All Forum Posts by: Anthony Phillips

My tenant's lease is coming to a close and I am relieved she will be moving soon.

She has been paying on time but has been extremely unpleasant and rude.

While the money does not smell my mental sanity is more important than money in this case.

She sent me a registered letter stating that she feels "unsafe because we have not done the fixes the way she wanted it".

She requests to have her witness for a walkthrough.

In my state a walkthrough is required but I am not about to grant it to her to bring any witnesses as that is not in my contract.

If she feels unsafe she does not have t be present.

I also do not treat a final walkthrough with a tenant as a final sign off.

This walkthrough does not include a detailed inspection of the plumbing and the appliances that will be done after she departs.

This is simply for the visible cosmetic issues and should take less than 1 hr.  

I will treat a witness as a trespasser.

I want to really emphasize that this lady is a major headache and may have mental issues.

It is possible she has been fired from her job as well. 

Also want to add that she had multiple violations such as having a dog with her while her contract states no pets and she was contacting repair facilities and acting as my agent or pretending to be a property owner and interfering with repair process. 

She has been sending complaints to the city and to the HOA board.

Of course these complaints do absolutely nothing because we are within our rights and following a contract.

She was complaining that we did not have the right to fix our own property since we are not licensed.

She thinks she owns the place and we are merely room service.

Tons of opportunity in Austin Texas right now. 

@Anthony Phillips, there are a lot of ways to measure an investment. You might want to learn about all of them so you can evaluate your investment from a bunch of different perspectives.

That said, $200 without accounting for cap ex, vacancy, and I assume maintenance sounds to me like a next zero cash flow basically.

If a 1.5% increase in rates brings you down to $0 cashflow, that sounds like a skinny deal to begin with. So, I don't think the interest rate was the biggest factor here.

What kind of loan and rate are you looking at right now? and with what kind of lender? 

When I was starting out and because the loans I needed were small in my inexpensive market I used 15 year adjustable rate mortgages from local community banks. The plus side is they adjusted DOWN when rates go down! Not a bad idea right now. Another benefit is that local lenders whom you create a relationship with you will often do mortgage modifications. For example, rates dropped after I took a mortgage once but I wasn't entitled to an adjustment for 2 more years. For a $200 processing fee they modified the loan and adjusted the rate saving me a nice chunk of interest. I could probably also get them to reamortize a loan to stretch out payments and increase my cash-flow.

My point is that financing isn't static. You will have opportunities to work with it as time goes. You may also reap the rewards of higher rents in a couple years. I would evaluate those potential opportunities before making a decision. 

A run down house in a good neighborhood is for sale at $230K.  It has already been reduced by $20K, but I think the renovation costs will be quite substantial given the list of things that need to be replaced inside and outside.  My biggest concern is that it is still difficult to secure a contractor's time even as the market is cooling.  I am not in a hurry to jump in on this project, should I wait until later 2023 when contractors' availability become more assessable?