All Forum Posts by: Jessica G.

@Brian Mathews

@Joseph Weisenbloom

@Jerry W.

Thanks everyone for the input. Here is a recently sold comp, a clone of his property one block over (except with converted garage). My acquaintance's appliances are 8 years old and he added solar screens to the windows. I don't know if he has the same countertops. This comp sold in December; DFW and Dallas-area housing prices have only gotten crazier since then. This is a really affluent suburb about halfway between Richardson and McKinney.

http://www.redfin.com/TX/Allen/1400-Flameleaf-Dr-75002/home/32025983

I don't know much about wholesaling. I guess I will go post in that forum too.

It's actually in Allen. I don't think I could buy it myself right now but I could try wholesaling it. How low do you think the price would have to be to attract an investor if the ARV were around $135k?

I have made the acquaintance of a homeowner who wonders if there is a way to responsibly get out of his home without cleaning it, making repairs, selling his belongings, etc.

He owes $114K; he says homes in his neighborhood sell for $130-$140K. It is in an excellent school district and would probably rent for $1500.

The home is full of "stuff" that he doesn't want anymore, but he says that if someone took the time to sell everything on craigslist, it would be worth several thousand dollars. (Audio visual equipment, expensive bed, appliances, etc.) There is a dead tree that needs removing and he said the attic needs insulating because the A/C can't handle Texas summers right now.

Is this something an investor would be interested in? I know the numbers don't make sense as a flip, but is it a good buy and hold deal? Would investors want to deal with a houseful of personal belongings?

Hello all!

I'm trying to figure out how investors are not a hassle for RE agents.

My husband and I own one investment property along with the home we live in. We are planning to do cash-out refinances, but before we approach the bank, we would like to get CMAs done on the properties to get a ballpark figure of our equity. I can sort of figure it out myself on Redfin, but I worry my emotional attachment to the houses makes me overvalue them.

We are totally willing to get appraisals, but they cost $400 each and we'll have to pay for that anyway as part of the refinancing. We don't want to start the refinancing wheels turning without being reasonably sure we have enough equity to cash out. I've had a drive-by appraisal done before, and it cost $300 and seemed to be nothing more than a paid-for CMA.

We might sell the investment property this spring, but we are leaning 90 percent toward keeping it. In this scenario, would an agent be willing to run these comps for me? Isn't it a poor use of his/her time and energy if I am not doing any immediate buying or selling?

Additionally, we plan to buy another investment property this year (probably in the fall or winter). But I imagine it will involve a lot of driving all over creation to look at a bunch of properties that won't work, then when we do find one, it won't exactly be a high-dollar transaction. Again, is this a good use of an agent's time/energy?

We do plan to increase our holdings over time, but it will be a slow process. We might try to buy two in 2015, etc.

Over our eight years of home ownership, we have used three agents. Two I liked (one traditional agent and one flat/reduced fee agent) and one was horrible. I wouldn't mind using either of the first two again, but they are established, full-time agents and I don't want to waste their time (or anyone else's, of course).

What are your thoughts? (I am NOT soliciting an agent here. Just asking for investors' and agents' thoughts.)

Hi folks! Well, the foundation warranty guys came out and said 15 piers under the house will be adjusted for free, the house is 100% habitable and the fixes won't inconvenience the tenants, and the problem likely stems from a plumbing leak (sigh). I'm also going to blame the years-long drought we've been suffering from.

I am so surprised that so many people jumped to the conclusion that the house is dangerous or uninhabitable. Foundation issues are a chronic fact of life in D/FW, and I've never heard of a local house being "red-tagged" for that issue before.

On a philosophical note, my husband and I JUST made the decision to become intentional landlords and begin handling the management ourselves and investing in more properties, then we get this call. Is it a sign? <-- Don't worry, (mostly) kidding. Although I hope the plumbing doesn't wipe us out before we've started.

Edit: Oh, and after that initial flash of frustration, we don't blame the tenants.

@Account Closed I don't understand. Why/what would they report to the city?

@J Scott Thanks! Lots to chew on. I wanted to mention/ask a couple of things:

* We don't have another property to put them in! This is our only rental. Cracks in the wall don't make the property unsafe, do they? It's just aesthetic as far as I can tell.

