Selling one of my rentals with a huge gain!

[Mark Ferguson]

I posted about buying in another market a while back, well I am continuing on that path and have one of my rentals in Greeley under contract to sell. My plan is to sell three of my rentals here and refinance 7 others to take advantage of the incredible appreciation we have had. Most my rentals are single family homes, which makes them super easy to sell (at least right now)

Here are the numbers on what was my fifth rental.

• Bought to for about $88,000
• Put about $15,000 of work into it
• Had it rented to the same tenant for three years at $1,200 a month (that was low at the end) 
• The tenant was always late and a pain, but he always got caught back up and paid late fees
• After the tenant moved out we painted the exterior and that was it. The rest was in great shape. 
• Listed it for $199,900 and got in under contract in two days for close to list. 

I decided to sell this one, because it has a weird floor plan and was very hard to rent. Now I have to decide if I want to 1031 it, or just sell it and pay taxes. If I pay taxes the gain would be at 15 percent, which is not bad. If I 1031 it, I would be under pressure to replace it with 2 or 3 houses in Florida. I think I would be ahead paying the taxes and taking my time, because one great deal would make up for the taxes I would pay. My loan is about $66,000 and I would have a lot of cash to work with for more rentals. 

[Mark Ferguson]

Buying below market value helps as well.