Buy and Hold in Bridgeport, CT is cash flowing.

[Peter Silvestry]

Well, there sure are a lot of success stories on here that eclipse mine.  I am still happy with my first deal, considering I knew nothing at all about Real Estate when I got into it.  I bought this place in Bridgeport, CT.  It's a two family home that was all refurbished.  The reason I chose Bridgeport is because I'm from the Bronx and property values run much higher to the point where it was impossible for me to buy something there.  So I went and looked at this place in CT and was in love with the character since it is a hundred year old house and most of the original moldings are intact.  The space is tremendous compared to a similarly priced house in NYC.  I bought the house with my wife so we made an offer on the house and we went into contract.  This is where the fun begins.

A couple weeks after we signed the contracts I get a call from the loan underwriter because they discovered that the owner died before actually signing the contract! (Whaaaaaat?) After a couple of days of alarm, this was ironed out. The owner had the ownership of his properties rolled over into another LLC which had the power to sign the document and that was that.

So be closed on the house!!  Great!!  Now what?  Now we have to find some good tenants......well first we fixed the finish in the basement in this place.  A two months and $9,000 dollars later it was done.

We get a nice family living in the second unit, and they break our lease after two months.  The good thing was that because we had them in there, they used the bathrooms and stuff and we were able to see that there were very BAD leaks in some of the plumbing that needed to be addressed and we still have some remnants of that to this day.  It is under control though.

We knew going into the house that we needed to get a house meter for electric.  So we get our contractor and permits and everything and get going on that project which was quoted at $3,600 and to be finished in two weeks.  => In comes the inspector.  Long story short, about 3.5 months and like $20,000.00 later the service is approved.  From installing a house meter I ended up re-doing the entire electrical system in the whole basement.  The inspector came back 3 times and each time he dug deeper in and found more violations.  Fun times.

At this point we get a nice family in unit 1.  I think I paid the mortgage out of pocket about 3 months and I had the house for 8 months.  The other 5 months I had MOST of the note paid from the rent.  Unit 2 gets rented out to students. 

Some monies owed from electrical work gets paid, some credit debts from fixing the house get paid and now it's a year after closing.  <= I refer to this as the "Year Of Hell" (but I guess it wasn't so bad.)

The house now cash flows about a nice amount of profit per month now that all the dust has settled.  It's not easy in Bridgeport, but it can be done.