First buy and hold purchase

[Adam Stanton]

Got my first rental

[Adam Stanton]

Hit wrong button

Anyway, got my first rental off and running.  Bought a small 3/1 for 55k in mid October in Richmond Va.  Place is in great condition.  I started marketing for renters a week before closing.  I quickly learned it's best to be as frictionless as possible when looking for renters.  I made the process too difficult at first and probably scared away a few reasonable tenants.  I also learned that people respond much more quickly to text message as opposed to email and phone.  However, I still had a few applicants pull no-shows, and I live an hour from the house.  Looking forward to writing off all those trips.  

I used rocket lease for application screening.  I liked the simplicity of it.  I use spark rent for monthly rent.  I started at $875/m which turned out to be a bit high.  I dropped to 825 and got lots of responses.  There was a random week where nothing came in, still not sure why.  I finally rented it 10 days after closing for 815/m to a quality tenant.  They passed all the background checks, income verifications and I just got a good gut feeling about them.    

Big thanks to @Brian Rhodes for his quality counsel.  Your carpet guy was awesome by the way.

Now that I have this deal under my belt my next goal is to purchase another rental without using MLS, because thats just too time consuming. And to do it without using my own funds for down payment. At least not 20%.