Wednesday, October 22, 2008

$300 here, $1k there

Today I got an email from my property manager saying that there was a leak in the basement shower of one of the houses...apparently that was fixed a while ago.  But the drywall was never repaired.  So it just cost me $300 to get the drwall repaired.  And the crappy shower that was in the house when we got there now apparently has gotten crappier, so we have to replace it.  It's gonna cost me $1000 for a vinyl shower plus installation.  I want to put in a tile shower, but he says that will cost me $3000.  :( 
I should have replaced the shower when we first bought it, but my wallet was getting sore after I replaced all the pipes and electrical.  Oh well.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Finishing the story

I apologize for not finishing the story.  We got the roof put on, and Kevin got the property rented to a family from North Carolina for $1900/month.  They wanted to rent it starting October 1, which is a little later than I hoped, but strangely enough coincident with the date of my first mortgage payment.  Kevin got the first $950 as his 1/2 month (well, he had to split it with Phillips Real Estate, his company).  So at least I had some income to go with my first mortgage payment.
As I mentioned before, this house is a 4 bed/1 bath.  This is not the optimal configuration.  We're going to ask the renters (once they move in) if they'd like for us to add a second bath in the basement and raise the rent.  We'd like to spend <$5000 and raise the rent $200 so that we can recoup the cost in around two years ($200x24 = $4800) and then we get the incremental income.

We also got the house on Corliss Ave rented starting 9/15, so we ate 2 weeks of vacancy in which we had to paint the house and clean up the yard.  This ends up being a quite expensive month, since the yard and paint was about $1k, plus about $900 lost due to the vacancy.  All this adds up! 

One additional note:  I ran into a friend the other day and he asked me how the economy and housing market is affecting my houses (he calls me a land baron).  It turns out it's affecting my stock portfolio significantly more painfully.  Houses are down nominally about 5- 7% in Seattle, while my stocks are down 30+% from peak.  Of course if I actually tried to sell my house, it would probably be significantly worse than the 5-7%.