New Members in Cincinnati, OH

[Aubrey Page]

My husband and I just bought a property last week in the North Avondale area.  It is a quadplex in a low-income area.  We have met several neighbors who have been very welcoming.  We are excited to become a bigger part of the community.  We live much farther north of the city in the suburbs, so we like the closeness of the city.

My husband has been trying to talk me into getting into REI for years, but it always made me so nervous. I listened to Marcia Maynard's podcast about being a landlord with integrity and it really opened my mind. Many of the career-fields I have been in are built to favor men and don't have a lot of focus on ethics. Marcia's talk showed me my ability to set my own ground rules for how we interact with our tenants.

I was still nervous about dropping a lot of money after purchasing our first house in March 2015. So we looked for low-income properties. We searched for about a year for the right deal. We found a property that had great cash flow (better than the stock market!) and we could ROI in less than 5 years even at a 75% occupancy (we hope to do better!). It was a manageable mortgage financially on top of our own and we finally got a credit union to agree to give us a 15y 25% down mortgage.

Now that we have closed and we actually owned it, we are working on a lot of things to set us up to have tenants before the first mortgage note is due in December.

- Hiring responsible contractors
- Screening tenants well (2 requests for information already!)
- Legal boundaries (security cameras in common spaces, renting out garages - per zoning, required code updates)
- Balancing fixing it up *too* much for our rental market
- Transferring our mortgage to an LLC (credit union wouldn't allow it initially - looking into whether we have a due on sale clause)
- General asset protection

I will post a more specific tenant screening question in another post, but that is us.  I am primarily handling the property.  My husband works full-time and I do not so I am fixing up the house, finding replacement parts, and coordinating contractors.  He comes at night to move heavy things and rewire things for me.  We are excited to get beyond this hurdle of initial repairs and get into tenant management.  We know low-income properties can be tough, but we hope to provide safe housing for people who are truly looking for that in their price point.