Springtime must make people a little stir crazy for change. We have three of our four rentals with people who have either moved out or are planning on moving out. One of them was just abandoned…again. Another we were told what was going on and they are going to pay rent until we find someone else and the third had his lease come up and gave notice that he is planning on moving. And the fourth house we had someone else move-in with the current tenant! Everyone is moving this year, it seems. Even we feel the pull to move to Puerto Rico!

So…we were going to be putting all our rental properties eventually under a management company anyway before we move to Puerto Rico and figured that this is as good a time as ever to make some of these changes. Our own sort of stir-craziness.

On one of our properties Britton wanted to see how much we could get if we sold it. Last year we thought about selling one in Evans, but the price didn’t make sense; we would actually lose money. But we talked with our real estate agent on this one and she said we definitely had a spread for some profit. So we decided to list it. So far it’s been going pretty good. We have had quite a few people come over for showings. I am a little ambivalent about selling it as it was our first ever house that we owned outright, it’s a very sweet cute house, and we were making pretty good income on it. But I also understand that the cash infusion could really help us in our savings goals. Britton would like to sell just to sort of “clear the slate” and have one less thing to worry about here in Colorado. It was with this one that we really got stressed out over last summer.

Our house that’s for sale

My investment strategy has always been income, with very little emphasis on growth/appreciation, so that is why I really have to just go with the flow on selling one of our “golden gooses” even if it we can make a decent lump sum. It’s hard to want to let it go. We also have never gone through the process of selling a house so this is all a big experience either way (we’ve bought plenty, just never tried to sell anything). We are planning on keeping it on the market for a few weeks and seeing if we get any offers. If we don’t get any by the end of April or early May, we may just rent it out again under a management company with the other two.

We are excited to see how a management company will go and if it will ease some of the stress that occurs mainly when there is tenant turnover. Plus they have all the tools we don’t when it comes to leases, contracts, complaints, evictions, legal matters, etc. I am glad we have  a year to test all of these unknowns out too that way we can adjust and make changes as they come along.

In the meantime we have been interviewing management companies, cleaning, staging and painting houses and signing contracts. It’s a busy time, but I think all this front-end work will pay dividends when we are living down in PR.