House #2, accepted offer

[Carl C.]

At the risk of counting my chickens before they hatch, I just had an offer accepted on our second SFR yesterday. Our initial offer was presented in October so this was a long and at times exhausting process. I'll get more into that with some lessons learned as paperwork gets finalized in the coming weeks.

As far as work goes, this house is in very nice shape. Extremely well kept. The current owner is 70 and he was born in the house. He takes great pride in his property. There are two big projects. #1 is asbestos removal from heating pipes in the basement. That absolutely MUST be removed properly before anyone gets in there. #2 is converting the dining room into bedroom 4. This is fairly simple. We will be hanging a door where there used to be one. The dining room was a bedroom years ago, so relatively easy conversion. 4th bedroom is critical as we will be renting to college students and 4 bedrooms are the most popular in the area. We may convert the furnace to natural gas from oil. That's yet to be seen. We will see what else pops up in the inspection, but I couldn't find anything else this house needs. It's in excellent shape.

As for numbers, I don't want to go into too much detail yet (trying not to count those chickens) but the asking price was 210, They accepted 182. Expect to rent for 2600. More details in the coming weeks.

[Carl C.]

Update: We finally closed on the house on Friday..... sort of. The closing ended up being described by everyone at the table as "the worst closing I have ever attended". It was exhausting. In the end it took 5 hours to get it done, there was a bank lawyer who was 3 hours late, incorrect docs from the bank, yelling by everyone, crying sellers, getting kicked out of the seller's attorney's office, an attorney who still used a type writer, a wonderful title rep who canceled her dinner plans and had us shift the closing to her dining room (sans sellers), final check exchange on Monday, and pizza. Oh and did I mention the sellers attorney isn't a real estate attorney? 

If this was my first deal, I might never buy a house again. Holy moley. The house is now ours but the sellers are staying until the weekend to have time to move their stuff out. They close on their new house today so fingers crossed that it all goes well. As far as work goes, I have three doors I need to install then this house is ready to go. It needs nothing unlike our first place that needed everything. 

We will be putting it up for rent immediately but since we rent to college kids I don't expect that we will have tenants for the upcoming semester. In the meantime my parents will be moving in while they renovate their house. With any luck we will get renters for the second semester. I'll keep you all posted how that goes.