Enjoying the small victories

[Joseph Shevy]

Hey Everyone,

Just wanted to share a little success story, because of how happy I am with the way things turned out. 

My wife and I both just turned 25, and have owned two 2-family properties for a little over a year now. ( One FHA house hack + one seller finance score!).

So, everything has been going great with the properties, there haven't been any major issues so far, (just a couple hot water heaters, door/window replacements, and a few other things that all went smooth. Things were going almost too well it seemed, until one of my tenants handed me a 30 day notice. I was a little nervous about getting this apartment filled since its getting close to winter months and ive never actually turned over a vacancy before. 

Because of my research when buying the property + my research on the website + a little real estate savviness (I like to think), i was able to do more than just fill the vacancy. 

When we bought this property, we knew the rents were under FMV when looking at the comps. This was a big reason we bought the house, because the numbers worked AS IS. So, when my downstairs tenant moved out, I was thinking of advertising the apartment for $25-50 higher, but instead, our upstairs tenant wanted to move downstairs to the bigger apartment for a $25 increase in rent.

That left my upstairs apartment vacant. I then held an open house (my first ever) and had a few people come by and fill out applications for the upstairs apartment.. also at a $25 increase in rent! And, the same day, we picked a new tenant that agreed to our rent, and moved in only 2 weeks after the vacancy. 

All in all, I turned over two units, each with a $25 increase in rent (increasing cashflow by $600/yr), and only lost 2 weeks of rent income! Not bad for a first time turning over a unit! 

All it takes is doing your research and being confident in what you do. 

Thanks,

Joe