Arrived in Norfolk with a thud

[Corey Chonsky]

Hey everyone,

I wrote my introduction post a little over a month ago about my goal of really starting to invest in real estate after I transferred from Rhode Island to Norfolk, VA. Unfortunately, my arrival to the Hampton Roads area was less than perfect and had me pretty discouraged.

After my lender (NFCU) blew past my original closing date of July 29th due to not scheduling the VA appraisal in an appropriate amount of time, I thought that we were going to be able to recover and still be able to close on our primary residence and conduct a door to door delivery of our house hold goods.

We were set to close on our house (second attempt) on the morning of August 3rd and then our household goods were set to arrive in the afternoon of the same day. For those of you in the military, you may have delt with the struggles of living in an empty house for several days just waiting for your stuff to arrive. Needlessly to say, it's pretty terrible. 

Anyway, as you could probably guess we were not able to close on the 3rd because the appraisal was not complete. So I had to call the storage company and reschedule for the next available time which was August 13th. By the way, no hotels were available in the area because of the AAU junior Olympics going on in the area. So we were facing over a week in a completely empty house with a one year old. 

However, that's when our luck started to change. The next day we were told that the VA appraisal came in with no deficiencies and above what we were paying for our house. The following day (closing day) we received a phone call from the moving company to tell us that they had a cancellation and would be able to deliver our goods on August 6th. Everything went pretty smooth with our closing and moving our stuff in.

We were feeling pretty good, so we went and looked at some SFR's in good rental areas near by. We found two properties that we like and put in offers. We just got word today that one of our offers were accepted.

We are getting a 3 bedroom, 1.5 bath SFR that's about 1000 sq ft. We got it for $75500 looking to do about $8000-10000 worth of rehab and rent it for about $1050. We are hoping to turn the property around in about two weeks after closing. Still waiting on the second offer.

Overall, we are in a way better state of mind then we were last week and hopefully things keep going our way.