Buying 50+ years old houses for buy and hold

[Mary Jay]

I have an old house (built in 1920) and two homes built in 1998 and 2003 (I think)

Never had any issues with any houses. I did have to put a new roof on an old house though because I was worried it may start leaking, and it cost me 2K...

Other than that no problems.

But, despite my good luck with my "old-ie" I have always been scared to buy old houses (By old I mean 50+ years old).

I thought I should focus on buy and holds that are less than 30 years old and cost around 100K and rent for 800$-1K...

But lately Ive been seeing a lot of people doing 30-50K older houses and rent them for 500-700$

1) What do you guys think? What is better?

2) Someone I know buys 30K houses and redoes plumbing, electrical, etc which will be another 20-30K and then he rents them for 700$...My concern is, when you buy a house that is that old, it is probably possible that the rehab may be around 100K, not 20-30K....Even if a house does require 20-30K rehab such as electrical, plumbing, etc, what are the chances that structurally its good and sound? Plus foundation....I don;t know...

What are your thoughts?

[Shiloh Lundahl]

@Mary Jay I buy houses where the financial numbers make sense. Those numbers are more important to me than the age of the home. We have had to replace roofs and plumbing but we just factor that into the rehab numbers. 

For us, the foundation of the home hasn’t had as much to do with the age of the home. Some newer built houses have had issues with the the foundation whereas some really old homes have had no issues with the foundation. It just depends on the specific house and the ground it was built on. In some cases, some of the older homes have been built better than some of the tract homes that have used cheep materials. So I don’t know if I would get as stuck on the age of the house (it can come into factor in Athens appraisal though). I would just encourage you to get a plumbing and roof inspection before the inspection period is up when you are buying.