Early research for my primary residence/ occasional rental pt2

I'll admit I didn't do as much research for my Florida house as I did for my primary residence. But I kept the search to areas I was vaguely familiar with.

Use of the web

The web. The wonderful internet is how I came to own an investment property. I had already been a landlady by renting out an extra room in my home to a variety of people and learned some lessons and made some extra money by doing that. So I took it to the next level when buying a property in Central Florida just seemed too obvious,

I was fooling around online in 2009 when I came across a shack of a house in walking distance of my parents house for $8000. Eight thousand I thought, heck I could write a check for that. Then it occurred to me that I could write a check and buy a house with the money I had in my checking and savings account.

Use of Human Capital

My parents, mainly my mother. My dad owns his own business, which is him, tearing down stuff and riding large noise-making vehicles. My mother was semi-working/retired in a nursing home. When I was a kid they tried their hand at landlording and failed, horribly.

I asked my mother to drive by the $8000 house. She did and gave me the history of the place because my parents know a lot of people and a lot of people in the community in Ocala know my parents, and they lived there for 40+ years. So there is a lot of social capital. What she told me about the immediate neighborhood, the house's history and it's structural condition was enough that made the $8000 house not worth it.

Back to the web

The bug had bitten, and I had it in my head to buy a property in Ocala. So I was still fooling around on the web and decided to blindly reach out to a few Realtors online. One got back to me and we began a correspondence. He was willing to work with my mother who would look at houses for me.

Bob the Realtor would email me a list of houses that he and my mother and sometimes another relative would look at. These were mainly foreclosures and other places that had been languishing on the market since the Florida housing market crashed in 2008. It didn't help that my price range was $30K. But a jewel was found. It didn't reek of mold, it wasn't a mobile home pretending to be a house, it still had most of its appliances, and it was close enough for my parents to keep an eye on. It was $33,000 and I paid cash for it.

I like paying cash. It is so much fun not having to deal with a bank, unless it is the bank selling you the house. I also wanted to freedom to just let the house sit. The valuable lesson I learned from renting out my extra bedroom is one should be free to wait for the right tenant, and not be in a rush. After it became mine I had to fix somethings, like upgrade the electrical box, get the gas turned on (strangely harder than you'd think), replace some doors and clean up a minor vandalism incident that happened sometime after closing. That took a month and my mother met with and sorta dealt with the trades people. I came down to Florida to deal with some other utilities issues.

Buying online

The title, the insurance, buying the dang thingy  did not require me to be in Florida. I was able to do it mainly in DC. Looking back at my old emails, yeah, I wasn't there. I either did things on-line by FedEx or had my mother do it for me. She picked up the keys. She met with the electrician. I have a lot of emails between me and the title insurance people, and me and my Realtor's office, during the days I bought the house.

Renting

Here is where I have to be a bit vague for the privacy of the renter. I bought in late August and filled it in October. The renter and their family are people I and my parents know. I began more enamored with owning land than making money and rent the first year was very charitable. Between insurance which was $800 and property taxes, I broke even. But every year after that I kept raising the rents until the renter started paying really late. 

I intend to sell this place in a few years and use the money to buy a better investment property, one either closer to me or with professional property managers who are not my parents. I love my mother, but she is not a great property manager.

The Future

I intend to dust off the old research skills, I used for my DC home to look at properties in other urban areas. What will I take from my Florida experience? Well a big list of what not to do, along with things I loved about the process and owning.

I've already had one little walkabout in Baltimore and plan a few more. I use the internet, not just to look at what's on the MLS but use Google Street view to take a virtual walk around the block, and Timecapsule to take that same walk in 2007. At some point I will make a spreadsheet when I hone in on one or two neighborhoods and get hyper-local with my knowledge to determine where the trend, if any, is going. I will learn here at BP and learn about the quirks of renting in that particular city (yes, I know about ground rents and historic districts all over the dang place). And I', gonna make another map, to map out the vibes.