All Forum Posts by: JT Spangler

Unfortunately, I don't know that there's an easy way to do this without the MLS. I personally have an agent I'm really close with who will send me lists of sold properties in an area I specify so I can do that.

But if you're just looking to get an idea of the market sales, just pick a house and manually look up the sale price from the assessor's website. Or pick a handful of them and use one of the online resources. They'll be close, but with variation.

 It's an excellent question. Short answer: it wasn't in the budget.

Long answer: I'm hoping to acquire the property next door to this one in the next 3-5 years, at which point I'll probably sell the whole parcel to a developer who'll bulldoze and build new construction here, so I did the rehab with as little cash and effort as I could. If I wasn't looking at that five year exit strategy, this would've been a gut job and I'd have spent 12k-15k on it instead of 5k.

I lived in LA for 3 years, and I don't truthfully understand how anyone could invest there at the numbers you're talking about. 

If you have 20k-40k to put down, you could buy a nice MFR in a 2% market, have it managed, and be earning a solid cashflow from that. Eventually, your cashflow will be enough to cover your rent wherever you want to reside, in LA or elsewhere.

I get 1% on both of my rentals in East Nashville, but I can't imagine getting 2% here. Maybe if I snagged an amazing deal at a foreclosure auction or tax sale, but I think even those are all locked up now by the hedge funds.

I remodeled this 1940s cottage almost completely. New paint everywhere, new light fixtures, two new bathrooms (new vanities, lights, fixtures minus the toilets), a totally new kitchen (new sink, countertop, backsplash, appliances, new front door, new GFCI outlets in every room, new supply plumbing throughout (a few new drain lines as well) and a new ceiling in the master bathroom.

I hired out the repipe, the backsplash, and the painting, and did the rest (and fifty small things I didn't mention) myself. 

I've been working ten hour days since the middle of December, minus three days off for Christmas and a week in Mexico over New Years. So, about 20-25 days of my life on this rehab. 

I priced it aggressively, and I've gotten multiple applications at the full price before I've even posted the listing on craigslist/postlets/facebook. I'm really hoping the first one checks out, since it's a single person with a nice job.

[pics forthcoming once I have them in my possession]

Solar panels make zero sense for the average American homeowner. High cost of entry, long payback, complicated additional system that most tradespeople and handymen can't (or shouldn't) work on. 

If you want to make solar panels work, you should first work on reducing your consumption by 70%. Get your electric bill down to 30% of what it normally is and keep it there for a few months, and now you are at a place where a solar installation might make sense. 

Exception: if you own a small, energy efficient house with propane/LP appliances, AND you already have an electric bill of less than $50/month, AND you live in a state with significant tax benefits for the purchase and installation.

Truthfully, you're probably best just getting out of it. Live where you want to live, and then buy something else if and when you're empty nesters. If you want to diversify and include real estate in your investment mix, perhaps consider a REIT or some other index fund?

Landlording isn't for the faint of heart, and those numbers mean you're going to be doing work you don't enjoy at the cost of several hundred dollars a month (on average) for the possibility that you might want to reoccupy it in 15+ years.

You might want to do some reading around the site before jumping in. With the numbers you posted, that property is an awful rental that loses money every month. The equation for a landlord is not Rent - Mortage = Profit!

I think North Nashville is definitely a good appreciation play/buy and hold area. It's bound by the river to the north, downtown to the south, and germantown on one side and sylvan park on the other. It's going to be forced to gentrify if Nashville keeps swelling with people coming in (which I have no reason to think that it won't).

I haven't dealt with the church thing yet, but I don't think it would bother me. Personally, I would like it if my house was really near a church, because (as a musician) it would mean ample parking for my gatherings/studio sessions/webshows.

Where it is? North Nashville? I own two properties in East Nashville but am looking more and more to North Nashville and Antioch to try and buy before the areas start really transitioning.