New and Green from Madison, Wisconsin

[Tanya F.]

Hi BPs,

Thanks for all of the great information on this site! I wish I'd found this site sooner. I recently found you guys through some forum posts on Mrmoneymustache.com, and I found MMM through the Chronicle of Higher Education, in fact.

We've owned a pair of two-flats for over 10 years now in the Madison area, and we also own a single family house in Eau Claire (where we lived for a couple of years). We've learned a lot through our own experience, and now are starting to help others by sharing what we've learned. Our main retirement investment is these properties. We're both in our early 50's, and one of the properties has a 15 year mortgage which will be paid off at the point that we'd like to be living off of it. We plan to sell the house in Eau Claire and either reinvest that in another property and/or use the cash to add some space onto the house we live in.

I have a day job as a university research scientist, but the income from that depends on grants and isn't so reliable from year to year. Therefore, we're working on making sure our rental properties are sustainable, in all senses of the word. Madison has a super low vacancy rate and we've been lucky, only a month of unplanned vacancy over the last 12 years. Our tenants love us, as a rule, and we enlisted the help of a local realtor to make sure our rents were up to the market value. We'd been undercharging for a few years, which explained some of the "love"... but they still appear to love us even with increased rent! ;-)

We and a handful of other landlords in Madison JUST started an association called the Green Apartment Network. I'm not promoting this yet (because it hardly exists yet!) - and I hope I'm not breaking any rules here on the intro page, but I joined BP because I'm looking for discussions from other rental property owners who have had success greening up their properties and finding the market sector of green-minded tenant who would most appreciate our efforts. Efforts could include new, efficient, appliances and mechanicals, improved insulation and weatherization, benchmarking utility usage, renewable energy, backyard garden space, bike parking, proximity to public transit, good walk scores... you name it! If you google Green Apartment Network you can see what limited organizing we've done so far.

So, that's who I am and who I'm looking to interact with here!