* The foundation work was done way back in 2006 and has been fine since then. These tenants moved in early summer 2013.

* If I suspect that extra people are living there but have no proof, what should I do at that time?

Hello all! It has been a few days since my last post; therefore I have new questions.

In 2006, we purchased a SFH that had been flipped. A few months after we moved in, the house started to crumble around us. It turns out that the under-the-table foundation work the flipper had performed was just enough to hold the house up while it was on the market. The house needed $17,000 in foundation work, then another $5,000 in plumbing issues discovered during the excavation for the piers. (I assume most flippers are not so unethical, and yes, we had an inspection.)

The foundation work came with a lifetime transferrable warranty.

We started renting out the house in 2011. We haven't been inside the house much since then, because we have a PM company (see my other thread in this forum for that background. We are taking over the management as soon as the current lease is up on April 30).

The last time we were inside was early in the summer, right after the new tenants' lease started. We were going to put it on the market for an investor, and our agent wanted to go in and take iPhone pictures (yes, I'll make another thread about HER later). At that time, the house was in normal condition (although I was pretty sure that there were at least two extra adults not on the lease living there).

A couple of weeks ago, our PM company emailed us and said the renters were reporting enormous, 1-inch cracks in the walls from apparent foundation problems.

The foundation company with whom we have the warranty went out to the property last week. We haven't heard from them yet. Will call Monday.

Today, I went over for a walkthrough because I wanted to see these cracks, since the last time we saw the house, it was fine.

It was horrible. There were probably 40 cracks in the walls and ceilings, some of them incredibly wide. The floor is separating from the baseboards. It is hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars in damage. "How long has this been happening?" I asked while walking through. The tenants' daughter piped up, "AT LEAST SINCE THIS SUMMER!" Her mom kind of laughed and didn't answer.

Also, the carpets (admittedly old) were filthy, the walls and molding were really grimy, and the laminate in the kitchen had 1/2" separations between the planks, also unreported.

My husband is furious, and thinks we should keep the entire deposit and require more payment because the damage was exacerbated so badly by the delay in reporting it. It is also spelled out in their lease that they need to water the foundation; there is no evidence that they have been doing so (soaker hoses, etc.).

These tenants call the PM company for small repairs constantly: Running toilets, broken burners, etc. That's fine, but they couldn't bother to tell us that the house was cracking around them?

What are your thoughts on this? We are in Dallas, Texas and have let the PM company handle everything involved with being landlords so far. We have only recently decided to take the reins and begin educating ourselves, so we don't know how to handle this.

This is so weird. Exactly three years ago, we almost couldn't GIVE our starter home away, which is what led us to become landlords. We just literally couldn't afford to bring a check that big to closing. I thought it would take another 10 years for that house to be worth what we paid for it in 2006. Is this another bubble, or just a very vigorous correction? I do know Dallas wasn't hit nearly as hard as some other parts of the country by the recession, but watching our biggest asset bottom out sure hurt.

http://www.dallasnews.com/business/columnists/steve-brown/20140130-dallas-area-homebuyers-to-scramble-this-spring.ece

@Justin Polston

@Christopher Schmidt

@Elizabeth Colegrove

@Richard Montoya

@Joseph C.

Wow, everyone, thanks so much for the awesome replies. I'm new to BiggerPockets and I'm amazed how much the people here are willing to help each other.

@Bill S. Thanks so much for all your insight. The biggest takeaway for me from your post is that I do need to acknowledge that tenants won't be invested in the home and neighborhood like I and my neighbors were/are.

So apparently you have managed to convince my husband and me to do the one thing I thought was off the table: Managing the property ourselves! We are going to let the current tenant and PM company finish out this lease (April 30), then take it over ourselves.

I'm feeling good about getting the rent we want, which is $1,300 or more for a remodeled 1,450 sq ft 3/2/2. Here are the January listings on Craigslist for rental houses in our city:

4/2.5/2 w/pool -- $1,750

3/2 (no garage) -- $1,600

4/2 (carport, no garage) -- $1,500

3/1/1 (450 fewer sq feet than ours, one-car garage, only one bath, comparable finishes) -- $1,350

And MLS has only one, a 4/2/2 for $1,800.