Paint or no paint for new rental?

[Jessica G.]

We have a property we acquired subject-to existing financing, so we didn't pay much for the purchase. The plan all along has been to hold it and rent it out. It's in a great middle-income neighborhood in a popular, affluent suburb of Dallas. 

We are also considering flipping it to raise capital for our real-estate goals, but that seems kind of like killing the golden goose before it even has a chance to lay an egg.

Anyway, my question is this. The house is in pretty good shape, except some chipped paint, a fence that needs total replacement, some plumbing fixtures. The roof will need replacing in the next few years, but not necessarily today. The landscaping is overgrown and some of it is dead, but I think I can handle that myself? Maybe? We already paid a couple hundred dollars to have a huge dead tree removed from the front yard.

A nice-quality fence (spruce, metal posts) will cost about $2,000 and the plumbing stuff will cost about $500.

We got a quote to paint the whole house while we were thinking about flipping it -- interior paint, trim, scraping, retexturing, and painting the popcorn ceilings, and exterior painting, for about $3,500. 

The paint is in OK shape except for an 8-inch hole in the living room drywall, and some chipping around the window sill where the seller had taped giant plastic sheets (???). The old paint is still in the garage, so I could make those repairs myself, but I know it wouldn't look nearly as nice as a professional repainting job.

The kitchen/dining is painted a horrible BLOOD RED color. And in the kitchen, it's obvious the previous owners painted over wallpaper. There is no texture on the walls and doesn't look good. The hall bath is painted a deep maroon that doesn't look much better. The rest of the house is an inoffensive dark tan.

The floors are OK, but obviously just cheap laminate, basic white tile, and carpet. There is a bit of separating between the boards in the high-traffic areas.

I wasn't too worried about making the house look 100% amazing until I saw this rental listing posted yesterday.

This is our competition: Same subdivision, same house plan, same square footage. They are actually charging a bit less in rent than I wanted to charge. The only things better about our house are a really nice covered deck, a new fence to come, and we are situated on a big corner lot.

So considering that we are already going to have to spend $2,500 for a fence and bathroom stuff, what would you do about the painting? We are just getting started and don't have a ton of capital, and instead of spending what we do have, I want to try to build up that account. But I also want to attract a nice tenant and charge market rent.

Some of the landscaping. There's a lot of dead stuff under some of the bushes.

One view of the blood-red dining room.

Fence that needs total replacement (all the posts are rotted).

Another view of the blood-red kitchen. If you make the picture bigger, you can see that the paint all got chipped away when I pulled the tape off the plastic sheet he had covering the window.