Bought our first Rental Property

[Kwame Searcy]

Hey Everyone,

I haven't posted on the forum in a while because we were busy buying our first income property. It took a lot of prayer and a lot of planning. I spent hours on BP looking up various things in order to answer my questions. 

Our plan was to buy and hold on the West side of Detroit. My wife is from there, and we still have family in that area. We currently live in Virginia but as many know in Northern Virginia housing prices are extremely high. We had been looking for a property since July. We found an agent (family friend, which was a bad idea) and had our agent and some family member go look at properties for us, they would glide us videos of the properties so we could see them. We found a house that we liked in our price range and put an offer in. The owner accepted and we moved on to the inspection. The inspection revealed that the property needed a new roof and the basement walls had bowed in due to runoff from the neighbors driveway. We requested that the issues be fixed or that the price be reduced. The owner didn't agree and we were back to square one.

Around late August we found another place and out an offer in. The owner accepted and we were set to go. This process would soon cause more headaches than we thought. We decided to get a 30yr fixed for the property to purchase the property. This caused problems because during the prequalifying process the lender said our loan amount should be fine, but 2 weeks before closing she informed us that it was a high cost loan and they could not write it for 20% down. Eventually we decided to go with 25% down and that seemed to fix that issue. The week of closing we had already planned to be back in Michigan for other engagements and were all set. Unfortunately two days before the lender said they would not give a clear to close because they wanted to get an HVAC inspection. We had to set that up the following week but that also meant we would have to go back to Michigan for closing. I didn't have enough sick days to pull this off so we went with a remote closing with a title company in Virginia.

We finally closed on the house in Mid October. After closing we had our contact go visit the house ytoo see what condition it was in. To our surprise all the appliances were gone. We called our agent to find out what happened and he told us he would get back to us. When he called back he told us that the owner took them as they did not convey. Now during negotiations we had agreed to convey all appliances verbally. Turns out after not reading the fine print, the housing conditions form we signed didn't show any conveyed appliances. It felt like a punch to the gut, I was upset with myself for not doing my due diligence before we signed. To make matters worse when we found out we had a tenant moving in the next week. Again with the help of prayer and awesome family members back home we were able to find some appliances before our tenants occupied the place.

Now we are on to our next great adventure of buying a house in NOVA (closing next Monday) and house hacking. Its a 4 bedroom townhouse with three rooms upstairs and a room in the basement. We will rent our room out through Airbnb to help pay the mortgage.

Well that's our story for our first income property. Full of twists and turns.