto Rico), I think it will have to be. We don’t want to have to shell out such a large sum in PR and have an empty rental that we are paying for and waiting to sell for a low amount on top of paying back the short term personal loans we got to buy the Rincon property.

We are ok with this. If our current tenant had wanted to stay we wouldn’t even be having this conversation and we’d let sleeping dogs lie. We thought if it played out right that this would be a good time to walk away and sell, but it just isn’t quite yet. So, that’s the plan, for now anyway. We hope to start showing it to prospective tenants this upcoming week and get them signed on the same week our current tenant moves out.

What do you think of this post?
  • WOW (0)
  • Awesome (0)
  • Interesting (0)
  • Useful (0)
  • Bummer (0)
  • Whoa (0)

Our Latest Projects

Leave a reply

We’ve been extremely busy these last few days. For one thing, we bought another rental which means lots of work. It is very similar to our last one, and at a great price. We’ve been doing a lot of work to it, and I will show the before and after pictures like I did with the last one when we are all done. But for now, here’s a preview:


Newest Rental Property

In addition to this huge demo/remodel project (mostly in the kitchen and bathroom), we are also coordinating the finishing of another rental’s basement. We have been working on that off and on now for about 3 years, so we figured it was about time to finish. We also have a paint job scheduled for the exterior of another one too! Really expensive to do this all at once, but it needs to get done sometime, so we figured while we have the time off, we might as well pull the trigger on them.

So Britton took the whole week off and I took off three days to do this. Some of it is hands on work, others it’s just calling and arranging for bids and quotes and meeting with contractors. In addition to these planned and expected projects, we also had a water heater we needed to replace in one rental and then our air conditioner at our house pooped out on us so we (Britton) had to fix that as well!

Overall, we have fun with these projects and I enjoy being busy. Usually with our rentals we hardly have to lift a finger, but I think it is because we are pretty pro-active property mangers and we treat each of them and the tenants the way we would want to be treated. If I could work doing stuff like this all the time without working for someone else I think it would be great! And it’s so rewarding to see the results of your efforts in tangible form. Plus we’ve had a chance to spend more time with our friends and family as a result.

I’ll update as these projects come along.

What do you think of this post?
  • WOW (0)
  • Awesome (0)
  • Interesting (0)
  • Useful (0)
  • Bummer (0)
  • Whoa (0)